If you haven’t noticed, America is polarizing into two main factions. The trigger for this division is generally seen as being the election of Donald Trump in 2016, though, to me, this ‘us vs. them’ culture war started decades earlier. This “us and them” thinking is, of course, also called in-group favoritism and out-group bias. It is the result, apparently, of our natural tribalism, meaning we tend to quickly form distinct groups or “tribes” in various areas of life (politics, religion). Problems can arise as the polarization between in/out-groups increase. Here is an excellent 12 minute video on the psychology…
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Everything that exists that we know of is contingent. Something being contingent means it exists because of something else existing that caused it to exist, or at least provided the necessary conditions, for it’s existence. Contingent beings thus depend in their very existence on other things that exist. They could have thus failed to exist to begin with if not for the existence of other things. Trees, rocks, planets, galaxies, and everything else in the universe apparently, all exist contingent upon other things. The entire collection of everything we know of is an interconnected, interdependent web of contingently existing things…
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A Review of A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss; The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe, by John Barrow; The Grand Design, by Leonard Mlodinow and Stephen Hawking I just finished reading The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. I thought I would give a brief review of this and the other two books listed above. All deal with the subject of “nothing,” the universe perhaps coming from “nothing,” and the physicists here who claim this has relevance to, or even…
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The title of this post is ambiguous. I meant it to be as several physicists, including some of the most prominent ones have been, not just ambiguous, but downright equivocating on the word “nothing.” As in the fallacy of equivocation. This post explains the informal logical fallacy of equivocation and gives the example of how some physicists commit the fallacy when trying to explain how the universe came from “nothing.” The Fallacy of Equivocation The fallacy of equivocation is using two different meanings or senses for the same word or phrase in the same argument. It is easy to define…
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Starting our look at a few logical fallacies, we have perhaps the most well known one, the “straw man” fallacy. The straw man fallacy is misrepresenting or misunderstanding an argument. You are stating or attacking/refuting an argument that is different than the one your opponent holds. To “attack a straw man” is to attack your misunderstanding or caricature of a person’s argument, not the real one. A “man” made out of straw (scarecrow) may look superficially like a real man, but it isn’t. Attacking or beating up a straw man is easy. Beating up a real man is harder. He…
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To start our series of brief looks at critical thinking, we will look at logic and logical fallacies. We first look at what traditionally has been viewed as the 3 laws of logic, or 3 laws of thought. The above YouTube video gives a good overview of this.
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Continuing our overview of cognitive biases we have the well known confirmation bias. This is one that definitely is important to know as everyone suffers from this bias. It can, like other biases, lead to and reinforce other biases. Coupled with the fact that we are all, to some degree, ignorant of our own biases (Bias Blind Spot) this can create what I call stagnant, intellectual tide pools. Confirmation bias is the bias we all have to seek information to confirm what we already believe. We gather and interpret information in a way that fits into what we already believe…
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The book, Infinity, Causation, & Paradox by Alexander Pruss, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. I just finished reading it as my first book by this author. I knew of him via other philosophers’ dealing with his work and through reading his blog. My first impressions of him from reading his blog was that he was a natural born philosopher, an original thinker, creative, and a top level contemporary philosopher. Or as the philosopher William Lane Craig described him, “scary smart.” Background on the author: Pruss is a theist philosopher and currently Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University…
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Continuing with my series of overviews of cognitive biases, we have “cognitive dissonance” and “belief perseverance”. The story of how cognitive dissonance and belief perseverance were first recognized or described in Social Psychology is an interesting story to me. It involves the sociological study of a 1950s UFO cult by the psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter . This was published in their book, When Prophecy Fails in 1956. I originally read this book in the ’90s. The group’s leader claimed to be in contact with extraterrestrials (through automatic writing if I remember right) and they told her the earth would be…
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My second blog post recommended using the Principle of Charity when dealing with people and avoiding the Fundamental attribution error (subject of third post). Here’s a very basic look at the Principle of Charity applied to people’s statements and actions in everyday life. An article for a more complete look at the principle as applied to arguments by others:
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