Category Archives: Critical Thinking

Definition (and Proof)

06 Saturday Apr 2024

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Inquiry, Logic

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I was recently in a conversation on social media that – rather magically, I thought – did not instantly zig into infantile spew. It did, however, take the predicted zag into a stream of superficial (if rather more maturely presented) fatuous nonsense that gave me enough pause to suggest this post.

There is, especially among persons of an especially right-wing political leaning, an inclination to demand simple, clear, and absolute definitions with regard to all terms in general, but especially those with even a patina of political significance. Thus, with the histrionic attacks on that vanishingly small minority of persons who identify as “trans” (a group that comprises <0.5% the last time I looked it up) the demand by persons of a neo-fascist inclination (and TERF’s; politics makes for strange bedfellows) the self-righteous demand to “define” “woman.”

(Funny how they never demand a definition of “man.” But then, it is only women whose rights they wish to strip away, after all.)

Back in Aristotle’s day there was yet some hope of justifying a faith in definitions as being foundational to rationality. That said, Diogenes going about Athens with a plucked chicken (a ‘featherles biped’) mocking Plato by shouting, “Behold! A man!” might have inspired a measure of humility. But these days, any such sophomoric dependence upon definitions is patently childish, if not downright infantile. Let us call such juvenile insistence the “Dictionary Game.”

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YAAFI

21 Thursday Mar 2024

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Humor

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What does “YAAFI” mean? Well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

First, let me say that this little editorial addition to my blog is not going to be explicitly or obviously “Whiteheadian,” although everything I write is to some considerable degree informed by those studies. That said, this will be more in the way of a personal screed mostly (if not entirely) lacking in scholarly &/or academic virtues. In other words, I intend to not only go full snark, but to occasionally employ “adult language.” Now, said “adult language” will certainly not exceed anything you’d hear with profligate abandon among a bunch of teenagers. Indeed, I consider “profligate abandon” far more adult language than the “fucks” I’m about to liberally dish out. I mean, seriously: when was the last time you saw “profligate abandon” used in a YA novel? When was the last time you saw a YA novel that didn’t have at least one “fuck”? (I don’t actually know; I read fucking adult literature.)

I needed a picture, and I thought “Storming the Bastille” was either subtle and clever, or irrelevant and funny.

Oh yeah, perhaps I should add that my tongue will, on at least an occasion or two, be squarely planted in my cheek. I will trust to the context to make those occasions obvious.

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Search versus Research

26 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by in Anti-scientific, Critical Thinking, Logic

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Please do not confuse your Google search with my doctoral degree.

So proclaims a t-shirt of mine; one of my favorites, I should add.

In this age of anti-vax infantilism, few things can set my teeth on edge as some uneducated buffoon declaring, “I’ve done my research!” (Some “unprofessional” language is going to appear in this blog post. So prepare yourselves.)

“I’ve done my research!” No, in point of fact, you have not, you ridiculous turdwaffle. Because it is damned near a mathematical certainty that you have never done any REsearch in your entire life. You did an internet search, at best, and counted yourself special for having done so.

The company name “Google” has become synonymous with an internet search engine in much the way the company Xerox became synonymous with a photocopier, long after the company itself had lost any real dominance in the field. They were knocked of their thrown by Canon, in particular, yet photocopying remained “xeroxing,” even unto this day. Google, despite its despicable and absolutely ruthless pillaging of its users’ privacyi has yet to suffer such a well deserved fate, but time may yet tell. In the meantime, I will resort to common usage, and speak of “googling” something, without necessarily speaking of Google itself. (You’ll know which one I speak of by whether or not the word is capitalized &/or comes with a gerund.)

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God’s Name

28 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by in COVID-19, Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Logic, Religion

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I see yet another story bemoaning the death of a willfully stupid fool who not only denied the reality of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) but also declared that he would place himself “in God’s hands”, both to avoid catching the disease, and then survive it once caught. Well, God appears to have been too busy trying to wipe a grease stain off those hands to attend to this gentleman’s demands, because said individual got sick, suffered, and died gasping for air while intubated.

I’m going to step outside my usual zone of operation and address a few words at those staggeringly vain individuals who imagine it is their unique privilege to tell God what to do. Now, as a proper Whiteheadian, I do believe that the term “God” has minimal reference and conceptual content. Not even remotely enough to form the kind of center of meaning that one might go to church to celebrate. For that, one must move well beyond Whitehead and into the process theology that owes its source to Charles Hartshorne. Much of this latter, though not all by any means, is also rooted in various interpretations of Christianity. And while even this is beyond the scope of my primary interests, I’m actually going to address my remarks to the vastly more conservative field that tends to identify as evangelical or fundamentalist. (While there can be overlaps, the two groups are NOT the samei.) I’ll spare you any fatuous declarations as to either the reality of these people’s God, the truth of their concept(s), or the validity of the Bible. In fact, I’ll be taking these things as given. Rather, what I want to show is that a certain class of behavior that they publicize as evidence of their devout faith is, by their own standards, a gross and indefensible sin. It is not hard to show.

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Year of The Plague 5: Get to Work!

28 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Economics, General Philosophy, Plague

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I recently learned that I was, in fact, born in a plague year, 1957, during the early stages of the “Asian Flu” pandemic. (I’ll have more to say about this naming convention in a moment.) Estimates on mortality in the US range from a low of 70,000 to a high of 116,000. (Information on the H2N2 pandemic may be found HERE.) After some 12 weeks (rather than the 12+ months during which H2N2 ravaged the world) COVID-19 is already at the upper limit of that earlier pandemic.i With the inevitable second wave of infections and deaths that will come with the push to reopen the country regardless of consequences; with sloppy and unevenly applied testing, almost non-existent contact tracing; and with the monumental infantilism of people who believe their right to be slobbering, self-absorbed imbeciles trumps your right to live, the death toll from the SARS-CoV-2 virus will easily surpass that of H2N2 by the middle of summer. (And, let’s face it: that is a conservative estimate.)

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A word about that “Asian flu” moniker: It was common to name diseases after a place, sometimes even the place where the disease was first located or even came from. This rule has always been applied unevenly; for instance, the “Spanish Flu” pandemic most certainly did NOT originate in Spain. So why aren’t we calling SARS-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus,” or COVID-19 the “Chinese disease”? One is almost inclined to admire the willful stupidity of persons pretending puzzlement over these questions, since the answer is so manifestly obvious: because doing so is blatantly racist and serves no other purpose than to function as a dog-whistle trigger for low-lifes such as the pond-scum comprising Donald Trump’s political base. One might as well complain that, “My grandfarther used to call black people by the ‘n’ word, and address them as ‘boy’! Why shouldn’t I be allowed to do that now, since it was so commonplace back then?” The naming convention for the disease has already been established, so no excuse other than racism can be offered for changing it in such a way as to blame a certain ethnic group. And let’s face it, even if SARS-CoV-2 is too tricky for their poor, pea-puddin’ racist brains to remember, terms like “novel coronavirus” and “COVID-19” are simple enough that even a remedial 3rd grader can learn and use them properly, all with little or no effort.

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The Implicit “All”

12 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Logic

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One of the fundamental units in logical analysis is that function/operatori lovingly known as “the quantifier.” Most logic texts content themselves with just two: “all” and “some,” formally symbolized as “” and “” respectively. Thus, to say that, “All X is p,” one is asserting that every (or any) instance of X is also an instance of p, or is characterized by p, etc. Similarly, when someone says only that, “Some X is p,” the claim is made that, if one looks hard enough, one will find at least one instance where X is p. There are ways of precisifying (one of those $5.00 words philosophers love to use) the above statements, but there is hardly any need to do so here. It suffices to have a general idea. Two points I’ll mention in passing. First, in most formal contexts (substructural logics are an example of an exception), “all” and “some” are defined as being interchangeable using “not”: thus, “not-All X is not-p” is taken to mean “Some X is p,” and conversely. Secondly, these are not the only quantifiers possible: “many” and “most” are also examples. But these last two are difficult to formalize (to say the least) and by a polite convention among logicians they are generally ignored wholesale.Implicit All

As the title of this post states, I wish to talk about what I am calling the implicit “all”; uses of the “all” quantifier in which that quantifier is functioning but not explicitly stated. This happens quite often, in point of fact, and is not problematical in itself. Where problems do arise is when that usage is not merely implicit, but actively denied as a means of evading the consequences of what someone has actively stated or written. When this happens, we are faced not merely with a logical error, but an overt act of dishonesty. The dishonesty becomes not merely overt but blatant when, even after the implicit “all” is pointed out, the individual continues to deny it. Continue reading →

The Myth of Technofix

26 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by in Climate Change, Critical Thinking, Global warming

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On a more or less regular basis, some wild-eyed enthusiast in a lab coat will get his name – and by my account, they’ve all been men, the reasons for which will become evident as we proceed – in the media by proposing some massively destructive campaign of crapping all over the global environment in order to “save” it from AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming). In order to make such a deliberately manufactured catastrophe sound respectable, it is given a fancified, multi-syllabic name: geoengineering. According to these well-paid (male) lab-coats, the way to make things better is to make them unimaginably – and, most terrifyingly – unpredictably, worse. One is reminded of the enthusiastic, lower-level Air Force PR officer who effused to the press how it was necessary to destroy some particular Vietnamese village in order to “save” it. These days this isn’t even recognized as ironic. One is also reminded of the nursery rhyme about the Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly. But getting people to recognize an obvious analogy is almost as distressed a program as getting them to notice irony.Sisyphus

Now, everyone who isn’t intransigently stupid, viciously dishonest, or some combination of both, has long since recognized the reality of AGW. Gee golly willikers, it was cold in some places in North America this Winter. Well, given that we’re talking about less than 1.84% of the entire surface of the Earth, a person might feel justified in asking if there might just possibly be a difference between GLOBAL warming and “your backyard” warming? Or again, the fact that the destabilization of the winter jetstream that leads to the “polar vortex” is itself a consequence of global warming, as unparalleled warmth moves into the Arctic and pushes relatively cold air South, is not one of those arcane secrets that gets hidden away in books, so that the denialists will never find it. So, the question is: What do we do about it? Continue reading →

It’s Not Easy Being Green

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Altemeyer, Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Green Party, Hillary Clinton, Politics

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The Green party has long been anathema to any genuine progressive turn in American politics now for upwards of twenty years or more. Beginning with Nader’s undercutting Gore’s electoral chances and thus putting Shrub (the lesser Bush) in the office of the President, the Green party has done everything in its power to demonstrate its absolute rejection of basic logic (to say nothing of facts on the ground) in favor of an “ideology” that amounts to nothing more than self-absorbed infantilism.kermit confused

And yes, I too have seen the strained fabrications that have self-righteously proclaimed that Nader did not cost Gore Florida in 2000. But like any person gifted with nothing more exotic than the mere abstract possibility of intelligence or thought, I recognize these exercises in childish excuse-making for what they are. This nonsense has even gone so far as to claim that Nader voters would have turned to Bush, had Nader not been running. Which is to say, Gore wasn’t far enough to the political left for such people, so in the absence of Nader they would have leapt even further to the political right. The only imaginable reason for doing so would be sheer, infantile spite which, given the nature of the Green party and its devotees, is actually almost believable. But I’m going to work on the assumption that Green party voters are merely stupid, as opposed to self-absorbed, narcissistic, intransigently petty, sniveling little cry-babies. If I am mistaken on this point, I apologize in advance. Continue reading →

At Least I Have Chicken

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, John Dewey, Process Philosophy

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Person’s familiar with the gaming world might well recognize the title of this essay as a quote from a famous incident in the online game World of Warcraft. The incident, recorded and posted on YouTube (see video below) might be labeled The Last Charge of Leroy Jenkins. A group of players are nervously planning a complex attack against a difficult, game generated collection of very dangerous “creatures” (the online game permits players in remote locations to play together, and communicate verbally even as they operate their “character” in the game.) But after a few minutes of this, one of them (“Leroy Jenkins”) loses all patience with the process, declares “Enough talk!” and rushes into the midst of the creatures bellowing his battle cry, “LEEEROY JENKINS!!!” Caught off guard, the other members of the team realize they’ve lost the advantage of surprise and follow in, only to have the entire team wiped out by this cluster of creatures. As they bitterly review this catastrophe, casting an occasional word of criticism in Jenkins’ direction, Leroy simply responds, “At least I have chicken” (presumably in his real world crib, as there is none in the game.)

The whole thing is much funnier if you’ve had any experience with multi-player roll-playing games, whether online, networked, or old school paper and painted tokens D&D. But the behavior is familiar to us all from the broader reaches of our lives, as we recognize a form of doomed compromise that those around us – and most likely we ourselves, at one time or another – have made. This came out again recently in a colleagues interaction with the students in his class. (It is not revealing much to note that said colleague is, indeed, a man.) The colleague was presenting one of the classic figures of Western philosophy, and the students began asking in reply, “but how important is this really?” Discussion went back and forth a few times until finally exasperated, my colleague said something to the effect that, “the alternative is to be an uneducated pawn in a machine that views you as nothing more than a commodity to be used until you’re used up, suffering the waste of your life in a job that offers no fulfillment, living in a house in the suburbs with a spouse that is indifferent to you and children that despise you!” There was a moment’s silence, when finally one student replied, “at least we’ll have a house in the suburbs.”

At least they’ll have chicken. Continue reading →

What is Populism?

06 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Fascism, Metaphysics, Politics

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The question came up on social media, What is populism? I had my own little St. Augustine moment, where I realized that, as long as no one asked me, I knew exactly what I meant by the term, but as soon as someone asked I had no idea. (In fairness to Augustine, his moment was around the significantly more subtle notion of “what is time?”) I could run off to the dictionary and waste people’s time by quoting that, but I won’t. For one thing, the dictionary (like Wikipedia itself) is not the answer to a question (other than “how do I spell this word?”), it is the starting point for asking questions. Further, dictionary answers aren’t always that well considered. Thus, the dictionary will tell you that an ad hominem fallacy occurs any time you say something bad about a person, ignoring the fact that, in order to be an actual fallacy, it must be either irrelevant or untrue (or both). Finally I’ve enough acquaintance with the word “populism” via use – both my own and other peoples – that the dictionary will either tell me nothing new or, like ad hominem, tell me something wrong.Mob action

After I make of quick gloss of the sorts of things that populism is at an absolute minimum, I’ll go on to suggest two different developments of the idea. One development leaves populism as a relatively “morally neutral” political method or technique, while the other will put it squarely in the negatives as a substantially fascist instrument. Neither one of these approaches represents the “truth” about populism, or the “real definition”; they are simply different ways in which the word can be used, ways that should never be conflated. I’ll finish with some thoughts from Whitehead and Dewey about the philosophical underpinnings of the kinds of popular relationalism that strengthen genuine democracy. Continue reading →