Thread: Applied philosophy refresher

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    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    Applied philosophy refresher

    Since it has been almost 10 or more years since I've been in a philosophy class I thought I would refresh myself on some of the fallacies I studied.

    Logical Fallacies

    Interestingly enough reading these it is clear to see that the U.S. mass media, be it left, right, or whatever as well as it's politicians are knee-deep in nearly every one of these fallacies.
    Do you guys rememeber anything else noteworthy from your college philosophy classes - other than the fact you might have slept through and/or missed half the lectures?
    Last edited by VirtualAce; 04-25-2009 at 02:43 PM.

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    Cat without Hat CornedBee's Avatar
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    You had philosophy in college? My last philosophy classes (actually, one class) was in high school. I remember absolutely nothing. But then, the teacher was ... weird. Not in a good way.
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    Devil's Advocate SlyMaelstrom's Avatar
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    All of these fallacies came up big time in the Civil and Criminal Justice courses I had taken. Specifically, we were taught how to use them effectively to win over a jury.

    If you can't build a good case you have to appeal to the natures of man.
    Sent from my iPadŽ

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    philosophy isn't perfect either

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    Banned ಠ_ಠ's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by robwhit View Post
    philosophy isn't perfect either
    Thinking of running for office?
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    argumentum ad hominem?

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    Quote Originally Posted by robwhit View Post
    argumentum ad hominem?
    Isn't it awesome?


    I would say that nothing is perfect, but if you did nothing all day it would be hard to make an argument that it was a perfect day
    Last edited by ಠ_ಠ; 04-25-2009 at 10:38 PM.
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    Of course, I didn't mean to imply that you shouldn't do something just because it wasn't perfect.

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    and the hat of copycat stevesmithx's Avatar
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    Last edited by stevesmithx; 04-26-2009 at 09:57 AM.
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    Cat without Hat CornedBee's Avatar
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    Unicode, and Firefox is not handling it well. It overflows the sig box and the quote box.
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    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
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    IE is not handling it well either

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    an argument can be both deductively valid and perfectly absurd, as in 1. All telephone poles are elephants. 2. Sally is a telephone pole. 3. Therefore, Sally is an elephant
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    spurious conceit MK27's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by BobMcGee123 View Post
    I might get a tattoo of this.
    Just make sure it is right over the crack of your ass.
    C programming resources:
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    CCAN -- new CPAN like open source library repository
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    Do you guys rememeber anything else noteworthy from your college philosophy classes
    Conclusions that look like a syllogism when they are not are logical fallacies (and probably vice versa), e.g. S->M is true, M is true, therefore S is true (which is wrong; S may still be false). It's easy to create more examples along those lines, and it's also easy to spot them (as well as the other logical fallacies) immediately if one has had prior exposure to common sense or propositional logic. I like the argument-by-authority, though.


    I've been thinking a lot about Curry's paradoxon lately, which allows to prove arbitrary statements:

    Code:
    Y := an arbitrary statement, e.g. Santa Clause exists
    X := X->Y  (simple recursive definition; think of the naive way of defining the natural numbers)
    
    Now let's prove Y:
    
        X->X       [tautology]
    <=> X->(X->Y)  [definition of X]
    <=> X->Y       [same truth table as the above]
    <=> X          [definition of X]
    <=> Y          [modus ponens: if X->Y is true and X is true, then Y is true]
    Thus Y is equivalent to a tautology, i.e. it's always true, i.e. Santa Clause exists.

    The funny thing is that none of the steps in this proof are forbidden or otherwise restricted. The tricky question is: how do we need to modify propositional logic in order to prevent this technique without restricting or allowing anything else? So far, nobody knows.

    There is an easy (and very restricting) solution by Bertrand Russell which every programmer should be able to come up with. Any volunteers?

    Greets,
    Philip
    All things begin as source code.
    Source code begins with an empty file.
    -- Tao Te Chip

  15. #15
    Cat without Hat CornedBee's Avatar
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    Isn't Curry's paradoxon essentially the mathematical formulation of circular reasoning?
    All the buzzt!
    CornedBee

    "There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code."
    - Flon's Law

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