“OK, OK wise girl. We get the point. We should be more careful calling our
interlocutors’ arguments fallacious. But
even you have to admit there are such things as real logical fallacies.”
Absolutely. But since one of the renewed purposes of this
blog is to get people to actually have conversations with each other, I’ve
focused on giving your opponents the benefit of the doubt—on not calling their
moves “fallacies” right out of the gate, but on trying to understand how what
looks like a fallacy to you might actually not be one, in their mind. They might still be committing a fallacy, and
they might still be wrong; but its important to realize that even if it seems
obvious to you that they’re either stupid or intellectually dishonest—they just
might be neither.
“Stupid or evil?”
“Why not both?”
“Does it have to be
either?”
2 comments:
Hi, I am brand-new to this conversation. But I have been a teacher of logic and of critical thinking for nearly 40 years, both at Cal poly and sac State and about nine years at UC Davis. I have to agree that it is best to try to understand and opponents argument. The human mind is such that it rarely commits logical errors. When people say that an argument is illogical, they usually mean that one or both of the premises are wrong and usually is the premise that asserts some fact or other. Most often people want to argue about what is right or wrong morally or ethically. So that means one premise (technically called the major premise) is based on what the speaker thinks is an obviously true moral premise.
It is a good practice to make sure that everyone agrees on the definition of moral goodness. For example: suppose a group of people are discussing the goodness or wrongness of abortion policies. Not too many people would say: "I don't enjoy killing babies but I think it's okay if the baby is going to cost too much or if the baby will not be healthy."
You can see in a case like this a lot of people might say: "well I don't think it's a baby or human at all in the earliest stages." You can see from this that this argument is not about moral right and wrong but about matters of fact. When does a conceptus become a baby? But if someone were to say: "it's a baby okay I just think my rights are more important than the babies". This person is arguing about the moral premise. He/she is arguing about the morality of rights. More about this later if anybody is interested.
Thanks for the reply! (And sorry I didn't see it sooner--vacation intervened.)
You taught logic and critical thinking--bless you. I had to "teach" them as part of an English composition course, one semester, freshman year. There was nowhere near enough time for all that in one course!
I am inclined to agree with your point about premises. Most so-called "illogical" arguments are actually merely "unsound." But I wonder whether major premises often get disputed as well ... Certainly they are easy to ignore, frequently left out in enthymemes ... And, I'd add further, that in my own undergrad experience a lot of disputed questions seemed to end up turning on the definitions on which those premises rest. In the abortion debate, that might mean ultimately debating about the meaning of words like "human life" and "person."
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