All posts by John Casey

Blogger
General discussion

OSSA Day One: Thagard’s “Critical Thinking versus Informal Logic”

So begins our "live blogging" exercise from the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation conference.  I won't comment on the beer store, the Vietnamese restaurant, or Detroit Coney Island style hot dogs, or the 2.50  3.00 dollar Rye.

Scott will comment on Doug Walton's paper on argument schemes are dialogue; here a quick note about this morning's keynote by Paul Thagard's, "Critical Thinking versus Informal Logic." 

Always interesting about papers like these are the examples of motivated reasoning, which Thagard might call "inference."  Argument, by constrast, is the stuff you do in logic class.  The problem Thagard points to is that argument has little cognitive value; we arrive at most of our beliefs by a process of inference, which, is unfortunately susceptible to various motivational distortions (fear, hope, etc.).  So what of argument?  Argument can at best be a corrective, used in the best of circumstances to influence inference, perhaps overnight, asleep, or while dreaming. 

General discussion

10 common faults

7 Comments

At this link are ten common "biases" or "fallacies" or "faults" or something.  I'm not sure what to call them, more on that maybe another time.

So let's have an interactive post.  Pick your favorite, tell us about it in the comments by committing it.  I'm pretty sure this is going to be awesome.

Straw Man

What to do about straw men

5 Comments

My sense has always been that careful and honest editors can spot most straw men.  But no.  On this score, via Leiter, here is an entertaining case in point.  The case is Gary Wills' negative review of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly's "All Things Shining."  Drefyfus and Kelly feel they've been straw manned, they write:

Our book, All Things Shining, has clearly touched a nerve. Prominent reviewers have found it transformative. They have called it “fascinating,” “stunning,” “illuminating,” “inspirational,” and even a “harbinger of future philosophies to come.” But others have been outraged and dismissive. Garry Wills, the eminent historian and distinguished defender of the Catholic faith, now bears the standard for those arguing against. His recent review [NYR, April 7] expresses “astonishment” at how “inept” and “shallow” our book is, states that it is full of “silly” and “discredited” claims, and admonishes the “famous Big Thinkers” who, he thinks, have been duped by its wiles.

Many of the historical arguments Wills gives are reasonable, and his review would be fair if we actually held the positions he criticizes. Unfortunately, Wills regularly mistakes our views for discredited ones with which he is already familiar, and then, after reciting the well-known arguments against these discredited views, calls us “inept” for having spewed such “nonsense.” Some of our most sensitive and appreciative interlocutors disagree with the positions we articulate; but Wills seems simply not to understand them. 

This is a pretty serious charge.  Here is how Wills responds:

A lot of words, and no answers. I made specific charges, to which the authors make no specific replies. The only concrete point they make is that “we even give an example of Odysseus deliberating,” and for that they give no citation, either to their own book or to Homer. But I assume (after search) they are referring to page 76, which quotes (and rearranges) Fitzgerald’s translation on Odysseus’ “mind and spirit pondering” (Odyssey, 5.424). The verb here is hormainein (which Lattimore translates as “meditate”). They do not address the formulae of choice I adduced (dikha mermÄ“rizein, or entha kai entha mermÄ“rizein). They must not have wanted me to find their passage, since they gloss the verb as “pondering and despairing.” Odysseus is not undergoing the anguish of choice. He is, in their words, “busy despairing of his options.” Despair precludes choice—which does not matter, since Athena saves Odysseus with a whoosh.

Amid all their verbiage they say nothing about most of the points that I challenge—such as that Augustine was the first to join Christianity with Greek philosophy, or that he invented interiority by watching Ambrose read silently.

They do not even mention the matters that were most noticed as sacred “shining moments” in their book—the worship of Roger Federer’s tennis, the “praises of the Lord” for Demon Deacons, the canonization of Elizabeth Gilbert for submitting to the god of her own genius. They especially do not take the opportunity to explain, at last, their wildest idea—that carefully brewed coffee is a prophylactic against the “whoosh” of Hitler rallies. They vaguely dance away from all that with a dismissive claim that I am talking history and they are talking philosophy—as if philosophy were a warrant for making false statements, over and over.

I haven't read the book.  I didn't read Wills review either.  But it doesn't seem like Wills gets this criticism either.  Seems like a better reply would be: "no, I didn't straw man your view.  This is where you hold it."

General discussion

Not only but also

5 Comments

Fox Nation–I just sort of ended up there (thanks a lot Media Matters)–notes the following about the Obama Birth Certificate affair:

With a father like this, it is little wonder President Obama did not want to release his full birth certificate.

Though the proof that he was actually born in Hawaii may silence some critics, a new, rather more interesting side of his life has emerged – that his father Barack Obama senior was a serial womaniser and polygamist who government and university officials were trying to force out of the country.

Obama senior married Stanley Ann Dunham, a white student from Kansas, not only when he was said to have already been married to a woman in Kenya, but at a time when interracial marriages were still illegal in many parts of the U.S.

Documents obtained from the U.S. immigration service paint a picture of a man who 'had an eye for the ladies' and, according to his file, had to be warned several times to stay away from girls at the university.

I don't get what that bolded remark has to do with the rest of the story.  The rest of the story paints a picture of a serial Newt Gingrich-style womanizer.  Does the illegality of interracial marriage in parts of the US at the time add to that fact?

General discussion

Abandon all hope

5 Comments

In yet another argument undermining the wisdom of the New York Times' paywall, Ross Douthat, resident prude, argues that hell must exist.  His argument hinges on the reality of human choices.  Human choices, without the possibility of eternal damnation, just wouldn't be real.  He writes:

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death … salvation or damnation.”

There are other ways our choices are real, I'd argue.  In the first place, our choices create our character right now.  Our choices also affect other people right now.  That, I think, is probably punishment enough.  Meditating on eternal damnation before deciding whether you want to have carnal knowledge of chunky Reese Witherspoon seems a bit much.

Not to be facile, but Douthat also seems to offer one key reason for not thinking there's a hell:

Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?

Seems like if there were a hell, and if there were a just overseer of it, we'd have an absolutely unequivocal answer to this question.  Turns out, however, we don't.  So maybe our choices have eternal reality in hell, which just can't determine which ones will send us there.

Formal Fallacies, General discussion, Illicit minor

Pasquino*

2 Comments

It's Easter Monday (or Pasquetta), so let's have a contest.  In traditional term logic, a syllogism whose conclusion distributes the minor term but whose minor premise does not is guilty of the fallacy of the illicit minor, or the Father O'Malley Fallacy.  A student of mine today suggested another name, the Father McPheeley Fallacy. 

Anyone have any other suggestions?

And in the tradition of making up gestures descriptive of the fallacies, the one for this one is moon walking.

*Pasquino

General discussion

That’s nonscience

5 Comments

Chris Mooney (coauthor of the Republican War on Science) has an article in Mother Jones called "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science."  A sample:

 In other words, when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers (PDF). Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end—winning our "case"—and is shot through with biases. They include "confirmation bias," in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and "disconfirmation bias," in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

Read the whole thing.  Read it and despair.

Ad hominem tu quoque, General discussion, Specious allegations of fallacy

Tax quoque

2 Comments

Time to pay your federal taxes, so it's time for people to complain about how much we're taxed, or, alternatively, how little some people are taxed relative to their income, etc.  Now comes Gregg Easterbrook, whose work I do not know (and now I know why, if this is a measure of his intellect).  It is well known now that Barack Obama is for reductions in revenue expenditures–i.e., he's for increasing taxes (a phrase for which he was justly lampooned by Jon Stewart).  But, Easterbrook spies a problem:

President Barack Obama wants to increase taxes on the wealthy, and surely is correct that this must be part of any serious plan to control the national debt. Consider the case of a wealthy couple who made $1.7 million in 2010, yet paid only 26.2 percent in federal income taxes — though the top rate supposedly is 35 percent, and the president says that figure should rise to 39.6 percent. The well-off couple in question is Barack and Michelle Obama, whose tax returns, just released, show they paid substantially less than the president says others should pay.

If Obama is in earnest about wanting increased taxes on the wealthy, then he should send the United States Treasury $182,998. That’s the difference between his Form 1040 Line 60 (“This is your total tax”) and what he would have owed at the higher rate (plus limits on itemized deductions) he himself advocates.

So why doesn’t he tax himself more? The Form 1040, after all, only stipulates the minimum tax an American must pay. More is always welcome. Obama should write a check to the United States Treasury for $182,998.

Wealthy people who say the rich should pay higher taxes — Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have joined Obama in declaring this — are free to tax themselves. If you believe the top rate should rise to 39.6 percent (Obama) or 50 percent (Buffett), then calculate the difference and send a check for that amount to the Treasury. Of course no one individual doing this, even a billionaire, would have much impact on the deficit. But if rich people who say they believe in higher taxes were willing to practice what they preach, this would prove their sincerity, making legislation on the point more likely.

This argument is so dumb that Megan McArdle made it (can't remember where I read the refutation).  Normally, accusations of hypocrisy need to posit some actual or hypothetical (counterfactual) hypocrisy.

On Easterbrook's view, Obama is a hypocrite for not unilaterally taxing himself.  He's rich, he advocates higher taxes for the rich, ergo, ipso fatso.  But of course he's not a hypocrite, because he's advocating a tax policy he'll obey if given the chance.

As a practical matter, a bunch of rich people donating to the Treasury will likely delay tax increases on the wealthy–see, for instance, the free rider problem.

 

Link via Mother Jones via Atrios.

And, BTW, happy Charles Krauthammer Day!

General discussion

Verum ipsum factum convertuntur

6 Comments

Yesterday I saw a link to an essay by America's Psychiatrist, Dr.Keith Albow (I thought it was Charles Krauthammer too), on Fox News about a little boy who likes pink, and who paints his toenails with his mother.  He writes:

A recent feature in J. Crew's online catalogue portrays designer Jenna Lyons painting her son Beckett’s toe nails hot pink. The quote accompanying the image reads, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”

Here's the feature.  What's his problem with this?

Yeah, well, it may be fun and games now, Jenna, but at least put some money aside for psychotherapy for the kid—and maybe a little for others who’ll be affected by your “innocent” pleasure.

This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity—homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such “psychological sterilization” [my word choice] is not known.

In our technology-driven world—fueled by Facebook, split-second Prozac prescriptions and lots of other assaults on genuine emotion and genuine relationships and actual consequences for behavior—almost nothing is now honored as real and true.

As far as I can tell, the little kid happens to like pink–and let's assume for the sake of argument he likes to paint his toenails as well.  Kids do that stuff.  So do grown ups. 

This, Dr.Ablow argues, will lead to psychotherapy for the kid and for others.  Don't know about the latter claim there (which others?).  One reason for this–not the one that Ablow is thinking about presumably–is the rigid enforcement of heteronormativity–boys better act like boys, otherwise someone will have to bully them into doing so.  Bullying will lead to psychotherapy for the pink-loving boy and perhaps for the bully. 

But rather than this obvious side-effect of the rich tapestry of humanity story here, Dr.Ablow goes off on a tangent about the "real and the true." 

As far as I know, there is nothing "real and true" about gender color selection.  That is entirely conventional.  Sure it's real and true that people think there's something real and true about these things.  But that's a different matter. 

And if there's anything homogenizing going on here, it's the idea that boys have to wear blue nailpolish.

General discussion

Not intended to be a factual statement

2 Comments

Sometimes I wonder about the effectiveness of satire.  It's entertainment value is purchased oftentimes at the expense of fairness and accuracy–you have to straw man, a little at least, to satirize.  It appears, however, that sometimes straw manning is unnecessary.  Some people just satirize themselves. 

On this point, please enjoy the clip at this link  from the Stephen Colbert show.  A little context.  Senator John Kyl of Arizona claimed that 90 percent of Planned Parenthood's work is abortion.  In reality, it's three percent.  As a clarification he said his remark was:

"not intended to be a factual statement."

Now it is clear.

Good work, also,  here and  here and by the Daily Show.