I was thinking about this lately and it seems to me, especially when it comes to religion, but that’s not the only place it occurs, that far too many people completely misunderstand how logical syllogisms work. They seem to think that if you can put a three-line argument together, you’ve automatically won the debate.
Sorry, that’s not how it works at all. Therefore, I’m going to give a high-level overview of syllogisms and why so many people are using them completely wrong. Hope it helps. Continue reading Why Do People Misunderstand Philosophy?→
This is a short one, but I came across a video on YouTube and find the answer provided to be ridiculously wrong. It just goes to show how poorly most people, even professional mathematicians, are at critical thinking.
This came up recently in a couple of other posts where I and a philosopher have been having a long, rambling discussion that’s had trouble sticking to a single point. That can be fun on occasion so I don’t mind a bit of meandering but one thing that I’ve noticed, and this isn’t meant to belittle my opponent, but they seem to be reacting in much the same way that I see with a lot of theists. “You just don’t understand!” Yet they seem incapable of just pointing out what I don’t understand, even though I’ve asked on several occasions, but more important than that, they don’t seem to be able to explain, in detail, *WHY* I’m supposedly wrong. Present your evidence and that doesn’t seem to be happening.
I’ve been having a couple of different conversations of late but two in particular seem to dovetail nicely. First, there was one with a theist who insisted that we had to take things like the laws of logic on blind faith and secondly, one going on over on my YouTube channel right now with a philosopher who seems very self-satisfied that philosophy is the end-all-be-all of human intellect.
So I was watching some videos today and I found one where they claimed that the logical absolutes were absolute as a bald assertion.
I entirely disagree. The logical absolutes exist because we’ve never had a single observation where they didn’t hold true. In fact, we can’t even imagine a situation where A isn’t A. We don’t even know what that might look like.
Therefore, the laws of logic, like everything else in rational human thought, they aren’t absolute but they certainly hold up based on every single observation that we’ve ever made. And there are a lot of people who just don’t like that. Continue reading Logic isn’t an Assumption→
So, as is no surprise, Matt Dillahunty is wrong once again. He claimed, on a recent video from The Line, that anecdotal evidence is, in fact, evidence. It’s not. It’s a claim. In and of itself, it doesn’t actually demonstrate anything.
I was thinking about this lately and it seems to me, especially when it comes to religion, but that’s not the only place it occurs, that far too many people completely misunderstand how logical syllogisms work. They seem to think that if you can put a three-line argument together, you’ve automatically won the debate.
This is a short one, but I came across a video on YouTube and find the answer provided to be ridiculously wrong. It just goes to show how poorly most people, even professional mathematicians, are at critical thinking.
I’ve been having a couple of different conversations of late but two in particular seem to dovetail nicely. First, there was one with a theist who insisted that we had to take things like the laws of logic on blind faith and secondly, one going on over on my YouTube channel right now with a philosopher who seems very self-satisfied that philosophy is the end-all-be-all of human intellect.
So I was watching some videos today and I found one where they claimed that the logical absolutes were absolute as a bald assertion.