Basics of Logic: Trivium Part III

Thank you Wes for being one of the many to wake me from my dogmatic slumber. Your work is greatly appreciated💚

I have a question for possible future discussion. It seems to me that even if our educational system was effective in teaching critical thinking skills/logic (which we all know it is not)…there is a more fundamental obstruction: human nature…our attachment to ideologies, our need to be right, our unwavering drive to defend our beliefs, our cognitive biases - and the list goes on. I have yet to see a person who has wrapped his/her identity around a specific ideology stop, choose to listen openly and absorb a set of facts (assuming that they are in fact, factual) and change his/her perspective. My question, therefore, is - is human nature an obstacle to critical thinking, is it possible for logical thinking (across a critical mass of us) to ever structure our belief systems, and in a society that feels “too far gone” …how do we accomplish/instill the discipline of “think before you believe”? Thank you- you are my single favorite professor of philosophy on You Tube. Your delivery, humor, and clarity do great justice to the brilliant minds of the past.

Loving this series.

fingers crossed A few minutes in, here's hoping he doesn't focus overly much on deductive logic line every other logic course I've taken. Edit: Alright, so you mostly covered fallacies, which is fair, and l'idiot ones I'd never heard a name put to. Is there going to be any discussion of philosophical razors? I could use a better examination of Hanlon's razor than Wikipedia, and Occam's razor is so often incorrectly stated that accurate presentations on it will always be welcome on the internet.

I recently heard about the progymnasmata. Will that be in this lecture series?

Liking and commenting for algorithmic purposes

I have also heard of paideia. Will that be covered?

For the comment about classic texts presenting arguments without fallacies, I would say depends on the texts.

I am generally like your videos and found this lecture to be great as usual. However, I want to add something. It is true that people unwantedly or accidentally make so many fallacies when making arguments. But, from my observation, this is mostly due to the fact that they either they have 1. Intrinsic motive (like personal benefits related to the arguments) or 2. Lack of knowledge or information. Because they don't have enough information, they must make arguments without solid foundation and must make a lot of generalization or guesses which may or may not incorrect. The fallacies they made are also "the best arguments they can produce" and "the most convenient way of debating" at that moment without spent too much time researching the topic. Having more information and access to information could be a way to avoid fallacies imho.

Just a reminder: just because something isn't logically valid does not mean it's not actually true and vis versa; just because something is logically valid does not mean its true. Also on a tangential note: man is part logic and part passion.

Regarding your forgotten thinkers playlist, I'm curious to know why you didn't include someone like Emerson? Reading him now, I think his unnoticed influence pervades American society. Aside from that, in your previous lecture, I must express my disagreement with the sentiment, also pervasive in society, that we should avoid sophisticated, florid, or otherwise sesquipedalian language in communication. The problem from my vantage is that it arises from the continual decline of readers in the populace since the mid-century and most importantly the advent of television and subsequent televisual media. People no longer read; thus are they stranded on the island of the infamous "middle-school reading level". So because the preponderance of the televisual has left the populace largely deficient in literacy at all levels, the erroneously chosen solution is accommodation of this degradation in quality. If something written today is verbally challenging, the author is liable to be accused of pretension or obscurantism. My very being cannot be clement to this, for I always had an affinity with language and with an insatiable striving upwards, so to be shamed for attempting great expressiveness, whether a person deems inappropriate the usage of a word, usages being quite arbitrary if one is aware of how our current language has ossified, or fossilized if you prefer, certain words by restricting them to particular instances like jigsaws pieces. To hell with that stultification. The English language is often lauded or commended for being the most expressive language in the world and with one of the largest vocabularies/dictionaries in the world, but if people are confined to a pedestrian quadrant of this glorious language, then this merit evaporates and its speakers are bereft of its richness. Now I accord with Schopenhauer in that if one is to read, one should read qualitatively good works, and with the Internet and democratization of publication, the world finds itself in a whirlwind of excrementitious compositions written by a population with a shrunken attention span. So it is lamentable that given all the words that one could exercise, people are prohibited to exceed the limits of the mentally-mummified non-readers and readers of mainstream slop. If those types can only censure and denigrate those who speak with greater versatility, then they should be silent, for their opinion only demeans everything. The speech and writing of the common man is insipid. Unlike you whose profession is in academia where you can converse with others of a similar level, I am not. Quotidian speech is tedious speech. When Emerson writes an unfamiliar word—eleemosynary, tournure, crescive, hodiernal—, my eyes glisten with excitement and my mind radiates with pleasure. I'm happy to see someone not convey things so blandly. The modern world is mechanical, sterile, dead, and it is reflected in its language. As you've said yourself, reading the classics alienates you, and I am alienated. Lastly and briefly, just as an analogy can be imperfect in the communication of an idea or ideas so too can the simplification of a speaker or writer's vocabulary impair his message.

"The Art of thinking clearly" from Dobelli is a good one on this. Also "52 Denkfehler, die sie lieber anderen überlassen", also from Dobelli, is a very similar one in German. The ad hominem can be very useful as to not waste your time (sometimes). If you hear a proven racist speak out argue, I just refuse to bother refuting or dealing with the argument, because I know that his general logic is so flawed.

just reminding everyone out there that if free will is merely an illusion, then knowledge is impossible.. don't bite that bullet. you DO have a choice

Hey Doc,I could be wrong but it feels like youre straw-manning by only focusing on acreage, where the steelman would incorporate variables like geography dynamics and migration routes. So it may be small, but without comment on how valuable, or indicative it is of local ecology…for example, if only a small amount of historic migration paths' ice melts, it can make all the difference to a polar bear who's been swimming for 7 miles. the terrain is tundra, this means seepage(how close to a water body?). And so on an d so forth. beyond geography, i bet a geologic approach like D & G in Anti-Oedipus is justified. any climactic approach seems more rhizomic than ANYfuckingTHING. maybe im nitpicking? but climate scientist have been consitently inaccurate in their predication over the last 5 decades: they have consistently underestimated the allele? manifestation? hauntologic-lost futures? positive feedback(ice melting/ocean surface absorption) etc etc etc. things are MUCH worse BECAUSE scientists couldnt incorporate permafrost melts in the year 2000. thats infantile code. IJS thx ~mike