Category Archives: Critical Thinking

Privilege and Simplicity (thoughts on Thoreau)

12 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Community, Critical Thinking, fallacies

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Today marks the bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, and rereading Walden always inspires me to say some uncharitable and unfair things about Thoreau. Knowing that they are unfair (see HERE, for example) I’m going to say them anyway, since having once been said it will be possible to see how and why they are unfair – as applied to Thoreau, at least – and then say some things that are fair, though mostly about some of Thoreau’s “readers.” So, let’s start by presenting the unfair in its simplest, and most privileged terms.

Sears Roebuck

Many years ago, the Science Fiction author Robert A. Heinlein elucidated what he called, “the Sears-Roebuck” fallacy. (Memory tells me this was in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. You should not credit my memory with any authority.) Describing this in my own words, young Henry David decides to head off into the wilderness, and make for himself the life of a True Man. Upon arrival, the first thing he needs to do is build himself some shelter, so he grabs his trusty ax, and sets out to fell some trees. But wait a minute! He was supposed to be leaving civilization behind; so where did that ax come from?

Why, the Sears-Roebuck catalog, of course! Continue reading →

Rules

06 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Objective Morality, Personal History

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(“More what you might call ‘guidelines’ …”)

If you don’t get the above reference, then I pity the life you’ve led.

Anyway, it turns out that I have “rules.” The idea hadn’t occurred to me so much, one way or the other, until some 20 years ago, when I happened to formulate these “rules.” (I’ll stop scare-quoting the word now.) I may or may not have mentioned the fact that I was (for a while, at least) a moderately serious Renaissance Faire participant, what is often referred to as a “rennie.” And by “participant,” I mean I had invested something in the neighborhood of $1,200.00 in garb and gear (about half of that was for my custom made, thigh-high boots alone) to participate in character as a low ranking German nobleman of the 16th C. The attached picture really is me (and yes, that is my hair). I share it here with the generous permission of the photographer, Jeffrey Gibson, D. Phil. The hyper link at his name is to his photographer’s website, and I encourage everyone to follow that link and take a look at some of his work.Gerhard11 - Gibson photographer

In any event, it was at Ren Faire – in garb and in character – that I learned that I had rules. Rules about interpersonal, social/sexual interactions. This would be a matter of scarcely any interest even to myself, except that the nature of those rules has some interesting philosophical characteristics over and beyond just what I personally will or will not do. It is to this latter I wish, ultimately, to address myself. But first I have to say a bit about the rules themselves, so that the philosophical implications have something to build upon. But to get to the rules themselves, I first must tell a story. Continue reading →

HERSTEIN’s SECOND LAW:

05 Monday Jun 2017

Posted by in Conspiracy Theories, Critical Thinking, Humor, Logic

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Never assume intelligence when stupidity will do the job.

This is a recently composed notion of mine, unlike my “first law,” which I’d entertained for many years prior to writing it up HERE. Now if only I can come up with a third law, I’ll have a complete set. “Laws” like these always come in threes: Asimov’s laws of robotics, the laws of thermodynamics (although some de classé fools claim there are four of these), and so on. Anyway, I’ve got a ways to go to come up with #3, and in the meantime I’m here to talk about the second law. (Notice how I avoided saying, “I’m here to talk about #2” … )LAW

So, “Never assume intelligence when stupidity will do the job.” Every conspiracy theory in the world is predicated upon ignoring this fundamental law of reasoning. This rule has been variously expressed as, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups” by the good folks at Demotivators, Inc. But while this latter formulation drops out as a corollary to the above, the Second Law is the more fundamental statement of the principle involved. So, my discussion here will start with a few examples of conspiracy theories, because these provide the clearest examples of violation of the law. But these are merely exempli gratia, and I don’t want them to overwhelm the larger problem of the ability of gross stupidity to make things unboundedly worse than they already are, without any shred of planning or design. Continue reading →

Ruined

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Personal History, Personhood, Psychology

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“You’ll ruin your life!”

I have objected to this phrase, commonly enough used by parents (and others) to admonish their recalcitrant children (and others), all of my adult life and even into my youth, so something over 40 years now. The only ruin a life will find is death, and even that might not be a ruin, depending on how well lived that life was. Certainly there are things a person can do that will permanently redefine the direction of that life. For example, young persons who, in a fit of rage, murders another person, and as a result ends up spending the remainder of that life in prison, has certainly changed the direction of that live in a manner that is unlikely to match very closely anything the individual ever hoped for or dreamed of. But is that life ruined? Isn’t it still a life, a life that might yet rise above its petty and benumbedi existence to genuinely mean something? A ruin is something that once was, but now only exists as a mere husk of its former glory. A life is something that is not over until it is over, regardless of whatever unexpected and (possibly) undesired twists and turns that occur in the process of that life.Acropolis-of-Athens

The ancient Greeks had a saying: “Count no man happy until he is dead.” The point being that the quality of a life can turn at a moment, so that the most successful individual might suddenly be cast down from the pinnacle of success to utter “ruin.” One of the favorite tales along this line is that of Oedipus, who rises from the status of an abandoned orphan to the all powerful king of a great country. Unfortunately for Oedipus, he gets there by unwittingly murdering his own father, and marrying and having sex with his own mother, all following the iron-clad declarations of a deterministic prophecy that allowed for no deviation. He ends up a blind beggar wandering the countryside. Such were the vicissitudes of life in the ancient world, success was fragile and life was harsh. Yet, they might as easily have said, “count no man disappointed until he is dead.” For life’s struggles may be constant, yet our success in dealing with those struggles can be a story of heroism or failure at almost – almost – any level. Continue reading →

In Praise of Unpopular Ideas

11 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Process Philosophy, Whitehead

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The title of this post came to be long before I had any idea what I was going to write. There is certainly no lack of great and genuinely classic arguments along this line, and I’ve no need or desire to do a rehashed book report on Mill’s On Liberty, or Milton’s Areopagitica. Still, with power canalizing everything it is able into predetermined forms, and the Butthurt Baby in Chief‘s unhinged ravings against the press, against President Obama, even (evidently) thundering at his own staff, saying something about “unpopular” ideas seemed not out of place. The challenge I decided to set before myself was to do so as a Whiteheadian.Abort_retry_fail

My previous post took a number of steps in that direction, including setting up some background on Whitehead’s mature metaphysics. And I’ll not revisit that argument here. Rather, I wish to expand upon it by entertaining some additional Whiteheadian notions, those of the role of error in the growth of meaning, and of the functions of reason in life. Mill talks of the positive value of error in the above referenced book, but his attitude is that such a role is primarily as a whetstone against which reason and truth can sharpen themselves. On the other hand, the trifold functions of reason (Whitehead’s book “singularized” the term to the Function of Reason) open up how the possibilities of meaning in the world creatively expand as we move beyond the shackles of mere existence into the full universe of possibility. That movement – that “creative advance” – involves a kind of “error,” in that what simply “is” must yield to that which only yet “might be.” And that “might be” will, almost invariably, start out by being unpopular. I’ll begin with The Function of Reason, as it is both the easier to explain and the founding (albeit implicit) principle behind Whitehead’s theory of the role of error. Continue reading →

The World is a Circle

15 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Logic

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The title is an ironic gesture to a disturbingly cheerful (some, like me, might say saccharin) tune by Bacharach and David, but my intention is to talk about what is less happily categorized as circular reasoning. This is one of those fallacies that has been recognized for so long that the medievals gave it a Latin name: petitio principii. It is also one of those painful failures of basic reasoning that goes beyond the narrow confines of formal logic, or introductory critical thinking classes. This is one of those monsters of bad thinking that empower authoritarian minded individuals and their enablers to unshamefacedly spout about “alternative facts” and other infantile drivel. You see, the problem with a circle, as well as with a mind that reasons in one, is that the circle is closed; inquiry, on the other hand, is (by necessity) open and ongoing.disturbing-1

I’ve talked before (several times, in fact) about what Altemeyer describes as the “compartmentalization” that occurs in authoritarian belief and ideology. One can scarcely dignify this latter as “thinking,” regardless of the degree of sophisticated cleverness employed in maintaining those compartments as air tight against all facts and logic. Authoritarian thinkers, following Hamlet’s example, keep their minds, bounded in a nutshell and count themselves kings of infinite space, were it not that they have bad dreams. (Of course, Hamlet was being ironic, and mocking his interlocutors, something the Mango Mussolini’s enthusiasts entirely fail to grasp.) The thing is, these people choose to be bounded by a nutshell, all the while imagining themselves in princely command of infinite space. Meanwhile, their bad dreams (which are the trailings of reality, dogging them despite their dogmatism) are the sources of their willing embrace of Trumpian neo-fascism. Because the nutshell – the “nut house” – in which they have bound their minds is a tightly enclosed circle that permits no entry from reality. Continue reading →

False Flag

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Logic, Politics, Violence

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A “false flag” attack is a premeditated form of deception in which some disaster with a high number of casualties is inflicted upon a community, evidently by outsiders, but in reality by the community’s own leaders in order to fabricate the impression of immediate threat and danger within the community, so that the leaders may act with impunity by taking aggressive – and typically extra-legal – actions. This then establishes the leaders’ power, with the willing consent of those over whom they actually intend to exploit this power. If you are a movie buff, the “St. Mary’s virus” biological attack from the movie V for Vendetta, is an example of a false flag attack raised to the nth degree. Claims of “real” (note the scare quotes) false flag attacks are standard twaddle with childish conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and blathering histrionics of his “Infowars” website. Lest there be any lingering ambiguity, I do not hold much truck with such infantilism. People who have taught the subject know that such conspiracy theory drivel is used as comedy relief in Critical Thinking courses. Such material is swallowed with great credulity by a large number of authoritarian minded people, especially on the extreme right-wing of the political spectrum.

squirrel

But we are seeing a perfectly analogous move gaining traction on the political left, and it is worth our time to squash it before it gains any traction. Multiple peaceful protests have recently either been preceded by, or occurred in parallel with, violent actions that had no relationship to the original protest. One increasingly sees these violent behaviors decried as the work of “paid provocateurs.” There are more than a few problems with these accusations, not the least of which being that they come without even the tiniest scintilla of evidence to back up the accusation. And these accusations will often be made by the self-same people who will brush aside Alex Jones’s fatuous nonsense with a roll of the eyes and a sweep of the hand, all the while as they are doing the exact same thing as Jones: making hysterical, baseless accusations and assuming that the volume with which they make the accusations carries probative weight. Continue reading →

Butthurt Baby in Chief

03 Friday Feb 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Donald Trump, Logic, Psychology

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Well, the first two weeks of Trump’s presidency bore no real surprises: the Butthurt Baby in Chief acted exactly the way you would expect a narcissistic psychopath with a fascist agenda to behave. Quite aside from the lack of organization, the total inability to grasp what governance is or ought to look like, executive orders pouring out like water from the fountains of the Nile, including the objectively illegal ban on Muslims entering the country (except, coincidentally, from those countries where Trump has business interests); indeed, there has not been a single terrorist attack committed by a refugee from any of the banned countries within the US since at least 1980. (One writer has suggested this ban is a “headfake” to test the loyalty of various departments, and the limits of what the courts will permit Trump to get away with.) We also have his infantile need to bring a cheer-leading squad along when he gives a press conference or a speech. He has declared the New York Times to be “fake news” for their failure to be his obedient and unquestioning mouthpieces, and has essentially put the Breitbart propaganda outlet in charge of the National Security Council, while removing persons with actual experience in and with intelligence. I mean that last in all the less flattering ways you can construe it. With regard to the non-voter fraud lie that Trump revels in spewing, the fact that such fraud is essentially non-existent is a matter of no concern for Trump: he doesn’t need facts, because the slack-jawed who swallow whatever lie that is spoon-fed to them by the paid professional liars at Fox “News” agree with Trump, so that makes it all true. This is so mind-numbingly childish that is seems to give it more credit than it merits to point out that it exemplifies the fallacy of the argumentum ad populum. And don’t even get me started on the Twitter storms …butthurt-baby

What kind of a “man” does this? (And yes, I use the term “man” guardedly, because I take the word to mean something more than merely an adult featherless biped with a penis.) Well, I’ve already said a fair amount about how and why Donald Trump is a fascist. I’ve made it clear that I do not use the term casually, or as a throw-away fallacy. But what about the other terms I’ve been using? I’ve characterized Trump as a narcissist for a while now, and have recently shifted from describing him as a sociopath to a psychopath. What sort of legitimacy can I give those terms, especially since I’m not really qualified to make such a diagnosis with any expertise? Continue reading →

Reason as Revolutionary

20 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Ignorance, Inquiry, Intelligence, Logic, Politics, Relativism, Trump

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So now this appears to be happening: several users out in the Twitter-verse apparently are crowing about the repeal of Obamacare while defiantly bragging about keeping their insurance through the ACA. Again, to all appearances, these people are real. Meanwhile, racist Trump designee for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, questions whether women and LGBTQ people face any serious discrimination in the world. Examples could readily be multiplied. This is because fascism is a movement that does not center on any sort of intellectual framework, while its appeal is to persons of an authoritarian mindset that rigidly compartmentalizes concepts and experiences so that genuine intelligence can never get a foothold on the person’s thinking. Under such circumstances, exercising reason – genuine reason – becomes itself a revolutionary act.revolution

But beyond that quip, what more can be said about the matter? Isn’t that a bit like dismissing Trump’s followers as being stupid? Even if this was true, would it really be an effective approach to dealing with the current consolidation of power by the fascists? In response, I would encourage people to read the above linked posts on the authoritarian mindset, but I’ll have a few more words to say about the nature of genuine intelligence below the fold. But mostly I want to think about the revolutionary aspects of reason around the topics of memory, logic, and leadership. Continue reading →

If You Didn’t Read It, Don’t Quote It

20 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Politics, Relativism

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I mentioned in a previous blog post how commonplace it was for people to misquote Emerson’s quip about “foolish consistency.” I got to thinking about that, as well as other (and more gross) forms of “lying by editing” – the cut-and-paste method of taking words out of context and making it appear that the person is saying the opposite of what they actually said. Right-wing ideologues with their authoritarian mind-set are especially prominent these days at such thinly disguised efforts at bald-faced lying, in no small part because their base, having abandoned any pretense at rational thought or even basic decency, will swallow any lie that is spoon fed to them, on no other account than that the spoon comes from the sources they’ve decided to believe without question, upon which they will swallow those lies without even a first, much less a second thought.pants-on-fire

Thus, the professional liar James O’Keefe fabricated a story that destroyed the organization ACORN with a highly edited tape that grossly misrepresented an interview with one of the group’s employees. But once the tape was made public, the facts no longer mattered: a lie will go halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on. The same vicious stunt was attempted against Planned Parenthood, but the hoax was uncovered with greater speed (spurred, perhaps, by the fraudulent accusations against ACORN). But there are lesser lies floating around out there which, while never as “compelling” as a video – people are more likely to react emotionally to videos, whereas reading activates more cognitive processes – they are nevertheless worth addressing. The habit (and it IS a habit) of dealing skeptically and intelligently with little lies, translates into something of a prophylactic against the really big lies. So let us look at a few of the lesser canards that are floating around in the great “out there.” Continue reading →