PHIL - 1101

Chapter 1

Barriers to Critical Thinking

• Avoidance:
• unwilling to see someone else's viewpoint
• Embracing ignorance as bliss. Fallacy that knowledge is irrelevant for decision making. Ignorance and blame.

Ignorance re: Principle for action ( is murder wrong )
or
Circumstances of action ( other facts relevant to action )

• Conformity:

• Trying to fir into something and doing some absurd things when trying to fit in.

• Milgram Experiment: Experiment on following the authority figure and to see how obident people are.

Critical Thinking

• Determine what information is not pertinent;
• Distinguish between rational claims and emotional ones;
• Seperate fact from opinion;
• Recognize the ways in which evidence might be limited or compromised;
• Spot deception and holes in the arguments of others;
• Present his own analysis of the data or information;
• Recognize logical flaws in arguments;
• Draw connetions between discrete sources of data and information;
• Attend to contradictory, inadequate, or ambigous information;
• Construct cogent arguments rooted in data rather than opinion;
• Select the strongest set of supporting data;
• Avoid overstated conclusions;
• Identify holes in the evidence and suggest additional information to collect;
• Recognize that a problem may have no clear answer or single solution;
• Propose other options and weigh them in the decision;
• Consider all stakeholders or affected parties in suggestiong a course of actions;
• Articulate the argument and the context for that argument;
• Logically and cohesively organize to defend the argument;
• Avoid extraneous elements in an arguments development;
• Present evidence in an order that contributes to a presuasive argument;

Critical thinking is EVALUATION of claims using careful application of reason. Thinking about thinking.

Reductio ad Absurdum:
Form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that
the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradictions.

Claims

Claims or statements are our opinion / facts about whether something is true / false. Some claims don't have to be investigated "Costco is open right now" and some do "We should adopt universal health care."

Some claims can be claims that cannot be proven or disproven due to insufficient information about the topic. Anything about different dimensions or parallel universes are pretty hard to prove. Bertrand Russell's conundrum "The enitre universe was created instantly five minutes ago with all our memories intact."

Issues

Call a claim into question, questions about its truth or falsity - we raise an issue. Answering the questions would be called settling the issue.

Sometimes its hard to tell what the claim and the issues being raised really are, from purposeful obfuscation to ambiguous terminology to plain muddleheaded thinking.

Sometimes claims are made in contexts in which it is not important that they be true. example, a joke. Even when truth is paramount, a scienticifc test may not be necessary. Mathematical theorems are confirmed not via experimentation but rather as deductions from other mathematical propositions. Appearing in the Bible would count as proof of a statement if you believe that the Bible is the revealed word of god. You need to have some idea about what counts for or against a claim's truth if you are to entertain it seriously.

Arguments

We produce an argument when we produce a reason for thinking that a claim is true.

Premise: A claim that is offered as a reason for believing anothher claim. Conslusion: The claim which the premise is trying to reason for.

An argument states a position on the issue.

Requirements for a premise:

• The premise can only offer support if the premise is true.
• The premise has to be relevant to the conclusion - premise is cogent.

An argument consists of two parts: one part provides a reason for thinking that the other part is true.

Sometimes the word "argument" will be used to refer only to a premise, as in " That's a good argument for your conclusion."

Arguments confused with explanations and attempts to persuade sometimes.

Arguments and Explainations

Patrick Lawler had driven a nail into his head which cause him a headache and he had to have it surgically removed which costed him 100,000 $ since he didn't have medical insurance.

Explaination: Lawler had a world class toothache because he had driven a nail into his head.

Argument: Lawler should have carried medical insurance because now he can't pay his medical bills.

"He had a nail in his head" states the cause of the headache and is not offered as proof that patrick has one.

Arguments and Persuasion

"National forests need more roads like farmers need more drought" this was used to presuade an audience that more roads would be bad for our national forests.

Persuasion is when you are trying to win someone's point of view. This can be done using arguments or even without them. They are 2 logically different things.

Deductive Arguments

An argument that is "valid", implies that it isn't possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false.

Inductive Arguments

An inductive argument doesn't prove or demonstrate the conclusion, but rather they support it. This means that assuming they are true, they raise the probability that the conclusion is true.

Unstated Premises and Conclusions

Premise: You can't check out books from the library without an ID.
Conclusion: Bill won't be able to check out any books.

Here the unstated premise is that Bill has no ID.

Conclusion Indicators

• It follows that
• This shows that
• Thus
• Consequently
• Accordingly
• So

Premise Indicators

• Since
• Because
• For
• This is implied by
• Given

Chapter 3

Vagueness

A statement is vague when what it means is not precise and needs more information to resolve.

Eg: The term paper has to be long enough to be good.

This is practically no information.

Eg: That is a small town.

Here although the word small is not really defined this statement can be made sense of and does convey some meaning.

Ambiguity

A word, phrase, or sentence is said to be ambigous when it has more than one meaning.

Eg: Jessica is renting her house

This could mean that she is renting the house that she owns to someone else or that the house that she lives in, she rents from someone else.

Semantic Ambiguity

Verbal Ambiguity

When a statement contains an ambigous word or a phrase, which produces a case of semantic ambiguity.

1. McFadden, the running back, always lines up on the right side.
2. Jessica is cold.
3. Aunt never used glasses.

Grouping ambiguity

Secretaries make more money than physicians do.

This is true if the speaker refers to secretaries and physicians collectively, since there are many more secretaries than there are physicians. But it's false if they mean individual secretaries and physicians.

There are two venerable fallacies based on the grouping type of ambiguity.

Fallacy of division when he or she reasons from the fact that a claim about a group taken collectively is true to the conclusion that the same claim about members of the group taken individually is also true.

Fallacy of composition when he or she reasons from the fact that each member of a group has a certain property to the conclusion that the group as a whole must have that property.

Syntatic Ambiguity

Structural Ambiguity

Syntatic ambiguity occurs when a claim is open to two or more interpretations because of its structure.

You will need a birth certificate or a driver's license and other photo ID.

This has the same ambiguity as p V q ^ s

1. You will need a birth certificate or a driver's license and other photo ID.
2. Players with beginners' skills only may use Court 1.
3. Susam saw the farmer with binoculars.
4. There is somebody in the bed next to me.
5. The boys chased the girls and they giggled a lot. ( Ambigous pronoun references )

Generality

The less detail a claim provides the more "general" it is.

Purposes of Definitions

1. What words mean. Lexical definitions;
2. Special meaning in a given context. Stipulative definitions; eg: In this environment, 'desktop' means the basic opening screen of the operating system.
3. Reduce vagueness or generality or to eliminate ambiguity. Precising Definitions; In this article, the 'dollar' refers to canadian dollars.
4. Definitions used to persuade. Persuasive or rhetorical definitions. Example: "Conservatives are hidebound narrow-minded hypocrite who thinks the point of life is making money and ripping off the poor people." - Here the definition provided tring to trash the conservatives and not clarify the meaning of the word.

Kinds of Definitions

1. Definition by example (aka ostensice definition):
   Pointing to, naming, or otherwise identifying one or more examples of the sort of thing to which the term applies. "By scripture, I mean writings like the Bible and the Koran"

2. Definition by synonym:
   Providing a synonym. "Fastidious means the same as fussy."

3. Analytical Definition:
   Specifying the features that a thing must possess in order for the term being defined to apply to it.

Writing Argumentative Essays

1. A statement of the issue.
2. A statement of one's position on that issue.
3. Arguments that support one's position.
4. Rebuttals of arguments that support contrary positions.

Chapter 5

Persuasion Through Rhetoric

Euphemisms And Dysphemisms

Euphemisms is a neutral or positive expression instead of one that carries negative associations.

The assassination of a foreign leader.
The neutralization of a foreign leader.

Dysphemisms is the opposite of euphemisms.

"Freedom Fighter" is euphemism and "Rebel" is dysphemism.

Rhetorical Explainations

A kind of slanting device clothed as explanations. "He lost the fight because he's lost his nerve."

Stereotypes

Lumping a group of individuals together under one name or description, especially one that begins with the word "the". A stereotype is a thought or an image about a group of people based on little to no evidence.

Innuendo

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am proof that there is at least one candidate in this race who does not have a drinking problem."

This is a form of Siginificant Mention or Paralipsis and it's one form of innuendo.

Loaded Questions

A loaded question has unwarrented or unjustified assumptions. "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Weaselers

Weaselers are linguistic methods of hedging a bet. When inserted into a claim they help protect it from criticism by watering it down. "Three out of four dentists surveyed recommneded sugarless gum for thier patients who chew gum." The word "surveyed" without the specifications as to how the dentists were selected. The second phrase is "for their patients who chew gum" the ad does not claim that any dentist believes sugarless-gum chewing is as good for a patient as no gum chewing at all.

Downplayers

An attempt to make someone or something look less important or less significant. "Don't mind what he says in class; he's a liberal", "Don't mind what he says in class; he's just another liberal" here the "just another" further downplays the person. Words and other devices that serve this function are known as downplayers.

Horse Laugh / Ridicule / Sarcasm

...

Hyperbole

Hyperbole is extravagant overstatement. "Parents who are strict about a curfew are facists."

A hyperbole can add a persuasive edge to a claim that it doesn't deserve. A hyperbolic claim is pure persuasion.

Proof surrogates

An expression used to suggest that there is evidence or authority for a claim without actually citing such evidence or authority is a proof surrogate. Using phrases like "informed sources say" or "it's obvious that".

"There is every reason to believe that votes in the U.S. are just as fed up with the social engineering."

Chapter 6

Pseudoreasoning is when stratagems masquerade as arguments but don't really have legitimate grounds for accepting a conclusion.

Fallacy: A mistake in reasoning.

Argument from outrage

"They're just livid - the press, the leftists in this country - are just upset there are not enough deaths to get people outraged and protesting in the streets againts the war. They're just mad these doctors are saving lives. They want deaths!"

Argument from outrage: where the speaker attempts to convince the audience of something via anger rather than a valid argument.

A perticular type of this is known as "scapegoating" blaming a certain group of people or a single person for all of life's troubles.

Scare Tactics

A direct threat to the person is know as "argument by force".

Prudential grounds vs Rational Grounds

An organization might agree to pay a settlement to a person who claims his back was injured on their property, even though they have no rational reason to believe him. The fear of losing an even bigger sum in court provides prudential grounds for paying.

Other fallacies based on emotions

• Argument from pity

• Argument from envy

• Apple Polishing ( Pride in one-self causing fallacy )

• Guilt Trip ( Using guilt as a tool for an argument )

• Wishful Thinking ( hopes, desires and aversions )

• Peer-pressure Argument

• GroupThinking fallacy ( One's sense of group identification )

• Argument from popularity ( Urge someone to accept a claim simple on the fact grounds that some substantial number of people believe it.)

• Argument from common practice ( trying to justify or defend an action or practice on the grounds that it is common (eg: false advertizing.) )
• Argument from tradition ( people do things because that's way things have always been done. )

Rationalizing

Mr. Smith bought his wife a table saw. "This saw wasn't cheap, But you're going to be glad we have it, because it will keep me out in the garage and out of your way when you're working here in the house."

Rationalizing involves an element of self-deception but otherwise isn't necessarily devious.

It's rationalizing if it's an innocent mistake, otherwise it's just cynical.

The Subjectivist Fallacy

Someone tells you sandpaper is slipper and you conclude:

• This guy doesn't know what sandpaper is.
• He doesn't know what "slippery" means.
• He's using some kind of oddball metaphor.
• He's stoned on something.

The idea that something is true just because one thinks it's true is sometimes known as the subjectivist fallacy.

Within language, some phrases, like "tastes great" or "that's cool" can be used pretty much as you please. But other expression are bound by fairly rigid rules; you can't just call any old thing sandpaper and expect people to understand you. Words like "slippery" are somewhere in the middle. "Slippery" is vague enough to permit a broad range of application, but there are constraints. Sandpaper and camp fires, for example aren't slippery.

It might be best to think of the subjectivist fallacy as a half-baked piece of philosophy rather than a "fallacy". By common agreement, some phrases can be used as you please. But not all expressions are like that, and not every claim you think is true is made true by the fact that you think it is.

The Relativist Fallacy

Relativism is the idea that one culture's or society's opinion is as good as the next, and that society/culture's thinking a claim is true make it true in the society/culture.

Well, I think bullfighting is wrong, but other cultures don't think
so, and who am I to tell them what to believe? If they think there is
nothing wrong with bullfighting, then I guess it isn't wrong for them
to have bullfights.

You can think that whether bullfighting is wrong depends on what a culture thinks, or you can subscribe to what your culture thinks, but you can't do both.

This bit of inconsistency is called the relativist fallacy.
The relativist fallacy consists in thinking a moral standard of your own group applies universally while simultaneously maintaining that it doesn't apply to groups that don't accept the standard.

Two wrongs make a right

Taking revenge on someone, or teaching a lesson to someone by doing something back, from a reasoning standpoint, is committing the fallacy know as two wrongs make a right.

However, there is a well-knows and somewhat widely held theory known as retributivism, according to which it is acceptable to harm someone in return for a harm he or she has done to you. But we must distinguish legitimate punishment from illegitimate retaliation.

Red Herring / Smoke Screen

When a person brings a topic into a conversation that distracts from the original point, especially if the new topic is introduced in order to distract, the person is said to have introduced a red herring.

Eg: when the prosecuting attorney introduced evidence that the defendant also sold liquor to minors when the case was about pandering.

Smoke screens ten to pile issues on or to make them extremely complicated until the original is lost in the "smoke".

Chapter 7 - More fallacies

The Ad Hominem Fallacy

( argumentum ad hominem ) The fallacy rests on the confusion between the qualities of the person making a claim and the qualities of the claim itself.

The personal attack ad hominem

Attributing a negative attribute to a person and giving that as a reason as to why his claim is false.

"Johnson has such-and-such a negative feature; therefore, his claim stand refuted."

The inconsistency ad hominem

When you associate something else that a person has said and done and it's inconsistency with their claim and that is used as a reason to refute their claims.

"Moore's claim is inconsistent with something else Moore has said or done therefore, his claim stands refuted."

The circumstantial ad hominem

Using the circumstance the speaker is in as a reason to believe that their claim is false.

"Parker's circumstances are such and such; therefore, his claim stands refuted."

Poisoning the well

Poisoning the well can be thought of as an ad hominem in advance. When A poisons your mind about B by relating unfavourable information about B, you may be inclined to reject what B says to you.

The Genetic Fallacy

Occurs when we try to "refute" a claim on the basis of its origin or its history.

The genetic fallacy is often considered to be a blanket category for all fallacies that mistake an attack on a source from an attack on a claim in question.

The positive Ad Hominem Fallacies

When you mistake positive characteristics of the speaker to the claim made by said speaker.

Straw man

A man made of straw is easier to knock over than a real one. When a speaker or writer distorts, exaggerates, or otherwise misrepresents an opponent's position.

"Mark, it's time you got busy and cleaned out the garage." - "What? Again? Do I have to clean out the garage every single day?"

False Dilemma

The false dilemma fallacy occurs when your limit considerations to only two alternatives although other alternatives may be available.

"Are you going to punish your children or your wife?" - Clearly the option of neither is not established.

The perfectionist Fallacy

A particular subspecies of false dilemma and common rhetorical ploy is something we call the perfectionist fallacy. It comes up when a play or a policy is under consideration, and it goes like this:

If policy X will not meet our goals as well as we'd like them met, then policy X should be rejected.

(It doesn't have to be all or nothing.)

The line-drawing fallacy

Another version of the false dilemma is called the line-drawing fallacy. The fallacy of insisting that a line must be drawn at some precise point when in fact it is not necessary that such a precise line be drawn.

"If we can not point to the precise dollar that makes her rich, then she can never get rich, no matter how much money she is given!"

Slippery Slope

"If we let X happen, then first thing you know, Y will be happening." This is one form of the slippery slope. Such claims are fallacious when in fact there is no reason to think that X will lead to Y.

Misplacing the burden of proof

A: "Say, did you know that, if you rub red wine on your head, your gray hair will turn dark again?"
B: "Baloney."
A: "How do you know it won't work?"

Odd because the burden of proof rests on A not on B.

1. Initial plausibility: the more a claim coincides with our background information, the greater its initial plausibility. The less initial plausibility the greater the burden of proof we place on someone who asserts that claim.

2. Affirmative/Negative: Other things being equal, the burden of proof falls automatically on those supporting the affirmative side of an issue rather than those supporting the negative side.
   When someone claims that we should believe in such-and-such because nobody has proved that it isn't so, we have a version of burden of proof known as appeal to ignorance.

3. Special circumstances: When getting at the truth is not the only important thing we want to accomplish or if stated before in a contract as to who the burden of proof lays on.

Begging the question

Some people say they can prove God exists. When asked how, they reply, "Well the scriptures say very clearly that God exists." Then asked why we should believe in the scriptures they answer, "The scriptures are divinely inspired by God himself, so they must be true."

We are guilty of begging the question when we ask our audience accept premises that are controversial as the conclusion we're arguing for and that are controversial on the same grounds.

Chapter 8

Deductive Arguments I: Categorical Logic

Categorical Logic

Categorical logic is logic based on the relations of inclusions and exclusions among classes.

Categorical claims

• A Claim

All X are Y.
⇒ X ∩ Y = X

• E Claim

No X are Y.
⇒ X ∩ Y = ∅

• I Claim

Some X are Y.
⇒ X ∩ Y ≠ ∅

• O Claim

Some X are not Y.
⇒ X ∩ Y' ≠ ∅

Where X is the subject term and Y is the predicate term.
Only nouns or noun phrases can be classified as terms.

"All fire engines are red" does not produce a standard-form categorical claim. "All fire engines are red vehicles" does.

The A and the I are called affirmative claims and the E and the O are called negative claims.

Translation into standard form

• Only
  "Only Xs are Ys"
  ⇒ All Ys are Xs

• The Only
  "The only Xs are Ys"
  ⇒ All Xs are Ys

The Square of Opposition

Three Categorical Operations

Conversion

The converse of a standard-form claim is the subject and predicate terms switched.

The E and I claims are equivalent to their converse.

No Xs are Ys
Converse: No Ys are Xs

Some Xs are not Ys
Converse: Some Ys are not Xs

Obversion

Complementary terms: Students and Non-Students.

To find the obverse of a claim:

• Negate the statement.
• Replace the predicate term with it's compliment.

All Xs are Ys.
Obverse: No Xs are non-Ys

Some Xs are Ys.
Obverse: Some Xs are not non-Ys.

Contraposition

To find the contraposition:

• Switch the predicate and the subject terms.
• Replacing both terms with complementary terms.

All Xs are Ys
All non-Ys are non-Xs

The A and the O claims are equivalent to their contrapositives.

Categorical Syllogisms

A syllogism is a two-premise deductive argument. A categorical syllogism is a syllogism whose every claim is a standard form categorical claim and in which 3 terms each occur exactly 2x in exactly 2 of the claims.

All Xs are Ys
All Ys are Zs
∴ All Xs are Zs

Major term (P): the term that occurs as the predicate term of the conclusion.

Minor term (S): the term that occurs as the subject term of the syllogism's conclusion.

Middle term (M): the term that occurs in both of the premises but not in the conclusion.

Rules Method of testing for validity

Distributed Term: A term that says something about the entire class.

1. The number of negative claims in the premises must be the same as the number of negative claims in the conclusion.
2. At least one premise must distribute the middle term.
3. Any term that is distributed in the conclusion of the syllogism must be distributed in its premises.

Chapter 9

Truth-Functional Logic

If and only if

The word "if" used alone, introduces the antecedent of a conditional.
The phrase "only if" introduces the consequent of a conditional.

Sufficient and Necessary conditions

Sufficient => just this being trust lead to the conclusion.

Necessary => this is needed to be true if the conclusion is to be true.

Unless

The word unless is the same as or
"Paula will foreclose unless Quincy pays up."

Most of this is available from https://suchicodes.info/cs1303