Sunday, May 13, 2018

Reason: Giving the Right Weights to Arguments

Reason, also known as logic, is the sufficient finding and creating of premises and conclusions on some specific issue, plus weighing of those premises with sufficient care and accuracy to figure out which conclusions are best supported by good premises, that is, most likely to be true. Both premises and conclusions are called claims. Anything that is logically insufficient, that should be ignored when weighing arguments, is called a fallacy. Combinations of premises and conclusions, the argument, in informal logic, most everyday reasoning, are degrees of strong or weak, depending on how well the premises support the conclusions.

Argument:
The moon no longer exists (conclusion). I looked outside the last three nights and it was gone (premise).

Counterargument:
The moon still exists (conclusion). It's been cloudy for over a week (premise). Only a dummy could think it's gone (premise). One hundred percent of astronomers believe the moon still exists (premise). Just because you watched the sky one night doesn't mean garbage (premise). The problem is the way your brain is wired (premise).

The conclusion in the second argument is better supported, that is, more well-reasoned despite the fact that it contains three glaring fallacies.

The cloudy and sufficient expertise of astronomers premises outweigh the premise in the first argument. The "dummy" abusive ad hominem premise, the straw person "one night" premise, and the circumstantial ad hominem "your brain is wired" premise should be ignored, treated as worthless. Those three fallacious premises are also irrelevant to the specific issue, so it doesn't matter to this issue whether they are true or not.

There are dozens of types of fallacies beyond false claims, ad hominems, and straw persons.

Individuals make fallacious claims because they want to persuade or because they're making a joke or because they don't know any better or because they know better but regard persuasion as more important than giving an audience logically sufficient claims. It is common for professional opinion makers to glibly reject arguments by saying, "I'm not persuaded." Being persuaded or not is irrelevant to the value of an argument.

It is also common in everyday life for an individual to reject or otherwise under weigh an argument because some claims offend them or some claims are fallacious. This is wrong. What matters is how good the conclusions are and how well the good premises support them. It is often ethically wrong to use abusive ad hominem attacks and carelessly use other fallacies, but that doesn't tell us how well-supported the conclusions are.

Reason is often dismissed as linear, uncreative thinking, but it requires a large amount of creativity and resourcefulness to find or brainstorm the best premises and conclusions. Most arguments omit the best premises and conclusions.

What Mr. Spock does often in Star Trek is not logic, as the show states. He spits out intuitive claims without arguments.

Reason is not the slave of passions, nor should it be. Differing cognitive states can help or harm our reasoning abilities, for example, our arguments might come out worse when we are bored, but our passions when creating arguments are irrelevant to their worth.

Science is one branch of reason. Ethics, technology, art criticism, and many other human endeavors also use reasoning.

Good reasoning is the only legitimate way to find out how likely claims are to be true. A true claim accurately describes something. Because many promoters of tyranny claim to be men or women of reason and science does not make reason to blame. Such individuals reek at reasoning and are throwing out reason and science as empty buzzwords to attach prestige to their horrendous plans. The ability and willingness of most human beings to reason well is extremely, extremely poor. Many individuals with prestigious degrees are abysmal at reasoning outside their areas of expertise. Some lawyers, physicians, professors, and other professionals are terrible at reasoning in every field. They managed to become professionals because they are smart, good memorizers, and hard working, not because of the quality of their their reasoning.

There is far more to the reason story, and those stories can be found is logic texts, ethics works, scientific reasoning writings, etc.

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