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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On July 30, 2020, NASA launched the Perseverance rover scheduled to land on Mars on February 18, 2021. It will land in Jezero Crater which is thought to have filled with water creating a lake in the ancient past (a couple billions years ago, I think). This makes it a prime target to look for evidence of microbial life. The rover will take several soil samples and place them in tubes, leave them on the surface for future missions to Mars to collect the samples and return them to Earth. Looks like the target date (earliest) for this would be…
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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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I have started at least a dozen blog posts and articles on various subjects. Since this is a new blog that covers several topics, I figured I’d give an overview of what you can expect based on what I have been interested in for the past few decades and what I am currently researching and reading. My main, long term reason for creating this blog was I want to write on major intellectual interests of mine. I am an artist, but since I am on the high end of the autism spectrum, I have an intellectual bent and find writing…
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