


PHIL 121-02
Camden County College
Spring 2009
Ironically, having extreme confidence in oneself is often a sign of ignorance. Remember, in many cases, such stubborn certainty is unwarranted.Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."
I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.
This may sound insulting, but one of the goals of this class is getting us to recognize that we're not as smart as we think we are. All of us. You. Me! That one. You again. Me again!"How can we better believe what is true? While it is of course useful to seek and study relevant information, our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us that we are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing."
Attendance is mandatory for the group presentations on Wednesday (5/6/09), and Friday (5/8/09). It's the only time I'll be a stickler for it. Basically, I want you to show respect for the other groups presenting.One last thing: be sure to keep the presentations under 15 minutes. A 10-minute presentation is ideal, so we can have time for a short question-and-answer session afterward.
If you don't attend on either the days your group isn't presenting (and your absence isn't excused), your own personal presentation grade will drop. Each day you don't attend will lower your grade by a full letter grade.
This mini-article on acne and anxiety raises a combo platter of questions relevant to what we're going over in class.
1) Reverse cause & effect: Does acne cause stress, or does stress cause acne?What say you?
2) Questionable statistics: Do you trust the stat that students were 23 percent more likely to experience breakouts around the time of a test? Is it a good study? A reliable source? An undemanding stat?
3) Questionable use of statistics: If the above statistic is true, is it reasonable to conclude that anxiety causes acne? Or is there another plausible explanation?
The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
Better Know a Lobby - Drug Lobby | ||||
colbertnation.com | ||||
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My best friend the inter-net has some nice examples of the fallacy of equivocation. Here are two good ones:
-via GraphJam
While there are a handful of Web sites that seek to debunk the claims of Mr. Jones and others in the movement, most mainstream scientists, in fact, have not seen fit to engage them.And one more excerpt on reasons to be skeptical of conspiracy theories in general:
"There's nothing to debunk," says Zdenek P. Bazant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University and the author of the first peer-reviewed paper on the World Trade Center collapses.
"It's a non-issue," says Sivaraj Shyam-Sunder, a lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology's study of the collapses.
Ross B. Corotis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the editorial board at the journal Structural Safety, says that most engineers are pretty settled on what happened at the World Trade Center. "There's not really disagreement as to what happened for 99 percent of the details," he says.
One of the most common intuitive problems people have with conspiracy theories is that they require positing such complicated webs of secret actions. If the twin towers fell in a carefully orchestrated demolition shortly after being hit by planes, who set the charges? Who did the planning? And how could hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the murder of their own countrymen keep quiet? Usually, Occam's razor intervenes.
Another common problem with conspiracy theories is that they tend to impute cartoonish motives to "them" — the elites who operate in the shadows. The end result often feels like a heavily plotted movie whose characters do not ring true.
Then there are other cognitive Do Not Enter signs: When history ceases to resemble a train of conflicts and ambiguities and becomes instead a series of disinformation campaigns, you sense that a basic self-correcting mechanism of thought has been disabled. A bridge is out, and paranoia yawns below.
Here's some random stuff related to inductive arguments. First, here's a video of Lewis Black describing his failure to reason inductively every year around Halloween:
This argument is overall bad because of the small sample size. We don't know exactly how many people went to the concert. Still, given what we know about concerts and the popularity of The Roots, we can probably safely conclude that the crowd was at least in the hundreds. A sample of 3 given this probable overall population is too small.2) Every time I’ve seen a rolling billiard ball hit a stationary billiard ball, the stationary ball starts moving. So the next time I roll one billiard ball into another, the stationary one will move when hit.
This argument is overall good. Again, we don't know the exact numbers on this. We don't even know who the person making the argument is. Still, if we start with the assumption that the person making this argument is typical, we can probably safely conclude that she or he has watched or played pool a decent amount. So our sample is probably hundreds or thousands of billiard ball collisions.3) Brandon Rush averaged around 13 points a game the past three years playing college basketball for Kansas. So I expect him to average 13 points a game when he plays in the NBA this year.
Also, each billiard ball collision is fairly representative of pool ball collisions in general. This seems to be a good example of the principle of "You've seen it once, you've seen them all."
This argument is overall bad. The sample is actually large enough: Rush played close to 40 games each season in college. However, the sample of college game performance is not representative of NBA performance. Since there are better players and tougher competition in the NBA than there are in college, most players do not perform as well statistically in the pros as they did in college.Abductive Args
This argument is overall bad. Concluding ing that this pill effectively prevents pregnancy is not the best explanation of the evidence we have. One big background assumption we have is that males do not get pregnant. Hypothesizing that the participants didn't get pregnant because they are male is a much better explanation of the evidence, since it matches our expectations more.(Scientists are actually developing a male birth control pill. But this, of course, prevents men from getting their female sexual partners pregnant. There isn't a need for something that prevents the men themselves from getting pregnant... or is there?)
The Dark Art of Interrogation
Bowden says torture is necessary
Can Foreign Aid Work?
Kristof says it has problems, but we should use it
Against Free Speech
but it's free, so it must be good
You Don't Deserve Your Salary
no one does
What pro-lifers miss in the stem-cell debate
love embryos? then hate fertility clinics
Is Worrying About the Ethics of Your Diet Elitist?
since you asked, no
Is Selling Organs Repugnant?
freakonomicists for a free-market for organs
Should I Become a Professional Philosopher?
hell 2 da naw
Blackburn Defends Philosophy
it beats being employed
The quiz is worth 7.5% of your overall grade. Feel free to insult me in the comments for putting you through the terrible ordeal of taking a quiz.
P1- true2) (from Stephen Colbert)
P2- true
structure- valid
overall - sound
P1- questionable ("great" is subjective)3) Some people are funny.
P2- questionable ("great" is subjective)
structure- valid (it's either A or B; it's not A; so it's B)
overall- unsound (bad premises)
P1- true (we might disagree over who specifically is funny, but nearly all of us would agree that someone is funny)4) All email forwards are annoying.
P2- true
structure- invalid (the 1st premise only says some are funny; Sean could be one of the unfunny people)
overall- unsound (bad structure)
P1- questionable ("annoying" is subjective)5) All bats are mammals.
P2- true
structure- valid (the premises establish that some email forwards are both annoying and false; so some annoying things [those forwards] are false)
overall - unsound (bad first premise)
P1- true6) Some dads have beards.
P2- true (if interpreted to mean "All bats are the sorts of creatures who have wings.") or false (if interpreted to mean "Each and every living bat has wings," since some bats are born without wings)
structure- invalid (we don't know anything about the relationship between mammals and winged creatures just from the fact that bats belong to each group)
overall- unsound (bad structure)
P1- true7) This class is boring.
P2- questionable ("mean" is subjective)
structure- valid (if all the people with beards were mean, then the dads with beards would be mean, so some dads would be mean)
overall- unsound (bad 2nd premise)
P1-questionable ("boring" is subjective)8) All students in here are mammals.
P2- false (nearly everyone would agree that there are some boring things not associated with Sean)
structure- valid
overall- unsound (bad premises)
P1- true
P2- true
structure- invalid (the premises only tell us that students and humans both belong to the mammals group; we don't know enough about the relationship between students and humans from this; for instance, what if a dog were a student in our class?)
overall- unsound (bad structure)
P1- true!10) All students in here are humans.
P2- true
P3- questionable ("scary" is subjective)
structure- valid
overall- unsound (bad 3rd premise)
P1- true11) If Sean sings, then students cringe.
P2- true!
structure- valid (same structure as arg #1)
overall- sound
P1- questionable (since you haven't heard me sing, you don't know whether it's true or false)12) If Sean sings, then students cringe.
P2- false
structure- valid
overall- unsound (bad premises)
P1- questionable (again, you don't know)13) If Sean sings, then students cringe.
P2- true
structure- invalid (from premise 1, we only know what happens when Sean is singing, not when he isn't singing; students could cringe for a different reason)
overall- unsound (bad 1st premise and structure)
P1- questionable (again, you don't know)14) If Sean sings, then students cringe.
P2- true
structure- valid
overall- unsound (bad 1st premise)
P1- questionable (again, you don't know)
P2- false
structure- invalid (from premise 1, we only know that Sean singing is one way to guarantee that students cringe; just because they're cringing doesn't mean Sean's the one who caused it; again, students could cringe for a different reason)
overall- unsound (bad premises and structure)
someone who tries too hard. a poser. one of those chic's who holds the sign saying "Carson Daly is Hot." the asstard who goes to a rock show because they heard one of the songs on the radio or mtv. or someone who insists on wearing velour sweat suits. Avril Lavigne.To find out more, I suggest watching Tool Academy to see our heroes in action:
So why does this course have a blog? Well, why is anything anything?
A blog (short for “web log”) is a website that works like a journal – users write posts that are sorted by date based on when they were written. You can find important course information (like assignments, due dates, reading schedules, etc.) on the blog. I’ll also be updating the blog throughout the semester, posting interesting items related to the stuff we’re currently discussing in class. I used a blog for this course last semester, and it seemed helpful. Hopefully it can benefit our course, too.
Since I’ll be updating the blog a lot throughout the semester, you should check it frequently. There are, however, some convenient ways to do this without simply going to the blog each day. The best way to do this is by getting an email subscription, so any new blog post I write automatically gets emailed to you. (You can also subscribe to the rss feed, if you know what that means.) To get an email subscription:
1. Go to http://ccclogic09.blogspot.com.
2. At the main page, enter your email address at the top of the right column (under “EMAIL SUBSCRIPTION: Enter your Email”) and click the "Subscribe me!" button.
3. This will take you to a new page. Follow the directions under #2, where it says “To help stop spam, please type the text here that you see in the image below. Visually impaired or blind users should contact support by email.” Once you type the text, click the "Subscribe me!" button again.
4. You'll then get an email regarding the blog subscription. (Check your spam folder if you haven’t received an email after a day.) You have to confirm your registration. Do so by clicking on the "Click here to activate your account" link in the email you receive.
5. This will bring you to a page that says "Your subscription is confirmed!" Now you're subscribed.
If you are unsure whether you've subscribed, ask me (609-980-8367; slandis@camdencc.edu). I can check who's subscribed and who hasn't.