Bulverism
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
It's only after you've tried, many times over, in futility, to build a coherent & effective belief system from first principles that you'll realize this approach is a dead end. All we have are beliefs, and our brains retroactively make up stories about why we think they are true. In this framework it is actually very useful to illustrate how your ideological opponent came to their beliefs. Then people can determine whether they find that story relatable.
Why would anybody have to be persuaded ? The point of thinking isn't just to manipulate people.
The problem with fallacies, as I see it, is they're often employed to fool that inner critic. They can dress up any emotional, thoughtless reaction in the guise of reason.
"I thought that person was rude" becomes "I believe this person is engaging in an ad-hominen attack." Or "they have a belief I don't like" becomes "Clearly, the other person has a case of confirmation bias."
I think our inner critic will detect us taking such mental shortcuts; it won't be quieted so easily. I also think that's why fallacy-first thinkers will spam their views across threads. Unable to persuade themselves, let alone others, they resort to rhetoric to silence their own creeping doubts.
Read the very next couple of sentences in my original comment.
That is, learning them will help you identify your own beliefs that are worth questioning. And, in this case, what behavior you may use that makes it hard to engage with others on their beliefs.
But the OP's point is that they're actually not a particularly good way of identifying that (particularly the rhetorical fallacies). Many if not most things people believe which are incorrect do not involve any logical fallacy. Conversely, if I wanted to identify which of my current beliefs are probably incorrect, beliefs I hold largely because of the appeal of authorities supporting them, for example, would probably be a very bad place to focus my doubts.
This can also lead to why a rhetorical won't work. Authority works, but only with a shared belief in the authority. Such that if your message requires a new authority to your audience, it has less of a chance of working. Zero, if there is an active lack of belief in your authority figure.
If examined with empathy, it can also let you accept someone's belief without believing it.
Authority is a very common base for why I believe things. 'Appeal to authority' is also a classical logical fallacy, i.e. 'but this conflicts with the positions of most scientists' is regarded as a weak and inadmissible argument in a debate versus someone who claims to have performed an experiment themselves. However, this logical fallacy is not particularly useful in assessing which of my own beliefs are incorrect, as suggested by the OP, because beliefs I have in common with most scientists are unlikely to be the beliefs I most need to question.
Every false belief involves a logical fallacy, either the fallacy of false premises or a fallacy of reasoning, because starting with true premises and employing sound logic will always produce a true conclusion.
"starting with true premises and employing sound logic will always produce a true conclusion"
is only useful where premises can be determined to be true, and the conclusion follows a logical syllogism end to end.
This is only done (or even achievable) for quantifiable / statements of fact ("a book is on the table", "the earth is round", "the GDP is 10 trillion" and the like).
For 99% of what humans care about - claims and their veracity, values, morals, politics, goals, tastes, aesthetics, interests, etc, there are no "true staatements" to begin with, and many of them doesn't involve a sound logical syllogist-sound process, but only regarding their simplest sub-parts.
E.g. two political enemies might have different opinions on what to do with the national debt, but they can agree on the actual amount of the national debt, and use pure logic to calculate it, check where it was spent, etc. That, though, wont help them determine logically and agree on whether something like welfare or military spending is good or bad, and it's usually those latter questions that matter in such discussions.
The thing is, people still name all those other things (that are not ammenable to logical process end to end) as true and false, based on their own opinions.
Logicians can disagree all they want, this ain't gonna change.
And it's those "true" and "false" statements that matter in most arguments, not their less interesting, quantifiable, easily acceptable by everybody and logically analysed brethen.
The "let's point people to logical fallacy lists, as the solution" crowd doesn't understand this.
Those are also the only things which can be unambiguously incorrect. So, the problem isn’t that there are incorrect beliefs that are not due to fallacies, it is that there are beliefs which are not knowably correct or incorrect, which is a very different issue. But even there, if we are to discuss them at all and have a discussion about our beliefs that they are correct or not, the same analytical tools allow us to effectively discuss beliefs and our beliefs as to why and whether they are justified while getting beyond rhetorical trickery. This allows us to pinpoint where disagreement lies, and to either converge on belief rationally, or identify disagreement on premises that are not subject to resolution through logic (which, if they are to be resolved, must be resolved through other means.)
> That, though, wont help them determine logically and agree on whether something like welfare or military spending is good or bad, and it’s usually those latter questions that matter in such discussions.
To the extent that there is a difference in axiomatic preferences, you can’t deal with that through logic. OTOH, you can identify it through logic, and particularly you can pierce the attempts to conceal it that are common rhetorical tools once an actor has determined that that exists and wishes to manipulate another party despite it using the tools of logic.
> Logicians can disagree all they want,
But they don’t. Literally nothing you say prior to this in your post (and nothing after it except for the the last sentence) is even slightly controversial. And while there may be people that meet the description in your last sentence, you seem to miss the point of what the understanding of logical fallacies and the application of that knowledge are about as badly as the people you are attacking.
And yet, the past 2-3 centuries (anglosaxon especially) philosophy is full of counter-examples thinking the opposite - and tons of philosophically naive people today as well.
And some of my beliefs which are pure logical fallacies when it comes to formal debate like 'Brain Force Plus is unlikely to be a useful nootropic because the man promoting it, Alex Jones, is a mountebank' are actually pretty useful heuristics.
It’s like a blind person learning this something isn’t red. They’ll continue guessing until they came up with the right colour.
No, they are mostly failures to apply sound abstract logic.
Such that the existence of a fallacy does not equal the existence that something is false. That is itself a logical fallacy.
There’s even a fallacy about it! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Ascertaining the small-t truth of individual beliefs is useful insofar as it enables you to better achieve things you want to do with tangible results in the real world. There is no need to convince anyone of anything in this endeavor, because they can observe the results for themselves.
There's value to it, but its not a way to reach true greatness in a field.
The thing about fallacies is that they can be persuasive. But if you recognize them for what they are, you can defend against the error.
To extend your metaphor, very few people will be masters of the violin. But it's pretty cool to play it it anyway.
Escaping the rhetorical tricks that facilitate persuasion independent of the merits of a position is actually the point; the approach you are attacking is a tool for doing this for abstract systems of ideas, empirical science provides the same thing for fact claims.
> Western philosophy has been incredibly effective at tearing apart everything that exists, but utterly ineffective in building anything back up from the ashes.
The practical knowledge and technology built on the back of empirical science, a system itself built on the back of Western philosophy—and specifically an outgrowth of the exact aspect of Western philosophy you are attacking—is, more than a little “anything” that Western philosophy has provided the tools to build up from the ashes of self-delusion that it years down.
And yet, as every piece of computer hardware needs an OS to be more than a brick, one yearns for an explanation of what "is" as badly as "what is not".
[1] There are a bunch of them. Here's more on one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8051867-the-greatest-eve...
"Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired." -- Jonathan Swift, 1721.
To rephrase in a more modern way: You can't use reason or logic to get to someone to stop believing something they didn't use reason or logic to start believing.
Just because you haven’t been able to access any truth through philosophizing doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
- trust is established,
- a relationship built, and
- questions are asked in a sincere effort to trigger reflection
could produce better results. Takes more patience and effort than we typically invest these days.
Trust requires the initial establishment of some reason to believe the other person, and we're mid discussing why we don't.
We're by no means the same, but the Venn has substanital overlap.
By the time we speak to people, we often find them far less monstrous than we imagine, even if their traditions differ.
Simple causality doesn’t do the intricate complexity of existence and the patterns that govern it justice, but you can surely map systemic obervations, much like you can project a timestamp of a 3D-room on a lower-dimensional surface. Just don’t act like that’s the whole truth, because it isn’t, and it won’t be.
That is to say people assume that logical equivalence is the same as logical entailment.
I think Lewis is right in blaming Bulverism. So I asked myself: can I identify a way in which Bulverism originates? How can I avoid it and how can I suggest other people to avoid it? Sorry for the excursus, but I hope someone will find it useful :D
It's very interesting, to me at least, to notice that getting "completely" rid of bulverism seems very difficult - perhaps impossible? Perhaps because it's part of how humans start the process of knowledge.
Let me explain...
Reasoning can go, a priori, in several different directions. Which one to pick? From a practical point of view, you pick the one that stimulates you the most: and this way, someone becomes a mathematician, someone else an engineer, someone else a poet, a doctor, and so on.
This movement has both some bulverism and some anti-bulverism: you hear someone speak, and a-priori, you feel like he's right (is there a name for this fallacy too?).
And I think that starting the process of knowledge with some pre-conception is unavoidable and also what makes diversity possible. So when does a safe practice become a threat?
I think it's when we lose faith in the positiveness of reality, that is: in the possibility of knowing what's true and that this knowledge is what really makes us more humans.
Bulverism is saying that I value more what I think than what's true, or that I value more to blame you than to affirm the truth.
It's interesting to see in how many way reasoning can go wrong once you exclude that reasoning has its natural end in the knowledge of what's true.
"Assume positive intent. Ask lots of questions."
Can't win if you don't try. :).
Yes I know, "both sides", but this has been the biggest challenge I've had speaking with progressive friends. Unless I agree that someone's beliefs/opinions/arguments are totally invalid because who they are or who they voted for, I'm also part of the problem..
Look, we've got a bunch of people attacking the foundations of our democracy.
If you voted with them, yeah, you've got a pretty steep climb to convince me that you're not part of the problem.
"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."--Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Call it "accidentally right" if you need to deprive them from the merit of being right. But let's not turn facts and logic into collateral damage of a fight that happens at a different level.
Humans care about reputation. Our trust in people is based a lot on past performance and what other people though about that past performance. Thus, we also find it dangerous to let people get away with being perceived as having competence on something where they don't have it, because they may in future capitalize on that and spread their wrong ideas and be believed because you conceded that they had competence in the past.
However it cuts both ways. If you want to expose somebody's incompetence you surely don't want to behave in ways that are clearly dishonest and bending facts just to strip the other person of being accidentally right once or twice a day. That shortcut won't pay off. I've seen so many discourse between otherwise honest people derailed by this practice that is now so entrenched. Call out fallacies by all means. Give credit when credit is due and move on to attack arguments that are worth attacking.
Supporting people who "Stand by and stand ready" is "legitimately dangerous."
Supporting people who think kidnapping a governor is a good idea is "legitimately dangerous."
Supporting people who think inciting violence is perfectly okay is "legitimately dangerous."
Yeah, putting the supporters of such people in the "part of the problem" bucket is perfectly valid, thanks.
The majority of people in Germany didn't really support gassing the Jews. However, the majority of people in Germany also didn't stand up and oppose it either--and that's why we consider them "part of the problem".
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ― Edmund Burke
I quite enjoy the Bulverism mindset. It's close to the bug seeker or pen-tester mindset. If the code seems complex you have to assume there is a mistake somewhere. You put yourself in the shoes of the one who write the code and try to imagine where some complex interactions could be badly anticipated. To exploit, you have to understand what went wrong.
Seeking the truth probably can't be done in absolute. It's probably a better idea to hold a variety of beliefs and Bayes updating them with the information you gather, but at the same time keeping in mind that other people may have received different information.
Joseph Stalin said some version of "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."
Its interesting listen Rudy to make his points and argue his case, how the votes should be counted.
He's a skilled orator.