The Importance of Logic and Critical Thinking

[Canadian_watcher]

Rhetorical Logic is a matter of satisfying requirements and thereby winning arguments, where Critical Paranoia is more corrosive and fertile, but...basically...exactly what you said about "the idea that critical thinking needs to be self assessed all the time."

Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Right now I'm halfway thru that paper, and I just dropped by to thank you for linking to it. Its been a great read so far.

Cheers.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I'm linking to this as an example of how Things Have Changed since the Trivium days -- I think it was useful in simpler times, but Saint Dali is probably a better guide in the Kali Yuga....Socrates never had to worry about Operation Metal Gear or games as rigged as this:

VIA: slashdot

"How, exactly, did Reddit get so big? Well, according to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it 'til they made it.' In a video for Udacity, Huffman describes how the first Redditors populated the site's content with tons of fake accounts. These days, with the site's users are wary of people using expendable accounts to try to seed their own content. But early on, Huffman said that using fake accounts driven by the founders was key to building the tone they wanted to the site. Early on the Reddit crew could shape the discourse of the site in the direction they wanted, and as the real user base grew, those standards held allowing the fake accounts to fade away."

The "fade away" is the limited hangout part, I've got a good buddy who is a (heavy) programmer and reddit user and he's long suspected it was a big testing bed for persona management software -- in other words, what would actually compel them to stop using swarms of fake accounts as a means of control over the community they're investing in? Also, it's no secret that Reddit was squarely in the sights of the DoD when they started talking about "persona management" and the Operation Metal Gear material (along with Facebook, Twitter, etc) and the Pentagon likes to secure cooperation with large government checks.

The game is so rigged that actual clinical-not-Critical paranoia can often be a reliable barometer of what's really going on. Which is horrible. But humans adapt.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Speaking of which, just read this and got goosebumps:

Last July, opening the Edge Seminar, "The New Science of Morality", Jonathan Haidt digressed to talk about two recently-published papers in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which he believed were "so important that the abstracts from them should be posted in psychology departments all over the country."

One of the papers "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," published by Behavioral and Brain Sciences, was by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber.

"The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

"Now, the authors point out that we can and do re-use our reasoning abilities. We're sitting here at a conference. We're reasoning together. We can re-use our argumentative reasoning for other purposes. But even there, it shows the marks of its heritage. Even there, our thought processes tend towards confirmation of our own ideas. Science works very well as a social process, when we can come together and find flaws in each other's reasoning. We can't find the problems in our own reasoning very well. But, that's what other people are for, is to criticize us. And together, we hope the truth comes out."

Further (and excellent) reading here: http://edge.org/conversation/the-argumentative-theory

[JackRiddler]

I was quite impressed at a young age by the absurdity of Logic, and my main attraction to the field was the perverse joy of using it to categorically state obvious falsehoods. I am grateful that my mentors were honest with me: the point of learning Logic is not to discern the truth, but to disguise a lie. The point is not educated citizens, the point is fast-talking lawyers.

Wow.

This is the founding story of Western philosophy, as it has been derived from Plato: Socrates looked about him in Athens and saw the exact absurdity you describe at work, among the Sophists. These were trained philosophers who competed for patrons and tutorial appointments on the basis of who was most skilled in the art of making any statement stand through Logic and Rhetoric, without regard to truth. They were more a profession than a school. In practice, since they ate well to the extent that they could serve the rich and powerful, the Sophists presented justifications, variants, and obfuscatory apologies for Might Makes Right or its fancy cousin, Wealth Is Virtue. Socrates rejected this and turned inward to look for truth in the eternal by a process of open questions. Arguably he obfuscated things even more (at least as the story is conveyed by Plato in The Republic) by just making stuff up as the word of god or by purporting to apprehend the invisible, unreachable, ideal truth, in a crucial step toward the monogod religions -- and often applying an even more clever sophistry to justify it, as when (after dispensing with the lead Sophist Thrasymachus, which means something like Rude Guy) his questions are pre-loaded with the answers he wants to hear, and his interlocutors turn into a chorus. This is not to say Socrates (or Plato's character of Socrates) lacked good faith, just that he was subject to the same frailties and failings and drive to be right. Nor is it to say that he didn't get somewhere; the myth of the cave is undoubtedly the closest a metaphor has ever come to describing reality. We are in the dark, our fallible senses perceive shadows and pieces and reflections and take these for the real, for the thing in itself. When we ask who then has successfully emerged from the cave to the light and returned to report back to the rest with fidelity, we return to square one: Who can argue or appeal for it most successfully? The jury decided Socrates didn't, or did too well, so they made him drink his death.

.

[ida pingala]

Riddler, there is Western Philosophy and there is Western Philosophy.

[norton ash]

And then there is country-and-western philosophy, which transcends stoicism, empiricism, rationalism, positivism, or existentialism by way of alcoholism.

[Simulist]

We are in the dark, our fallible senses perceive shadows and pieces and reflections and take these for the real, for the thing in itself. When we ask who then has successfully emerged from the cave to the light and returned to report back to the rest with fidelity, we return to square one: Who can argue or appeal for it most successfully?

Let me take you down,
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about.
Strawberry Fields forever.

Living is easy with eyes closed,
Misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me.

— Strawberry Fields Forever by John Lennon

For a while now, I've suspected that thinking itself forms the restraints that keep us inside Plato's proverbial Cave.

If this is true, then the way "out" is not "better thinking"; in fact, better thinking might just make our bonds appear more convincing to us.

[Luther Blissett]

These logic games are all the hobby of the cowardly and myopic evangelists for normalcy. Critical thinking can be used to denounce the idea that Gifford's youtube page was following two people before the assassination attempt: one fellow congressperson, and Jared Loughner. Everyone at RI saw it, but using words to communicate that to others who didn't breaks the rules of "critical thinking." See also: billionaire pedophiles going free, the looming environmental doomsday scenario, signs of extraterrestrial microbial fossils, the entire PTech saga, etc. The potential outcomes or reality of any of these certainly have the thrust to justify beliefs, which demonizes the subject matter.

the point of learning Logic is not to discern the truth, but to disguise a lie

Sheesh.

[tazmic]

For a while now, I've suspected that thinking itself forms the restraints that keep us inside Plato's proverbial Cave.

If this is true, then the way "out" is not "better thinking"; in fact, better thinking might just make our bonds appear more convincing to us.

Sure. But if all thought turns out to be argument, rather than something essentially (I choose that word carefully) declarative, then we can all have a ball, and think as hard as we like, and not make the mistake of thinking that the way out of the cave is to leave it.

(Compare with a buddhist realizing that this isn't essentially a world of things, and then telling everyone about nothingness. Don't you get the feeling they've missed the point?)

I think the big limitation with critical thinking is that it is never automatically aware of its own context, if that's the right way of putting it. It remains bound by an argument's framing levels of abstraction, and on its own can't touch them. Sometimes the truth is not as important as context.

[Wombaticus Rex]

I think the big limitation with critical thinking is that it is never automatically aware of its own context, if that's the right way of putting it. It remains bound by an argument's framing levels of abstraction, and on its own can't touch them. Sometimes the truth is not as important as context.

I suspect this is a central boogeyman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computatio ... actability

And of course, this tangle of self-reflection also brings to mind the endless geometric loops Hoffstaedter was having so much fun with in Godel, Escher, Bach, a book I should really re-read now that I have a better grasp on music theory. (And a high school diploma.)

Not gonna budge too much on this one, I have Truthiness on my side. Luther, Sheesh yourself. Jack, that's just a story. Our human condition is an ugly thing....don't take it personal!

[Simulist]

For a while now, I've suspected that thinking itself forms the restraints that keep us inside Plato's proverbial Cave.

If this is true, then the way "out" is not "better thinking"; in fact, better thinking might just make our bonds appear more convincing to us.

Sure. But if all thought turns out to be argument, rather than something essentially (I choose that word carefully) declarative, then we can all have a ball, and think as hard as we like, and not make the mistake of thinking that the way out of the cave is to leave it.

Well, it may not be possible to leave the Cave physically and therefore cognitively (since our cognition, as we most commonly experience it, is dependent upon physical processes) — but if somehow we are more than our physical experiences appear to us to imply, then it would be those latent non-physical faculties that would be essential to "leaving" the Cave.

(Of course, once those faculties become sufficiently developed, some of us might be pretty surprised to discover that there never really was a Cave.)

(Compare with a buddhist realizing that this isn't essentially a world of things, and then telling everyone about nothingness. Don't you get the feeling they've missed the point?)

Actually, not so much.

[barracuda]

And then there is country-and-western philosophy, which transcends stoicism, empiricism, rationalism, positivism, or existentialism by way of alcoholism.

I know you meant that to be funny but in my opinion maybe you're not so far off the mark.

"I say that one must be a seer, one must make oneself a seer ...The poet becomes a seer by a long, enormous and reasoned derangement of all his senses .... He seeks himself, he exhausts in himself every poison, retaining only their quintessences. Ineffable torture, in which he requires supreme faith, superhuman strength, in which he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed and the supreme sage!"

- Rimbaud

[tazmic]

(Compare with a buddhist realizing that this isn't essentially a world of things, and then telling everyone about nothingness. Don't you get the feeling they've missed the point?)

Actually, not so much.

I consider it an example of truth usurping context. What is nothingness in a world that is not one of things? Isn't it obvious that this is a new vision expressed in an old language, with the old paradigm still dictating the interpretation? The cave is full, but the people are now staring at the wall instead of its shadows, still not realizing they are staring at themselves.

(btw, I highly recommend Jay Garfield's magisterial commentary on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, if you are not familiar with Nagarjuna and his 'Emptiness of Emptiness', or if you just enjoy logical contortions too subtle for your own good.)

I suspect this is a central boogeyman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computatio ... actability

Sorry, I got distracted by "Combinitorial Explosion' and when disappointed to see no mention of Graham's Number was only one click away from The Curse of Dimensionality, and there was no turning back.



As for the argumentative theory of rationality, I think it's much simpler than that. We need to generate consistent models of our environment, so we don't have conflicting responses, and completeness is never necessary, or more to the point never relevant in an evolutionary context. Consistency is dominant, not rationality, which is a bit of a myth, and secondary environments can be dismissed, or compartmentalized, if we find them interfering with our immediate need for such consistency. Notice that there is no drive in this model for turning our rational cogitations toward the context, which is always calling the shots, regardless of how 'critical' we become. (This makes so much sense it's got to be true, right? I'm going to apply it to everything I see.)

[Simulist]

(Compare with a buddhist realizing that this isn't essentially a world of things, and then telling everyone about nothingness. Don't you get the feeling they've missed the point?)

Actually, not so much.

I consider it an example of truth usurping context. What is nothingness in a world that is not one of things?

Hmm. I think it might be more accurate to say that it's the suggestion of a reality that this thing-filled-world doesn't have any sort of descriptor for, a reality that "eye has not seen, nor ear heard."

Isn't it obvious that this is a new vision expressed in an old language, with the old paradigm still dictating the interpretation?

Somewhat, but not exactly. It seems more to me that it's obvious that whatever "no-thing-ness" may be, it can't properly be expressed in the context of any materially-oriented paradigm.

The cave is full, but the people are now staring at the wall instead of its shadows, still not realizing they are staring at themselves.

I'm pretty much with you there.

Unless someone has actually experienced this "no-thing-ness" on some level, it's hard even to imagine a bona fide reality not established by things, but predicated only by our Self.