Logical fallacies
05 12 11 - 06:49
When I look back over the kids who went into higher education, the ones who went to top schools never bothered memorizing logical fallacies.The ones who went to second-tier state schools seemed to spend a lot of their time doing it.
In general, the smarter the organism, the fewer rules you have to teach it -- you teach it goals and a vocabulary of argument.
If it's dummyland, you teach lots of rules -- it's a compensatory behavior.
Suppose Fred glances out the window and says: âThe groundâs wet outside. It must have rained.â Heâs given an argument. What should we think of it? We could say:
Oh dear, what a mediocrity poor Fred is. He is evidently arguing as follows: If it rains, the ground gets wet; the ground is wet; therefore it has rained. If heâd ever taken a logic class heâd know that heâs just committed the fallacy of affirming the consequent!
Yes, we could say that, but (to paraphrase Haldeman paraphrasing Nixon) it would be wrong. It is simply unreasonable and, indeed, unjust to accuse Fred of committing so blatant a fallacy when an alternative construal of his argument is easily available. For while Fred could have been reasoning deductively and committing the fallacy in question, it is more likely that he was reasoning inductively, along something like the following lines:
When the ground is wet outside, rain is the usual reason, though occasionally there are other reasons, such as flooding. The ground is wet outside right now and there is no reason to think these other causes are operative, and good reason to think they are not. So it is very likely that it has rained.
Obviously this is a perfectly respectable piece of probabilistic reasoning, and what logicians call the âprinciple of charityâ requires that we assume that Fred had something like this in mind rather than the fallacious alternative interpretation, unless we have strong evidence to the contrary. If we fail to do so, we are guilty of the sort of illogicality of which we would accuse Fred. - Edward Feser
Logic does not exist outside of context, nor does anything in this universe. It's all connected. Deconstruction is the hobgoblin of little minds.
23 comments
http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf Improbable - 05-12-’11 12:46
Wrong.
http://spq.sagepub.com/content/73/1/33.short scientific evidence to the contrary - 06-12-’11 00:57
>attempt to convince parents you aren't gay paradox - 06-12-’11 00:59
Memorizing the fallacies is, of course, not a substitute for understanding sensible logic and argumentation, including of course both deductive and inductive arguments, the differences between them, when you'd use one and when the other, etc.
But the names of fallacies, and their definitions, are still useful tools for characterizing common ways for arguments to go wrong. I don't know of a logician or rhetorician who would shun their use entirely.
This is part of a more general fact, that every intellectual enterprise, not matter how lofty and principles, has to resort to technical terminology at some point to frame their studies more precisely and comprehensibly, and to some extent, everyone in the field has to memorize that terminology.
The example you mention is, as you say, a result of someone failing to recognize the difference between an inductive and a deductive argument. It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with knowing what "affirming the consequent" means, and I challenge you to find a logician who doesn't. But you have to also know, as you said, that it only applies to deductive arguments. Who are these kids anyway? - 06-12-’11 11:21
The bottom line is, liberalism is positively correlated with intelligence. Deal with it, nerd. @ "scientific laziness" - 06-12-’11 12:31
There are plenty of conservative idiots and plenty of liberal idiots; counting each won't give you any insight on who's right.
That's like saying "You're wrong, because a lot of idiots agree with you." That's even more absurd than saying the also fallacious "I'm right, because a lot of geniuses agree with me."
The only thing you can do is examine the *best* arguments for each, and see which is more persuasive. I'm right. - 07-12-’11 11:29
Communities of the intelligent are almost exclusively liberal. Think about that. All of the groups comprised of the certifiably smartest people in the world, and only that caliber of person, are all liberal.
Even extremely intelligent people who have a vested interest to be in the "conservative" camp, like Bill Gates, are still liberal. healthy dose of reality - 07-12-’11 11:35
Intelligent people are more likely to do this correctly than non-intelligent people. The trend is for them to come up with better solutions to problems than the non-intelligent. Intelligent people are demonstrably more likely to be liberal, IE have liberal solutions to social problems. Therefore, through its nearly unanimous validation and approval by qualified sources (something called "peer review" in the scientific world, for you non-literates) liberalism is better than its alternatives. you lose - 07-12-’11 11:46
Actually, given this site's vision of a world only for the meritocratic elite, saying that intelligent people are more likely to be liberal is even more of a significant, crushing blow than saying liberals are more on the whole more intelligent (also true, by the way). shot yourself in the foot, right there - 07-12-’11 11:56
You are applying inductive reasoning to say that since liberals tend to be intelligent, and intelligent people tend to be right, liberals are therefore probably right.
If you're smart enough to come up with this kind of clever argument, why not bypass the appeal to authority and examine the actual political positions yourself? Let's see. - 07-12-’11 12:00
intelligence is itself a bias. aamir - 07-12-’11 15:18
>exclusively liberal. Think about that.
Actually intelligent societies can allow themselves being liberal to a degree. It's sheep that need herding. Thus caste, inequality, self-discipline.
Linear IQ, by the way, is a bottleneck measure. Nick - 08-12-’11 20:04