General discussion

We’re Back

Sorry for the long hiatus–work and some wordpress issues. Anyway, we’ll be back to posting occasionally.

Here’s a paper worth reading: “The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life”  by Boudry, Paglieri, and Pigliucci. Here’s the key argument:

We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life (few actual instances). On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are sophisticated enough to capture real-life complexities, they can no longer be held up as an effective tool for discriminating good and bad forms of reasoning.

In addition to other questions (which I’ll maybe discuss later), I wonder very strongly about the empirical verifiability of the first horn.

General discussion

But didn’t Hitler grow up to be Hitler?

5 Comments
The quondam next Hitler

Low hanging fruit today, but here’s Televangelist Pat Robertson’s advice to the mother who just lost her baby:

As far as God’s concerned, He knows the end from the beginning and He sees a little baby and that little baby could grow up to be Adolf Hitler, he could grow up to be Joseph Stalin, he could grow up to be some serial killer, or he could grow up to die of a hideous disease. God sees all of that, and for that life to be terminated while he’s a baby, he’s going to be with God forever in Heaven so it isn’t a bad thing.

Look Lady, on the bright side, at least you’re child wasn’t the next Hitler. I think Rev. Robertson might have borrowed from this video.

General discussion

Chutzpah

In the The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defines chutzpah as

. . . that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan”.

Here is a nearly perfect example. John Thune, US Senator from South Dakota, tweets:

Six million people risk losing their health care subsidies, yet @POTUS continues to deny that Obamacare is bad for the American people.

Six million people have health care subsidies through Obamacare, they risk losing it because Republicans have (1) never supported it and didn’t vote for it; (2) constantly voted to repeal it; (3) waged lawsuits, like the present one, aimed at undermining its legal basis. Now, the argument goes, if he gets his wish and it goes away, it is the President’s fault.

General discussion

The Attack on Truth!

1 Comment

Fun article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on willful ignorance, science denial, etc.  Here’s a fun paragraph:

The philosopher Andy Norman and others have criticized this theory [that what matters is persuasion, not reason, eds.] by pointing out that it relies far too heavily on the idea that rhetorical skills are valuable within an evolutionary context, irrespective of the truth of the beliefs being advocated. What if the reasons for your beliefs are not true? In a response to Mercier and Sperber, the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg pointed out that while reason and argument are closely related, “persuasive reasoning that is not veridical can be fatal to the individual and to the propagation of his or her genes, as well as to the human species as a whole.”

It’ll get you killed.

General discussion

The deep end

2 Comments

Bridge in Sioni Reservoir. September 2006.jpg

There drought in California has raised questions about how to conserve water. Luckily, the California Pool and Spa Association has the answers:

As residents struggle to cut waste at the tap, the California Pool and Spa Association is lobbying water districts to quash proposed bans on filling pools and spas. The industry cites an in-house study that found that a standard-sized pool, plus decking, uses one-third the amount of water as an irrigated lawn after an initial fill.

“We’re not saying, ‘Solve the drought, put in a pool,’ but the bottom line is people who put in a pool are making a decision to do something more water efficient with their backyard. They’re saving water,” said John Norwood, the California Pool and Spa Association’s president. “Pools are landscaping.”

Even more water efficient would be not watering at all–or putting in drought-resistant plants:

In the end, the water used for pools and lawns is roughly the same, said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, a nonprofit research institute focused on the environment and sustainability. And letting a lawn die or replanting with desert landscaping uses dramatically less water than a pool, so the comparison misses the point, he said.

A long while back I got an email (I don’t check that account) asking whether there was a name for this argument form (though the example the author gave went like this: gays in the US should not complain because gays elsewhere, like Uganda, have it comparatively worse). I’m inclined to think it a false dichotomy, as it offers an exclusive, but false, disjunction between alternatives p and q, where q is horrible and p is what arguer A wants.

So, adapting the current example: given the drought, you can either water your lawn like a water hog or save water by filling or building a pool.

General discussion

Marketable philosophy skills

Socrates thought no one can know the good yet fail to do it. And so akrasia, moral weakness, weakness of the will, is impossible.   Aristotle sort of disagreed, claiming you can be a total douchenozzle knowingly and on purpose (EN VII.3). Aristotle’s disagreement (or agreement) with Socrates hinges on what it means to “know” in the first place. For, you can deceive yourself into thinking you know Empedocles, when the best you can do is drunkenly recite his verses.  Analogously, with enough philosophical acumen, it seems you can find an argument to justify just about any moral turpitude.

Oxford philosopher Anil Gomes nicely captures the problem:

This wouldn’t matter if philosophy were simply neutral. I once argued for the election of a philosopher rather than an economist to a Research Fellowship on the grounds that the philosopher at least would do no harm. (I was ignored.) But things may be worse. Prime amongst the ‘transferable skills’ so lauded by philosophy’s proselytisers are those of drawing careful distinctions, of paying attention to small but subtle differences between cases.

The development of these skills is thought to be central to a philosophical education. (‘Oxford Philosophy: training tomorrow’s thinkers today.’) And when used effectively, they allow a clarity of thought shocking in its brilliance and precision.

But they sometimes lapse into institutionally sanctioned pedantry. And when they do, they have analogues in a particular kind of self-deception, that involved in rationalising our bad behaviour. It is easy for a philosopher, trained in the making of distinctions, to distinguish lying from reticence, as Kant did, when writing to a suicidal correspondent. Lying is contrary to the moral law, he claimed; reticence on the other hand…

Here is one use for philosophical thinking: to draw distinctions that make one’s immoral conduct seem permissible, even praiseworthy. It is the kind of thinking which justifies claiming light bulbs on expenses or pressuring one’s spouse into taking one’s speeding points.

It is as if philosophy provides the tools which enable us to do all that we do whilst looking in the mirror and saying: yes, you’ve done good.

The whole passage is worth a read.

via Leiter.

 

General discussion

Praying is cheating

As I hand out finals, I gently remind students that asking God for extra help is a form of cheating.  God after all is person with answers and your asking Him for them.  That’s pretty much cheating.  Having said that, here’s how Republican Presidential Candidate got through Freshman Chemistry at Yale:

“When I went to take the test the next morning, it was like ‘The Twilight Zone,'” Carson said. “I opened that book and I recognized the first problem as one of the ones I dreamed about. And the next, and the next, and the next, and I aced the exam and got a good mark in chemistry. It worked out okay and I promised the Lord he would never have to do that for me again”

They always say they’ve learned their lesson.

General discussion

When the argument is not the argument

5 Comments

Misrepresenting someone’s position is usually a no-no.  Two quick reasons: first, a critique of the misrepresentation reveals nothing about the view; second, the misrepresentation deprives the person making the argument of critical input.  Naturally, this second violation assumes people make arguments in order to receive critical input from others (which is dubious, but nonetheless important).

The problem with this is that people sometimes do not argue for their real positions.  They argue, rather, for positions they can defend, hoping that this defense will cover their real view or that it will distract or wear down attackers. Sorry for the war metaphor here (I’ve been thinking about this lately and will have something on it later).

The “covering strategy” is to assert entirely general principles that may not apply in your case.  This strategy is somewhat akin to the question-begger which avoids the controversy by taking two steps back. Perhaps this is why so many fruitless public debates center around various parties claiming their view is consonant with some or other founding principle. What’s at issue is usually rather the application of the founding principle to the specific case.

Something like this, I think, is at play in the Indiana case.  Mike Pence, the Governor of Indiana, claims that this law has nothing to do with discriminating against gay people. That, of course, is preposterous, and worthy of an Onion article.

There’s no question that the view the Indiana law and its supporters clearly advocate is an unpopular one.  It’s also pretty clear that people are going to heap piles of scorn upon them.  It might also be true that they think their view isn’t going to get a fair hearing from the crowd gathered to hear it.  I’m not sure, however, if any of these things is sufficient to justify the shifting strategy they’re employing. For one, such disingenuousness is shielding themselves from criticism relevant to their view.

General discussion

Public Philosophy

Spiros at Philosophers Anonymous tells a funny story worth sharing in its entirety:

I was sitting in a bus station earlier this week, and the people sitting next to me were embroiled in a heated discussion.  Eventually, one of the discussants turned to me and asked me to weigh in on the topic in dispute.  As it turns out, not unlike that old story where William James settles a campground debate about a squirrel, the disputants were talking past each other and needed to draw a distinction, in this case, between de dicto and de re.  So I introduced the distinction and explained how it was at work in the apparent disagreement.  This seemed to satisfy the arguing parties, who quickly went on to discuss something else.

But a little later, one of the men turned to me again and told me that the distinction I drew was helpful, and asked what line of work I’m in.  I replied  that I’m a philosopher.  The guy reacted with surprise, and then asked, “So… can you read minds?”  I replied, “Not in the way you’re thinking of.”  The guy replied, “So you CAN read minds!”

Spiros, 0; Guy Waiting for a Bus, 1

To be honest, my few forays into public philosophy of this type usually end in disaster.

Your argument is invalid