--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <authfriend@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" <anartaxius@> > wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <authfriend@> > > wrote: > > > > > Xeno, sorry, but you are SO far from understanding what > > > the issues are with Share. Facile observations about > > > general vs. specific thinking styles don't begin to cut > > > it. Just for starters, there are (at last count) seven > > > different people on FFL who have the same criticisms of > > > her. > > > > For starters, your starting argument is 'argumentum ad > > numerum', a logical fallacy that makes the assumption that > > because a number of people believe a certain proposition > > to be true, it must be true. > > Nope, wrong. [Unsupported statement, not an argument] Very sloppy reading on > your part. [Characterisation, not an argument] > Notice that > I didn't mention the proposition you have in mind anywhere > in what I wrote, much less claim it was true, much less > that it was true because a number of people believe it. [True you did not say > the proposition directly (see comments below about tokenisation), nor did you > claim directly a truth value. But you presented it as the first step of a > rebuttal marshaling a mention of others with the same belief, which would > seem to be a psychological way of bolstering your point.
You > made all that up yourself on the basis of no evidence and > read it in. IOW, it was you who made the unwarranted > assumption. > > Knowing all this, can you read what I wrote just a little > more carefully and figure out what my point actually was? > > Here's a hint: It directly addressed your assertion about > different thinking styles as the reason for Share's and my > disagreements. > 1. You say I do not understand the issues with regard to Share. I don't care about your issues with Share. But I understand you and others have issues with Share. 2. You think thinking styles are not adequate to explain these issues. I maintain they have an important role to play in the way people interact and react. This was a general observation intended to convey another perspective irrespective of the specific issues, as everyone has modes of thought and reasoning that vary from person to person, and that might be a reason people disagree. 3. For starters (this is the part I addressed in mentioning 'ad numerum'), whatever the issues you and others have with Share, 7 people at last count, have according to your reckoning, have the same criticisms of Share, those issues, whatever they are. That those 7 people, no matter what the issues are, have that opinion does not make those criticisms of those issues true. Whether you directly mentioned the content of the criticisms or not does not matter, as you encapsulated them in the statement 'Just for starters, there are (at last count) seven different people on FFL who have the same criticisms of her.' 'Same criticisms' is a token that represents all those criticisms. It is not necessary to enumerate them, just as when we use the token 'United States' we do not need to enumerate all the individual states, how big they are, where they are, what their population is, and so forth. Those criticisms en masse are part of the logical structure of your point. You say they are among the seven, the same criticisms. The 'Just for starters' statement and what follows is the proposition to which I objected. Within that is the token (*same criticisms*) representing all the other propositions that specifically would be the criticisms of Share. Thus, unwittingly perhaps, you included all your propositions regarding criticisms of Share in that sentence. It is not necessary for you or me to delineate them specifically, or for me to address them in any way. Logic is about form, about structure, not content. To quote one of the men who demonstrated that mathematics and logic were the same, Bertrand Russell: 'Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true ... If our hypothesis is about anything, and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. But we would know that if a particular number of people held a certain view, that alone would not be sufficient to render a verdict of true or false. But my objection to your statement was not in reference to what I wrote about styles of thinking. It had nothing to do, logically, with the content of the differences you and others have with Share. That is just added material postulating that misunderstandings might have taken place, and maybe you might consider it a possibility?
