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Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

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Re: Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

#21

Post by Alex3917 »

aethertap wrote: post #3

For me, fallacies are a great tool for recognizing bad reasoning, which then provides pointers about how to expose it as such using a real argument. The fallacy itself doesn't constitute a counter argument. In a good debate, the fallacies themselves never come up but you can see how they have influenced the flow of argument. I really liked how it was put in the book Logical Self-Defense: To be valid, an argument has…

"The fallacy itself doesn't constitute a counter argument."

Why not? It doesn't prove that what the other person believes is false, but it does show that their reasons/evidence for their view are wrong. (Assuming the logical fallacy isn't itself a straw man against some minor point in the other person's argument.) And it's usually it's not necessary (or even possible) to prove that x is false, only that there's no rational reason to believe x.

E.g. even Richard Dawkins doesn't claim that it's impossible that there is a god.

Re: Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

#23

Post by Arguggi »

Am I the only one troubled by the last example?

And then suppose you encounter a woman who tells you that because of the insults she has received from guys in the skeptic community, she has decided that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist.

Receiving insults from men that identify as skeptics does not mean that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist.

Telling her she just committed a fallacy doesn't seem so wrong to me.

Re: Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

#24

Post by Jach »

snowwrestler wrote: post #12

Deductive logical systems cannot reliably find truth. That is the lesson of the scientific revolution and the revolution in mathematics that is most closely associated with Godel. Yet when people invoke "logical fallacies" they are almost always fallacies in deductive logic. Hey Internet--how about catching up to the 19th century and employing some inductive reasoning in your arguments? The problem with that, though,…

Furthermore, many deductive fallacies can turn into inductive, probabilistic theorems simply by moving to evidence-backed arguments instead of proof-backed arguments. (Authoritative claims can be evidence for a shift in probability, correlation is evidence of causation, absence of evidence is evidence of absence... How much that evidence is worth, of course, depends on the context.)

Re: Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

#25

Post by khyryk »

> And then suppose you encounter a woman who tells you that because of the insults she has received from guys in the skeptic community, she has decided that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist. (Emphasis mine.)

And later:

> This woman has confided her experiences and concerns; in these responses, you are insultingly and condescendingly attempting to diminish them, by portraying her experiences as irrelevant and her concerns as illogical.

There are better ways to confide experiences and concerns, and assuming intellectual immunity after calling an entire movement sexist isn't one of them. Both "sides" should be held to the same standards.

Re: Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

#26

Post by msg »

Arguggi wrote: post #23

Am I the only one troubled by the last example? And then suppose you encounter a woman who tells you that because of the insults she has received from guys in the skeptic community, she has decided that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist. Receiving insults from men that identify as skeptics does not mean that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist. Telling her she just committed a fallacy doesn't seem…

She may have just committed a fallacy in truth.

That doesn't mean telling her so is the right choice.

If you don't address her experience, you're missing the point.

You can "believe" all kinds of things without feeling them and living them out.

In her case, skeptics may believe they are not fundamentally sexist. But her observation would then be that this belief is only skin deep. It should trouble the skeptic that an observer finds their community sexist, and trigger a crisis in the belief.

Re: Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

#27

Post by Symmetry »

And given the topic, there's neccesarily a relevant Less Wrong link:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...

Once upon a time I tried to tell my mother about the problem of expert calibration, saying: "So when an expert says they're 99% confident, it only happens about 70% of the time." Then there was a pause as, suddenly, I realized I was talking to my mother, and I hastily added: "Of course, you've got to make sure to apply that skepticism evenhandedly, including to yourself, rather than just using it to argue against anything you disagree with—"

And my mother said: "Are you kidding? This is great! I'm going to use it all the time!"

Re: Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

#28

Post by Avshalom »

Arguggi wrote: post #23

Am I the only one troubled by the last example? And then suppose you encounter a woman who tells you that because of the insults she has received from guys in the skeptic community, she has decided that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist. Receiving insults from men that identify as skeptics does not mean that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist. Telling her she just committed a fallacy doesn't seem…

Did ya miss the whole thing about figurative language?

Re: Logical Fallacies Are Usually Irrelevant or Cited Incorrectly

#30

Post by cpleppert »

mindcrime wrote: post #11

Humans typically communicate in a way that resists shallow logical analysis. In a real conversation, people use words rather than terms, make utterances rather than sentences, and employ a wider variety of inference methods than modus ponens. A great deal of what is communicated and inferred in a conversation depends on context; the speakers and audience, their history, their shared knowledge and confidences, the fee…

>>But not everything that is said here needs to be treated like it was uttered as part of a debate. Sometimes opinions are just opinions, sometimes anecdotes are enlightening, and sometimes generalizations, metaphors, analogies and other abstractions come into play.

True! But I also think that the intent to immediately jump to logical fallacies is a sign of weakness. If you can't dispute the premises (or even understand them) you can jump right to an area that allows a) total victory, he used a fallacy somehow somewhere! or b) the argument breaks down into a subjective analysis of whether someone committed a fallacy thus allowing the argument to continue without having to face the other persons argument.

Maybe it is just me, but I find that even the (few) people without any critical thinking skills don't really commit classical logical fallacies. The problem isn't the surface argument but rather the evidence or the premises that is usually the issue.

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