When people say, “The time has come to …”, what they’re implying is that until now it hadn’t. Come, that is. So apparently sexual violence was okay until this morning. The rote politician response to a tragedy is, “Our hearts… Read More ›
Critical Thinking
STUPIDITY DEFINED
Philosophers are in the business of either drawing distinctions or collapsing them. A case of the latter is David Hume’s observation that, all this palaver to the contrary notwithstanding, causation just is correlation. A case of the former is the… Read More ›
THE OUTCOMES FALLACY
The way to test your argument for validity is what we might call the that’s-like-saying test. You give me your argument, I provide an analogous argument – analogous in the sense of sharing what we call your argument’s argument form… Read More ›
WHEN AN AD BACULUM ISN’T A FALLACY
There’s an important distinction – one too many critical thinking instructors fail to make – between, on the one hand, what’s likely to be true, and, on the other, what one’d be well advised to believe. For example, that Jesus… Read More ›
THE CRITICAL THINKING PROFESSOR’S DILEMMA
S asserts that not-p. S is paid. Therefore S is paid to assert that not-p. The likelihood of the truth of not-p varies inversely with what one is paid to assert it. If one’s been exposed to the evidence… Read More ›
