Philosophy - The Game


I think that discussion of mainstream philosophy is getting…how shall we say it…boring.
I think it’s well time that we upgrade the discussion boards to the 21st century…
After all, the ancient greeks had philosophy discussions at the pools getting their feet massaged…
What do we have now, just a bunch of text on a screen.

The ideas we have in our head…are limited, not conveyed…
Posting animated gifs and uploading movies are such a chore…a waste of energy…

We’ve got a’something that is better…

Something that changes ALL the rules…

“Philosophy” - the game

Not a battle, not a Rock-Band’s ripoff…

But a something that will put you under our spell…

(Sorta like Wow meets the matrix meets metroid…you walk around on a terrain, that has some paths, some roads, some cars, your items make certain behavoirs (vortexes, blackholes, moving blocks to and fro. and a neat little draw tool to share your ideas, a way to share your philosophies quickly and easily, with more interactivity, and expressivity. Fabulous. This way there will be a way to express the basic shapes and movements and sciences going on in your mind. We will be famous.)

well good luck with that.

here’s the next revolutionary application of philosophy:

but first a little build up. See, philosophy, as a science, is dead. Meaning it’s no longer progressing.
there are no new truths we can arrive at philosophically without chewing our own tails off. but none of that matters.
The fact is, we have more than enough philosophy to let all manner of flies out of all manner of bottles.
Tools to keep our ideas and beliefs clear and rational and consistent. We have the great list of fallacies.
Ever peruse all the fallacies? They all have great names, there’s like a hundred at last count.

If you like philosophy at all, go look at these lists. I guarantee you will recognize a TON of these fallacies
from your every day life, in the statements of the people closest to you, AND coming from the talking heads
and writers who bring us our news, and from politicians and celebrities of all stripes.

What the fuck? FOLKS, WE HAVE THE TOOLS. We literally have the fallacies all listed. And yet we continue to
riddle our dialogues with these self-same fallacies. It’s so EASY for a philosopher to simply
review a dialogue, sentence by sentence, and as soon as a fallacy occurs, the philosopher can hit a buzzer
and tell us which one. But we NEVER DO THIS. And yet it would be SO EASY TO DO.

Again, I’m not talking about progress in terms of metaphysics and ontology or epistemology. I’m talking about all
the BASIC CONFUSIONS, the civil issues, the quarrels and world views great and small that are bent out of shape
and fucked and getting worse, trifles that many of philosophy’s tools could unravel in their sleep and just come out and say who’s
wrong and point exactly which fallacy is at play.

We need an APP for this. Or at least a TV show called Fallacy Watch. But it’s going to be hard to bring to market. After all, the
mass media and the small indie media traffics in fallacy. And each one of us, our spouses, our kids, our
customers and bosses and our whole fucking infrastructure THRIVES on fallacy, like flies on dung.

I’m not talking about BELIEFS. I’m not talking about FACT FINDING or SCIENCE. I’m strictly talking about
internal logic, epistemology, linguistics, analysis, just that ALONE would force people to admit how stupid and wrong they are about
most things, starting with fanaticism.

It will be very hard to introduce such a thing. But it would also be very easy.

It’s the next step. Who’s going to step up?

A tu quoque fallacy in:

Because philosophers have hit their buzzers when they spot a fallacy, we should also.

You’ve offered no reason to do this other than that we should appeal to your authority and I don’t much appreciate the appeal to force with the big, demanding CAPITAL LETTERS.

=D>

Fallacy is in of itself a fallacy.

Many of the so called “contradictions” and fallacies are not actual contradictions.

For example, calling someone an “idiot” is a fallacy, called an ad-hominem. But what if they really are an idiot? Calling it a fallacy would be a fallacy.
Fallacy is fallacy.

Also, philosophy is stagnant, but not dead. There are still unanswered questions. And answers which are hollow and unsatisfactory.

No Trixie. Slow down for a minute. Calling someone an idiot is not a fallacy, but saying someone is wrong because they are an idiot, is.

An example of an ad hominem:

Trixie is a liberal who says paying taxes is necessary and she supports progressive taxing, but she tries to avoid taxes wherever she can. Therefore, liberals and liberal principles are wrong.

If I am asserting that liberalism and liberal principles are wrong because Trixie is a hypocrite, I am committing the ad hom.

I know what you are saying but fallacies are a tool that people use to suit their sloppy arguments.

Like, if someone says something idiotic, and you call them an idiot, they cry “Oh no! Let’s play the fallacy game! You used an adhominem!”

Also my example was pretty fallacious, but there are some fallacies listed in some fallacy charts I read before which are not really logical contradictions, but social sentiments.

Then again, if a person doesn’t hold to their own principles, why should anybody else take such principles seriously when advocated by such a person who obviously doesn’t take them seriously him/her/self?

I’d say such an example would be an indicator that liberal principles are wrong, albeit a weak indicator since one person not adhering to their own principles doesn’t really matter much in the large scheme of things.

It’s like, if Trixie says A, but Trixie is also known to lie more than not, then, all other factors equal, it’s reasonable to assume that not A is more likely than A, wouldn’t you agree?

Come on AOC, you know this one.

What someone does with what they believe has nothing to do with the truth of what they believe or whether or not you should believe it. It would be like calling Christianity de facto wrong because most of them are idiots. If Christianity isn’t true, it isn’t because Christians are idiots or not. You feel me?

note: there is a clause in the ad hominem though. Wikipedia is saying:

I don’t think this is a case of what you’ve mentioned, though, but I could be wrong. The credibility of Trixie’s claims is not the same as her adherence or not to those claims. So, even if Trixie is incredible because she never pays her bills on time and avoids paying taxes, the principles of liberalism might still be right.

I’m aware of a computer with enough ability in natural language processing to be able to run this app. It’s name is Watson and it only took like 20 million usd to build.

2op

Can we be sure there’s not an explanation which will make >everything< we know less true or false?

…because there is.

I’m not trying to establish a causal relationship (that Christianity is wrong BECAUSE most of them are idiots), I’m pointing out a correlation. If most people who believe X are idiots, and we know that idiots usually tend to have poorly thought out beliefs, it reduces the credibility of X. I’d agree it’s not a particularly strong argument, and it’s usually avoided in academic circles (and for good reasons), but it can be used if you have no other method available to judge something.

They might, but I’m talking about degrees here, not absolutes. If political positions are necessarily supposed to be practical, then if Trixie isn’t practicing his/her own position it means she holds it to be impractical, which is a good indicator that it’s a dysfunctional position.

^^ Christianity may be a truth to far for Christians to understand though. …but my guess is that the religion itself is idiotic, therefore people who learn from it are roughly comparable. :mrgreen:

Years ago, I developed Resolution Debating for that exact purpose. Statement by statement, agreement is sought. A tree of uncertainty blossoms at the same time that a mountain of certainty rises. Eventually it all becomes clear … and resolved.

But as the OP indicated, such is “boring”.

There is far more to the complexity of society than dreamt of in your philosophies.

No it is a strong argument, or exception rather of what Hume was doing with the induction fallacy. David Stove argues that if there is sufficient regularity- in this case the incredibility of idiot X who’s always frontin’- it isn’t irrational to assume there will be more incredibility with idiot X in the future.

But you’d have to observe the behavior of all liberals first, before you were so sure that liberalism is bad. One particular, incredible liberal is not enough to say a whole position is ‘dysfunctional’, is it?

James that’s because you were pursuing philosophical truths. I’m just talking about basic shit.

Tu quoque – I’m glad someone brought up tu quoque. I love that one, and I love saying it to my brother when he texts me something that is a tu quoque fallacy.

I never hear that or any other fallacy talked about on TV.

I wish just once bill maher would say post hoc ergo proper hoc. or tu quoque or ad hominem even. ad nauseum.
we NEED these words in our dialogue in order to quickly highlight the precise flaw in the logic so we can move on.

We do it here adequately, can you imagine how well a professional would fare? Not some netporn underachiever douchebag like me or you.
I’m talking about a bonafide philosopher PRO. How well they could easily pinpoint a fallacy. And not in deconstructive commentaries on commentaries on rorty. I’m talking basic stuff. The way people bicker, from the way people believe things on the news, to the way we justify bullshit every day.
I’m not talking about actual cutting edge stuff, just dime store stuff. How many more ways can I say it?

And it would take a dispassionate person. Someone without an agenda. Too bad it’s not me. Because I have no agenda except this. But I’m not good enough. Anyway stop arguing with me and get out of your ass long enough to admit I’m right. Tu quoque. tu smoque. reification. excluded middle. poisoning the eel, (eel? that can’t be right. See, I suck at this.) reductio ad absurdum, straw man, weak analogy, you too, if by whiskey, special pleading, bulverism, texas sharpshooter, base rate fallacy, backfire effect, semmelweis reflex…

And my favorite, brought to you by your parents, guaranteed, the good old
THOUGHT TERMINATING CLICHÉ.

I could do this all day. Because fallacies are so virulent and everywhere, you’d think we’d develop a way to slap 'em down more efficiently. On any given talk show, or your neighborhood dinner party, it takes like an hour to try and unravel any one of these, and in the process you probably open up three or four new ones. When was the last time you yelled out 'Subadditivity Effect!" at lunch with your brother. NEVER.

SO YOU ASK how this game, philosophy, is played? By fucking applying it to every day life, so we can finally stop walking around acting and talking like apes.

All of these brilliant people learned from Christianity:

St. Augustine
Thomas Aquinas
St. Anselm
Meister Eckhart
Chaucer
Dante
Boccaccio
Shakespeare
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
John Donne
T.S. Eliot
William Blake
W.B. Yeats
J.R.R. Tolkien
Sylvia Plath
Flannery O’Connor
Cormac McCarthy
Martin Scorsese
Frederico Fellini
Ingmar Bergman

Please try to show how a single one of these people is idiotic?

Here’s where fallacies fail, you see.

Anecdotal fallacy - using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of sound reasoning or compelling evidence.
Appeal to probability – is a statement that takes something for granted because it would probably be the case (or might be the case).[2][3]

^the above are called structural fallacies, problems with the argument’s form.

But it doesn’t take into account the weight of the anecdote.

If the personal experience had a lot of weight, it might be relevant.

Probability is relevant. The argument for probability is not structurally unsound

Appeal to the stone (argumentum ad lapidem) – dismissing a claim as absurd without demonstrating proof for its absurdity.[13]
Argument from ignorance (appeal to ignorance, argumentum ad ignorantiam) – assuming that a claim is true because it has not been or cannot be proven false, or vice versa.[14]

Often times the argument is absurd. While it’s ignorant to say “preposterous” when someone presents a new idea, the idea that planes exist was absurd at the time. Absurd, but not impossible.

Science bases itself on argument from ignorance, after you repeat an experiment ten times you deem it to be true. Gravity has not been proven false. Therefore, gravity is a fallacy. Fallacy is a fallacy.

I learned this about Trixie from another thread. He has no idea what “fallacy” or any other philosophical term means. He’s adorable that way… :wink:

If you wanna get people to stop acting like apes, fallacy is just another form of apes.

Instead, one must rephrase one’s sentences.

“The sky is blue” becomes

“I percieve the sky to be blue ”

“Obama is a bad presdident” becomes

“Obama is a bad president (77% of the time.)”

“Religious people are stupid” becomes

“Religious people are closeminded and ignorant, but some are mathematically gifted.”

“That guy above me is an idiot” becomes

“That guy above me is being an idiot right now.”

“Humans are doomed” becomes

“Humans are doomed (probability 90%).”

You think it makes more sense to make people speak in e-prime or whatever?

I disagree completely.

yes there is such thing as the fallacy fallacy. But I’m not guilty of it.
I’m not talking about whether something is wrong or right, true or false,
and I made that clear. I’m talking about firstly
whether there’s a fallacy in the logic, embedded assumptions, etc.
that’s not everything, but it’s something we can actually DO.

Sometimes people who smoke don’t die of lung cancer.
And sometimes statements riddled with fallacies are at rock bottom true.
Seems like a dumb reason to keep fallacy and cigarettes around.

I think you are guilty of the nirvana fallacy, which discounts an idea because it falls short of perfection.
I’m not suggesting this will make us perfect, but it will elevate us beyond apes.
Apes make all sorts of noises over and over, repeat the same mistakes and hurl shit.

Imagine a world where we all know how to live in the gray areas a little better.
We will always be human, always flawed, partly because meaning itself is a flawed concept
and yet we all need meaning like oxygen, and meaning requires a little fallacy now and again,
a little black and white, a little boundary-making, letting the power of words run rampant
so that we can believe in something, anything.

BUT, i’m talking about starting small, trixie. Plenty of low hanging fruit out there.
I’d like to hear, JUST ONCE, an expert come in and outline some previously held debate,
and break it down into the composite fallacies. I’d especially love to see this applied to
the most dangerous stuff, the pundits, the rabid, the angry. the bigots disguised as voices of reason.
and nationalists, loyalists, the left or right. Israel or islam. i’m anti-fallacy.