On 01/07/2014 02:04 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > (3) Reasoning illogically -- Clearly violating fundamental rules of logic. > All swans are white; this bird is a crow; this bird is white.
I think this is the most difficult problem to identify. However, back when we were discussing tautologies, this thought nagged at me. The validity of conjunction elimination (P,Q => P) relies fundamentally on a kind of static, small universe. If the universe is dynamic and/or too large, then the use of conjunctive elimination (normally considered a truth preserving rule) puts our argument at risk of false conclusions. E.g. Let's assert: A C B is, as yet, indeterminate. A,C => A is a valid rule. But if we later discover B, ~(B^A), then that entire link in the _chain_ of reasoning becomes a rat hole... a waste of time, perhaps so cognitively jarring as to prevent people from accepting B and - from now on - rejecting A. The people wallowing in that reasoning link will have forgotten that we had a _choice_ in our conjunctive elimination. We could have eliminated A rather than C. I speculate that utopians like the libertarians do this a lot: i.e. use locally valid rules that turn out to be distally invalid. But they don't do it because they're stupid, only because they accept simplification as a globally valid rule. -- ⇒⇐ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
