The Last Stone

The last stone is this site’s label for the step in a chain of persuasion that the persuader never said aloud and the audience supplied. It is an analytical metaphor drawn from the site’s picture of premises as stones across a river, and it is not a finding of psychology.

What it takes to name one

Every dissection checks whether a case has a last stone. Naming one needs textual evidence: where the original wording stops, and what record shows the audience supplying the rest. When that record comes from only a few sources, the article marks the stone provisional and says which sources they are.

If the evidence is not there, the article says No last stone in this case and explains what the persuasion relied on, and the crossing map marks none. A speaker who states the conclusion outright may leave no such step at all.

What it does not claim

An article will not say that an audience believed something because it supplied the step itself. Where a mechanism is discussed, the article names a researcher’s hypothesis. An article also does not hunt for a last stone to fit the metaphor.

An example

In the Zola libel trial, the charge kept the words “cette illégalité” (“this illegality”) and cut the half sentence that defined them, and the court barred proof of the illegality itself. The last stone there, marked provisional, is the premise that the jury could answer without having that illegality proved to it. The record supports only that sequence, and it says nothing about what individual jurors thought.

The other two terms are the borrowed yes and the exit cost. How articles are checked is on Stone by Stone.