Random Thoughts Thread

[Vuk]

So my brother just had an emergency surgery to get his appendix removed because it was inflamed. Being the loving brother I am, I tore the appendix out of a book and brought it over to him with this zinger. "I heard that you lost your appendix, so I brought you a new one." ~:P

[Rhyfelwyr]

So my brother just had an emergency surgery to get his appendix removed because it was inflamed. Being the loving brother I am, I tore the appendix out of a book and brought it over to him with this zinger. "I heard that you lost your appendix, so I brought you a new one." ~:P

He must have been in stitches.

[Montmorency]

this is not our experience, and experience has been the test of reality.

There is a difference between empiricism and phenomenologism.

What our "experience" shows is that our experience is worthless without cognitive prostheses such as instrumental science.

In fact, what empirical science has precisely been showing us over the past millennia is that our first-order ontological intuitions - based on 'what we feel like' - are invariably and thoroughly mistaken.

[Fragony]

Expensive restaurants are fine of course, but there still nothing as satisfying as a portion of fried fish and a salted herring with onions.

[Montmorency]

Two of the most deeply-misunderstood logical fallacies are the "Ad Hominem" and the "No True Scotsman".


1. Ad Hominem

Calling someone a name does not automatically have any bearing whatsoever on one's arguments. Unless one explicitly predicates those arguments on some individual possessing some (presumably bad) trait(s), in which case the user is open to attack just in case it can be shown that the ad hominem is actually false or invalid.

You are a killer, therefore the political views you hold must be wrong.

Fallacy?

You are a killer, therefore you must hold wrong political views.

Fallacy?

You are a killer, therefore you love Hitler

Fallacy?

It is perfectly possible, though likely false, that membership in the set of killers should in itself entail membership in the set of Hitler-lovers. Thus the statement is not fallacious by the Ad Hominem.

Bonus: The same standards of relevance and possibility apply to the "Tu Quoque" fallacy, another oft-misunderstood fallacy.


2. No True Scotsman

This fallacy is one of equivocal or circular post-hoc reasoning. It does not comprehensively invalidate statements of the form "No 'legitimate' X..." or "An entity A can not be of Set X if it is a member of Set Y".

A: Is he a Scotsman? No Scotsman can jump.

B: He is a Scotsman based on multiple independent criteria, yet he can jump.

A: In that case those independent criteria must be wrong or irrelevant, as no true Scotsman can jump.

Fallacy?

A: Is he a Scotsman? No Scotsman can jump.

B: Yes, and he can jump.

A: In that case, he can't be a true Scotsman, as no true Scotsman can jump.

Fallacy?

In this case, the burden is on B to elucidate other factors that determine or preclude membership in the set of Scotsmen. Otherwise, all we have is B's unsupported affirmation of some entity's membership in both the set of Scotsmen and the set of people who can jump.

To make it even clearer, here's a fallacious argument obviously based on equivocation:

A: Is he a Scotsman? No Scotsman can jump.

B: Yes, and he can jump.

A: But he just beat that black guy in basketball, so clearly he can jump, and therefore is not a true Scotsman.

Ultimately, it would probably be best if in almost-all cases people just stopped referencing fallacies in their discussions at all.

[Fragony]

Awesome, just heard that my mate's daughther is going to the thai-boxing world championship. Next year she will have a much harder time because of her age, but this she could just haul in.

[Beskar]

Two of the most deeply-misunderstood logical fallacies are the "Ad Hominem" and the "No True Scotsman"...

I had a good understanding of the concepts, then I read your post. Now I am confused.

[Montmorency]

That's sig-worthy.

[Husar]

Ultimately, it would probably be best if in almost-all cases people just stopped referencing fallacies in their discussions at all.

I don't remember coming across any of those fallacies in the Germosphere/Germanosphere. It might be because I'm not discussing philosophy and politics as much in German, but I think I mostly saw these here on the .org, which is part of the Anglosphere.
Therefore this despicable behavior must be yet another trait of the imperialistic Anglo-man.

[Crandar]

Seems that the 2013 Modding Awards are up in Total War Center. Nice to see abit less categories than the competition of 2012, as some of them were so obscure that the victor was dependent on his connections.
Anyway, can't say I have played many of the mods listed, except for the DarthMod, which has provided me with a breath-taking experience, considering the awfully broken AI of Napoleon and Empire, so the guy has definiteley my vote.
Actually, the greatest problem of those games was that the retarded AI had migrated to other, mediocre mods, like TGW, making them rather annoying to play, unfortunately, despite their over-ambitious planning.