Tag Archives: Critical Thinking

It Isn’t a Fallacy If It’s True

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Donald Trump, Fascism, Logic

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Actually, it isn’t a fallacy if it is true and relevant, but that makes for a rhetorically clumsy title. The fallacy I want to talk about here is the argumentum ad nazium (sometimes called ad hitlerium.) This is the “fallacy” of dismissing some person or group as being Fascists or Nazis. We’ve certainly seen a great deal of this in recent years, with President Obama repeatedly denounced in the right-wing media as a Fascist communist Muslim Kenyan/Indonesian (with a time machine to fake his Hawaiian birth certificate.) These accusations are just part of the flood of infantile twaddle that organizations like Fox “News” butter their bread with. But what if someone in the public sphere – for example, running for national office – really is a Fascist?Fascists

There are many memes flowing through social media comparing Donald Trump to Hitler. I disagree with these comparisons somewhat, and a glance at the attached picture will indicate the nature of that disagreement (the specifics of THAT disagreement will not be explored here.) I will argue that it is both true and relevant to characterize Trump as a Fascist. However, before proceeding with that particular claim, I will spend most of my time talking about Fascism itself. This concept gets thrown about with promiscuous abandon, and the general disregard for what it really means is a disturbing sloppiness for which I have no sympathy. Continue reading →

How to Lie with Questions

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Authoritarians, Critical Thinking, Logic, Politics

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Many people labor under the erroneous assumption that questions are essentially innocent. To the extent that this is true, these people open themselves up to a kind of manipulation that is insidious to the point of being vicious. The asking of a question – any question, really – presupposes an enormous amount of background information in order for the question to even be meaningful, much less answerable. When that background information assumes as given fact matters that are in reality untrue, then the fallacy of the complex question has been committed. Groucho Marx famously posed the question, “Are you still beating your wife?” But this question cannot be answered unless it is first true that the person being asked is, or at least was, a wife beater. But if that condition is not true, then there is no way of answering the question, since either a “yes” or a “no” answer amount to the assertion of a falsehood. Which is to say, in answering a question, one is tacitly agreeing to the background assumptions.Groucho Wife

One can be at once variously innocent seeming, and yet aggressive, in how one poses a loaded question, depending on how utterly lacking in integrity one happens to be. Thus, for example, in politics one often encounters what is known as a “push poll.” Disguised as a questionnaire, a push poll’s real intent is not to learn what people believe, but to actively manufacture that belief. The seeming innocence of the push poll is in its sheep’s clothing as a questionnaire; the aggression comes in the implicit posturing as essential democratic process: failure to answer the question is a failure to participate in democracy. Which brings me to the Congressional Representative for my district in Illinois, Mike Bost. Continue reading →

Rhythm and … Logic?

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Aesthetics, Critical Thinking, Logic, Mathematics, Whitehead

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There’s a false dichotomy which supposedly stands between aesthetics and analysis. But art and emotion do not stand in opposition to logic and reason. This nonsense is, in many ways, the bastard offspring of the “two cultures” story we’ve inherited since before C. P. Snow gave it a name, and which we’ve variously integrated into our teaching programs for almost all levels of education. Back in the “good old days” of classical education (by which I mean the ancient Greeks) mathematics and music were treated as much the same thing. Even today, we have not quite lost all sight of those connections, and if one takes the time to listen to mathematicians, one will notice that the issues of whether a proof or a theorem is beautiful or not takes on primary importance.DrumStickNylonPic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWlK-cL504

Careful, meticulous reasoning is not cold; quite the contrary, it is a fire that will consume you without mercy. I’ve touched on the idea of mathematics and the beautiful before, but wish to revisit the idea again because it can bear the company, even in this Thanksgiving season. This time around, however, I wish to approach matters from a more “musical” perspective that specifically highlights some ideas around “rhythm.” I mean to tackle these ideas from what I take to be a very Whiteheadian point of view. Whitehead was, of course, an accomplished mathematician and educator, and well attuned to the subtleties of mathematical aesthetics. But as he began to worry about the philosophical underpinnings of our physical sciences, his inquiries began to lead him from issues of organization (of thought) to organism itself. Rhythm became one of Whitehead’s central concepts. Continue reading →

Test

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Inquiry, Logic

≈ 8 Comments

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This post can be viewed as a companion piece to my one about “proof.” Proof is a kind of test to which a certain, rigidly constrained, set of ideas can be subjected. While it is important within that limited context, proof mostly stands out as an all-but-unachievable ideal, the kind of ideal that suggests the outside limit for the types of tests that might be applied to ideas, concepts, claims, hypotheses, and so forth. There are a great variety of such tests, and they do not line up along a single unimodal, univocal spectrum. But it does seem to me that they do converge at the far ends of this lattice, this partially ordered set of possibilities, to proof as the highest ideal at one end, and vapid opinion, as the most dispensable example at the lowest (and, sadly, commonest) end.Test F

There are primarily three families of tests for ideas, and each such family breaks out in a variety of ways: logical coherence, empirical adequacy, and narrative intelligibility. Following Whitehead’s argument in the early pages of Process and Reality, I take “logical coherence” to be something that is vastly larger than just proof-theoretic completeness or model-theoretic semantic sufficiency. Both of these latter are formal ideals, part of the above, generalized concept of “proof,” that seldom realize themselves in the real world. Logical coherence is not such a desiccated abstraction; rather, it is the requirement that ideas “hang together,” at least “locally” (in metaphysics, this requirement becomes “globally.”) Continue reading →

Proof

12 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in Logic, Philosophy of Logic

≈ 7 Comments

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Nine times out of ten (probably closer to ninety-nine times out of one hundred) when someone starts talking about, much less demanding, “proof” – proof of anything – unless they are discussing whiskey[1], they almost certainly have no idea what they are talking about. This is especially true in the empirical sciences, where various anti- or pseudo-scientific quacks, climate change denialists, creationist ideologues, and others like them, will insist that the fatuous twaddle they are spewing is perfectly reasonable since, after all, they (the quacks) have not been “proven” wrong, while the actual scientific literature has failed to absolutely “prove” its case. These claims are so childish that one must almost wonder if the denialists and others like them might actually know that what they are saying is not just bullshit (that last being a technical, philosophical term), but an outright lie. I am myself, however, disinclined to assign a level of intelligence to people to pull off such a clever conspiracy when nothing else in their lives gives any evidence of such nuanced and incisive reasoning. As a very loose and general rule, people are far for likely to have no idea what they are talking about, as opposed to talking about it very cleverly.Rum Gone

The idea of proof in mathematics (the only venue where non-liquor related uses have any meaning) had become so vexed by the end of the 19th Century, that the field of mathematical logic was, in essence, invented with the purpose of sorting matters out. Matters kept resisting being sorted, and along the way the nose of the mathematical camel got into the philosophical tent, and ended up swallowing philosophical logic whole for some decades that followed. Even today, the issue of how to teach logic, and what logic to teach, has not been particularly well sorted out in philosophy. So what might be said about the nature of proof, such that we do not have to become facile with mathematics, yet can still avoid being gulled by credulously accepting demands for, or putative statements of, proof? Continue reading →

Regardless Whose Bull

08 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Frankfurt, On Bullshit

≈ 6 Comments

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I am not a patient person, even under the best of circumstances. I am frequently astounded, even overwhelmed, by the patience persons of my acquaintance will show as others around them are spouting the most unbelievably ignorant and fatuous nonsense imaginable. “No, no, Fred. You can actually go outside and see for yourself that, on a clear, sunny day, the sky is actually blue, not red. However, we can continue to discuss this, if you’d like.” To my way of thinking, once someone has demonstrated that their ignorance is not only beyond measure, but thoroughly willful, I am done investing my time and effort in that person. I make no pretensions that this is illustrative of any, much less a superior, virtue on my part.

In this photo taken Sunday, Sept. 27, 2009, a sculpture by Chinese artist Chen Wenling entitled

Issues become more complicated when it is a group that is variously “gone over the falls,” as it were, especially when that group is one that you are inclined to identify with. So, for example, when Republicans and political conservatives demonstrate that they’ve abandoned even the pretense of reason, or even sanity, I’ll often just order a pizza, pour myself another glass of wine, sit back and watch the Klown Kar drive off the cliff. Some issues are obviously of great importance: conservative disregard of basic economic facts and/or climate change denialism, stand out as especially egregious examples. Other issues are merely outrageous. For example, as a veteran I am especially offended by Ben Carson’s blatant lie about having, as a young man, been offered a “scholarship” to the Military Academy at West Point. (Little of any consequence turns on this last, especially in light of the other sorts of twaddle Carson regularly spouts.) But there is something especially galling when bullshit comes from the political left, which then not only refuses to correct the error, but digs its heals in on the original nonsense. Continue reading →

Philosophical Explanation

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, General Philosophy, Logic

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It strikes me that I’ve said very little about the nature of philosophical explanation, even as I write from a specifically philosophical perspective and intent. This might qualify as ironic, but I’m never confident that I’m using the word “irony” (or its variants) properly. Which, for a man with my education, might also be ironic …Because Philosophy

I’ve written a number of posts variously exploring the nature, the expectations, and a few of the pitfalls surrounding scientific explanations. I’ve probed a few ethical/moral issues, and even discussed some fairly generic questions around the large scale issue of the “logic of inquiry” itself. But beyond a few scattered comments, I’ve not really posed the question (along with a tentative answer) about the nature and value of specifically philosophical inquiry itself. This post will be my first concerted stab in that direction. Continue reading →

When We do “IT,” It’s ok …

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Anonymous, Critical Thinking, Ethics, Objective Morality

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So, I just read how the hacker “group” Anonymous has been publicly outing members of the KKK. This has been variously accompanied by triumphalist celebrations by some people on the political Left. “Yay … justice … woo-hoo …”

I find such behavior singularly disgusting, both the outing and the celebration of it. When homosexuals are outed against their will – sometimes with devastating consequences – this is an intolerable violation of those persons’ privacy and lives. But when “we” do something similar, it is “justice”! When workers and protectors at a Planned Parenthood clinic have their faces, their families, their home addresses plastered all over the internet, this is a violent attack on their persons and safety. But when “we” do it, it is “justice”. Because, “obviously,” “we” are “good” guys, and “they” are “bad” people.Mlk-in-birmingham-jail

How is it that the question of right or wrong is exhausted by answering whether or not we are the one’s doing it? The question is obviously rhetorical, and the answer is, “obviously, it is not.”

There are numerous examples of nominally wrong actions being done for right reasons such that those reasons suffice to (arguably, at least) justify those actions. To kill another person is wrong, but if that killing occurred in the course of self-defense or the protection of innocent people, it will generally be viewed as a justifiable homicide. Violating the law is typically viewed as wrong, but when the law itself is unjust and immoral, then violating that law can itself become a moral duty. This is the leverage I wish to apply to the actions of Anonymous toward the KKK. My instrument of choice here is one of the most tightly reasoned moral arguments of the last century: Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Continue reading →

Carry a Big Stick

29 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Bullying, Critical Thinking, SLAPP

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A favorite resort of cowards and bullies is the argumentum ad baculum, the argument “from the stick.” It is the use of force or violence – whether physical, psychological, sociological, financial (which is really a part of the sociological), or emotional – to silence others who would otherwise disagree with their positions. Such persons, unable to present a genuinely reasoned case, decide that the vacuum due to the lack of cogency in their claims is to be compensated for with the blunt force trauma they are prepared to inflict. Sometimes “blunt force trauma” is not a metaphor. Just a few days ago, some high-minded “Christians” literally beat their own 19-year-old son to death, so as to properly impress upon him the love of the sweet baby Jesus. Such behavior is not normal, of course, even amongst the viciously right-wing authoritarians in American Christianity today who, regardless of their numbers, garner so much press. But it is also worth remembering that the reason these people are not as bad as, say, ISIL, has nothing to do with the “love” in their hearts, and everything to do with the fact that hard-won secular law stands between them and the kinds of atrocities they’ve committed in the past, and would still be committing if they could get away with it. (Recall Nietzsche’s aphorism: “If the Christians still loved us, they’d still burn us.”)Caveman

As I noted in a previous post regarding approaches to religion, “In communities that valorize liberal approaches, the experiential element will be directed toward personal growth and spirituality. In conservative communities, experience will be canalized into orthodoxy and conformity.” The latter, canalizing method must – almost, if not simply, by necessity – appeal to other methods than reason in order to establish such conformity. Reason unleashed invariably follows the multitudinous fibers of possibilities not yet described or even imagined, decrying along the way the permissions of others. This might lead to community, but it will not be the foundation of conformity. Continue reading →

God o’ The Gaps (part 2)

20 Tuesday Oct 2015

Posted by in Critical Thinking, God, Metaphysics, naturalism

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In the early part of the previous (which is to say, 20th) century, philosophers tried to dodge the difficult question of characterizing the logical structure(s) of explanation by arguing that science was really only about description. This program was a failure of almost laughable proportions. Anyone casting even a casual eye at what science is and how it functions cannot possibly avoid the fact that science aims at explanations. But are scientific explanations the only things that qualify as explanations?God Blame

Let me restate this question using the points and issues raised in part 1: concepts of “God” serve no valid purpose in scientific explanation, but is scientific explanation the only kind that is valid? I have written at length in other posts about the pathetic misdirection that is to be found in certain elements of contemporary science, primarily gravitational cosmology. But this is a failure of science within science; this still begs the question, is science all that there is? Continue reading →