www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html

Amazing Fallacy Chart - the London tube map for critical thinking..

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html

Caitlin Moran and her waffle chops.

Yellowhammer is on the look out for bad logic - see other critical thinking articles on this blog.

Caitlin Moran [too easy to distort the surname so I wont stoop] 

Feminist Author and general  know-it-all - gives a perfect example of many fallacies at once - problem is Im not quite sure which is dominant - help me out if you can !

begging the question , Fallacy of false cause, hasty generalization, affirming the consequent, denying the antecendent, straw man, cause and effect assumption ....:

".. believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilising mental illness. ....Only when the majority of people on this planet believe - absolutely - that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings...."

full passage

[http://fuckyeahcaitlinmoran.tumblr.com/post/20173885752/but-believing-in-an-afterlife-totally-negates-your]

Surely it is because of man's capacity for understanding one's own mortality that afterlife works as a concept in the first place.   ie it is because we realise we are going to die that the afterlife is useful to help us consider how to live well.   

To build Heaven on earth used to be one of the foundations for utopian thought - heck, Belinda Carlisle even wrote a song about it - so imagining perfection gives one a template of what end result to aim for here.

Unlike many/all other animals, we learn very early on that death is inevitable. 

Coping with that is quite traumatic for our species!  Denial of ones mortality is of course a problem, that could lead to complacency.

---But that is not to say that believing or not believing in an afterlife is the cause of complacency.  

The afterlife surely could be considered a place of comfort after a hard life of trying to do the right thing.  Some even would think it a reward for being moral. Some will be scared and thus prevented from wrongdoing - or atleast that was the Catholic churches intention at one point in history. Caitlin assumes that those believing in an afterlife do so to get them out of problems in this one, rather than an incentive.

Take some of those with a belief system including an afterlife -  Mother theresa, Ghandi etc- they all got things done because of their faiths  - would they be considered mentally ill ???? How rude.
Plenty of people who do not believe in an afterlife can be cruel and useless - take chairman mao.  This is not to say they have realised they are going to die though.

For those who have no where to go after this life then longevity becomes the key focus of purpose potentially.  This is one of the biggest mental problems modern society faces. 

A lack of logical thought and analysis is in my book a dangerous form of 'mental illness', yet she accuses those with an imagination and belief in more than the material of that very thing.

Everyone in the world is never going to believe the same thing and nor should they so it is pointless ranting about Everyone being something one person wants. Everyone in history who has tried that trips up, as in my opinion it's more how you reconcile the differences that counts, not being 'right'.

There's probably a few fallacies in my counter arguments - and of course she can write what she wants in her own book - but it behooves any author writing a book to sell, knowing young women are following every word, to go through it with a fine tooth comb.

Im sure female emancipation didn't simply mean having the right to be as flaky as some of the men out there. [eg. that means you, Dawkins]

Comments welcome as ever. 

And a final musing from Voltaire:

"If God did not exist it would be necessary for man to invent him"

The same could be applied to an afterlife generally. 

Fallacy nugget

good website:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/examples.html 

Logical Fallacy Nugget

Two more to think about :

• Fallacy of accident or sweeping generalization: a generalization that disregards exceptions.
  • Example
    

    Argument: Cutting people is a crime. Surgeons cut people, therefore, surgeons are criminals.

    Problem: Cutting people is only sometimes a crime.

     The exception does not break nor define the rule; a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid (where an accountable exception is ignored).

• Converse fallacy of accident or hasty generalization: argues from a special case to a general rule.
  • Example
    

    Argument: Every person I've met speaks English, so it must be true that all people speak English.

    Problem: Those who have been met are not a representative subset of the entire set.

  • Also called reverse accident, destroying the exception, a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter

Thinking is Critical.

Critical thinking is vital to ensure certainty of correct conclusions in the face of presented arguments. It consists of several methods to establish whether what is being said is truthful.

The Ancient Greeks (Socrates et al)  developed many rules of logical thought processing,  which were taught actively in schools up to the medieval period within the Trivium structure of learning . 

http://www.triviumeducation.com/ 

"To the medieval mind, debate was a fine art, a serious science, and a fascinating entertainment, much more than it is to the modern mind, because the medievals believed, like Socrates, that dialectic could uncover truth. Thus a ‘scholastic disputation’ was not a personal contest in cleverness, nor was it ‘sharing opinions’; it was a shared journey of discovery"

IT Programming revolves around truth being established. It uses logical structures (posited by Aristotle) to create logic gates to ensure computers process information correctly :

1 AND 0 = FALSE

1 AND 1 = TRUE

0 AND 0 = FALSE

1 OR 0 = TRUE
0 OR 0 = FALSE

etc..

To be able to pick out Logical Fallacies in conversation is one aspect of good CT anyone can master. I will post several as other posts progress.

Straw man and Begging the question are two phrases we use but may have no idea what they are - they are both expressions of Logical Fallacy - put simply -  a daft argument .

Logical Fallacy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

• Straw man: A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.
  • Example
    
    

    Person A: Sunny days are good.

    Person B: If all days were sunny, we'd never have rain, and without rain, we'd have famine and death. Therefore, you are wrong.

    Problem: B has misrepresented A's claim by falsely suggesting that A claimed that only sunny days are good, and then B refuted the misrepresented version of the claim, rather than refuting A's original assertion. ie they have taken a hit at the straw figure not the original argument.

Stop begging the question !

•  Begging the Question:  demonstrates a conclusion by means of premises that assume that conclusion.
  • Example
    
    

    Argument: George always tells the truth, I know this because he told me so.

    Problem: George may be lying. (and was)

  • Also called Petitio Principii, Circulus in Probando, arguing in a circle, assuming the answer. Begging the question does not preclude the possibility that the statement is incorrect, and it is not sufficient proof in and of itself.

It is no coincidence that most politicians have legal backgrounds which involve high level training in critical thinking....unfortunately this is often used to ensure issues are clouded rather than revealed.  

There is an A-level in Critical Thinking available, but the techniques are mainly now only encouraged at Oxbridge and Durham where small tutorial discussions take place.

Socratic questionning is used a lot in schools, but the teachers themselves are not trained in critical thinking, so it doesn't often lead anywhere useful in terms of learning and independent thought in students.

Socratic Questionning: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning 

There is a lot of concern in steering children towards 'correct' conclusions based on current emotions in society. Global Warming is one of the largest areas currently in the public domain where critical thinking is not being applied.

http://www.popupfallacies.com/

There is one for Greenpeace here with several logical fallacies labelled.
This is not to say Global warming is a fallacy per se - but whether it is human caused, or able to be solved by humans (in part or whole) is another matter.  I hope we can. No need to ply us or our children with anger, guilt and disinformation in the process is there..?


One major effect of CT is a feeling of ownership or ideas or principles. There is a marked drop in educated adults feeling problems or issues are in their realm of understanding or influence, because they have not been encouraged to own the problems, but instead continually await a decision from on high, even for topics that do not require specialist knowledge.

A 1995 study found there to be a genuine lack of critical thinking amongst the post graduate and general population. [Leon Gardiner]

There has been a resurgence in the realisation of the need for CT more recently thankfully, for without it we are at the mercy of pure emotion and illogical falsehoods.

Dorothy L Sayers argues a return to old style education in 1947- I think it is safe to say further decline has happened since then ..

http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html