[2] Corax is said to have lived in Sicily, Magna Graecia, in the 5th century BC, when Thrasybulus, tyrant of Syracuse, was overthrown and a democracy formed.
Corax originated some of the basic principles and laid the groundwork for the Greek scholars to follow – particularly Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Corax devised an art of rhetoric to permit ordinary men to make their cases in the courts.
This pattern of anticipating and then contradicting an audience's expectation has continued to be a typical move in reverse probability arguments to this day.
[6] Of course, another countermove of this same type can also be employed (it could be argued that the large man could have committed the crime precisely because he thought he would be too obvious a suspect), and then another, and then another.
This method of argumentation has also been called quasi-logical: "it maintains that self-referential logic that is typical of the human mind even if it is circular.