Category Archives: Critical Thinking

Objective Values

15 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Objective Morality

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Are there such things as “objective values”? That is, are there values that have a claim to objective reality in much the same way as the laws of physics? Or are all value claims subjective, nothing more than a matter of personal taste and desire, without any special reference to what is real beyond the fact of the desire?

Caution needs to be exercised here, as the framing of the questions above pose a false dichotomy. In addition, asking about objective values is a different question from that regarding the existence of objective morality. Values can be morally neutral, whereas morals are a very definite sub-collection of values. It is possible that some values might be objectively real (chocolate is objectively yummy not because we like it, but because it is just the best thing in the world), without ever entailing (in the logical sense of formal implication at the deepest levels of meaning) that any objectively real morals exist. Conversely, there can be objectively real moral values which nevertheless offer no further implications to the full range of other values, or even to other putative moral values. The relations involved are not simple ones, and do not involve set-theoretic/mereological containments (A is a smaller part of B) nor any necessarily transitive implications (that is, A implies B, and B implies C, therefore A implies C.) Connections – insofar as they exist at all – are “thin,” and can fade with the (metaphorical) “distance” between acts of evaluations, intentions, meanings, and values themselves.

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Making Sense 2: Storytime

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

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Making sense of things is a process of variously discovering and applying logical coherence, empirical adequacy and – the hard one – narrative intelligibility. Narrative is the subject of this post.

Narrative is a fancy word for “story telling.” And there is quite a story to tell.

Let us go back a bit, and by “a bit,” I mean before human beings even existed. Why would early hominids ever develop language in the first place? Did it somehow facilitate hunting? Well, other pack hunters like lions, dolphins, and troops of chimpanzees do not seem to suffer from its absence. (The latter group will evidently go out on murder raids against their own kind, again without any assistance from language.) Exactly what information could one convey with language, while hunting, that observation, practice and hand signals could not do better? Just imagine one hunter using language to assist in the hunt: “HEY FRED! CIRCLE AROUND TO THE LEFT! THERE’S A HERD OF ANTELOPE RIGHT OVER TH… oh … Never mind.” As anyone who has ever hunted in any capacity – or merely thought about the subject for an instant – will instantly recognize, stealth is of far greater importance than extended communication.

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Making Sense 1

29 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in Climate Change, Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

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In making sense of things – of anything, really – there are at least three factors involved: logical coherence, empirical adequacy, and narrative intelligibility. The last item there, “narrative intelligibility,” is the tricky one, and the one that many people tend to forget about. So I will deal with that in a separate post. Not only are logical coherence and empirical adequacy rather more straight forward to deal with, I’ve already said a fair amount bout about logic as such and about methods of formal analysis in previous posts. Still, it would be worth while to say a few words about what is meant by “coherence” before addressing the topic of empirical adequacy.

“Coherence” is a fairly well-liked word in philosophical circles, but its meaning tends to be given short-shrift especially among logicians. For these latter, “coherence” is often treated as meaning nothing more than formal consistency, which is to say, if “p” is a proposition, then it cannot be the case that both p and not-p are true. While this is a valuable resource in formal arenas and in matters of mathematical proof, it is pretty weak-tea from a more general, philosophical perspective of coherence. Whitehead offers the following characterization:

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Thinking about Thinking 3: Statistical modes

22 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by in Climate Change, Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science

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Statistical thinking is one of the most important formal methods of engaging reality available to human beings. Sadly, it is also one of the more difficult, because human beings, in general, have absolutely no intuitive sense regarding probabilistic claims or statistical analyses. The people who do such things – even the ones that do them poorly – only reach such a stage of analysis after a significant amount of disciplined education. For the rest of us (and I must perforce include myself in this list) our statistical guesses only rise to the level of the merely appalling on those rare occasions that they are not completely idiotic. Quite usable texts can be had for the downloading (although the interested reader might consider supporting the Open Intro foundation), but one still requires no small measure of determination to “climb Mount Statistics” on one’s own. It is a challenge I’ve never completed at any substantive level, making this post more than a trifle daunting. However, even lacking any measure of expertise on the subject, there remain a few intelligent things that can be said, even by someone like me.

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Thinking about Thinking 2: Algebraic Reasoning

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic

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“I’m never going to use that!” Variations of this war cry are frequently lodged in protest against that Torquemada-ish, 7th level of hell known as “high school algebra.” I am inclined to sympathize with this lament, but not for the reasons one might suppose. The problem, you see, lies not in the pragmatics – the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the subject – but rather in the pedagogical techniques and intentions with which it is presented. Algebra, as it is almost universally taught in secondary school, is little more than a peculiarly mangled arithmetic. Algebra as it ought to be taught is relational logic, it is algebraic reasoning.

So what does the above mean?

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Thinking About Thinking 1

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Logic

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The study of philosophy – whether as an academic discipline, or the individually engaged pursuit of wisdom – has often been called “thinking about thinking.” This is a fairly vacuous description, not because it is wrong, but because it is so egregiously vague as to provide nothing beyond a comfortingly information-free verbalization that does not require us to attend to even a fourth word. 2500 years of written (which is to say, disregarding the purely oral traditions) speculative inquiry merits rather less of a trivialization in my book. Nevertheless, I did think it might be nice to spend a few posts thinking about good thinking from several useful perspectives, focusing, as it were, on the “logic” part of my mantra (Logic, Principles, Evidence, Facts.) This time out the gate, I want to talk a bit about “informal logic,” or that subject which is frequently found under the title of Critical Thinking.

The “critical” in “critical thinking” sometimes throws people off. This is not about being judgmental, or “you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny” sorts of schoolyard pettiness. No, this is the criticism of the scientist and the art critic, the careful (but merciless!) evaluation of reason, BY reason. No cheap shots, but no free passes, either.

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Logic, Principles, Evidence, Facts

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Logic

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      There is a hierarchy of relational structures involved in any rational inquiry. No step or stage of this hierarchy may be legitimately skipped, although in various contexts certain of them may be relatively invisible. As might be guessed by the title of this entry, that hierarchy is the one that runs between logic, principles, evidence and facts. In essence, this is a “meta-relation” between that which is universal – logic, that which is general (in the sense of genera) – principles, that which is specific (in the sense of species) – evidence, and that which is particular – facts. Now, anyone familiar with the works of Peirce and Dewey (see for example, HERE, HERE and HERE) will not find what I have to say in this post especially surprising. Nevertheless, the basic ideas presented seem like ones that deserve a broader audience than just and only scholars in American Pragmatism. And I have long found this litany – logic, principles, evidence, facts – to be a useful one, such that I am inclined to repeat it often enough that having a citable explanation will be of value.

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Exempli Gratia: Misleading Authority

11 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Science

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     The recent publication in the peer-reviewed scientific literature of research showing that 97% of Climate Scientists are convinced that, not only is global warming very real, but the principal forcings in global warming are anthropogenic[1] in nature has created quite a stir amongst the denialists. Multiple independent lines of research have shown that the 97% figure is quite robust; the scientific data may be explored in detail at the authors’ of the original research own website, The Consensus Project. On the other hand, thorough-going debunkings of the attempts to dispute the 97% claim may be found HERE and HERE. More general discussions by actual Climate Scientists (not just John Conway) can be found HERE.

     My purpose here is somewhat different. In yet another sad attempt to dispute the real science behind the 97% consensus, one now sees the “Oregon Petition” once again being trotted out by denialists. This petition purports to show some 30,000+ “scientists” who dispute the scientific findings relating to AGW and the 97% consensus regarding those findings. What I wish to show here is how trivially easy it is to refute the Oregon Petition without making any appeals to a refined understanding of climate science or legitimate statistical techniques. All one really needs is a basic grasp as to the nature of science, and a casual grasp of the precepts of critical thinking.

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!!! SOCIALISM !!!

07 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Politics

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Language is one of the primary vehicles of thought. Consequently, it is also one of the first casualties of political discourse, because thinking is inconvenient when ideology is at stake. Take for example the word “socialism.” This word has been flung about with promiscuous abandon in much recent political discourse. But the sad fact of the matter is, not one person in ten-thousand who has employed this term of late has anything like a genuine clue about what the term can or even might mean. By and large, anyone who says that “Socialism is X” or “the definition of Socialism is X,” where “X” is anything less than a multidimensional complex of ideas (all of whose boundaries are foggy, to say the least), needs to be laughed off the stage.Panic

Now, my areas of expertise do not include social/political philosophy, yet even I can recognize at least four major trends &/or primary thematic structures any one or combination of which could qualify as “socialism.” And while I am not prepared to stipulate that this list is comprehensive, I am most certainly prepared to insist that any simplistic definition of the subject is necessarily wrong.

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On Whose Authority?

06 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Logic

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One of the most widely recognized yet least well understood informal logical fallacies is the appeal to authority: the argumentum ad vericundiam. Most everyone understands that appealing to authority is, in some sense or other, an illegitimate move in any reasoned discussion. (If one doesn’t care a fig about reason, than any rhetorical move whatsoever becomes “legitimate,” which is to say, allowable provided you get away with it.) The problem here, though, is that if one could rigorously eschew all appeals to authority, not only would one avoid a particular fallacy, one would completely subvert the very possibility of reasoned discussion of any kind. Appeals to authority are not only constant, they are absolutely unavoidable in anything that might even barely resemble civilized existence. The problem, therefore, cannot be in the appeal to authority simply in itself, taken at face value.

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