Coming to terms with Aristotle

The existential implications from the Aristotelian view kind of got under my skin. The circularity of implying the existence of ONLY things that exist smelt too much like begging the question.

It recently occurred to me that "implication" might not be the best word, or more likely that I misinterpreted it, in the same way I initially misunderstood the logical definition of "formal" and "informal" when we started studying fallacies.

I think another way of looking at the Aristotelian standpoint would be to say that it acknowledges the existence of things that exist. That way the circularity is more like a tautology than a fallacy.

Yesterday, while conversing with some of my relations, we ended up on subject of The Wizard Of Oz, and one of my cousins put forth the following argument:

Witches can be killed if they are crushed by a house, as seen when Dorothy's house killed the Witch of the East. A human would also be killed if a house were to fall on them. In addition, being shot can kill a human. Therefore, when the Witch of the West appeared, the musket-wielding Munchkins should have shot her and saved everyone a great deal of trouble.

With H representing Houses Falling From The Sky, G representing Guns, W representing Things That Kill Witches and P representing Things That Kill People, his argument look like this:

All H are W

All H are P

All G are P

--------------

All G are W

And once you replace H with Cats, W with Mammals, P with Animals, and G with Lizards, it's clear that the argument is invalid.

I realize this is a bit behind what we are doing in class just now, but I thought it might be notable since it was the first time I had a personal encounter with a fallacy that was formal rather than informal.

A somewhat atrocious piece of writing

I had to read this essay for my writing class. I found it very difficult to get through. The entire thing was basically one long Appeal to Vanity, though in a 'You don't want to be part of [x group],' rather than vice versa. The best example is in the first sentence of paragraph 15: "Now that you have distinguished yourself morally from the people who put their vintage cars ahead of a child's life..."

This got me thinking - is it an Ad Hominem to dismiss someone because they commit obvious logical fallacies, or would this be justified?

More fallacious arguments

This grove of fruit trees grows both oranges and lemons. Therefore, each individual tree grows both oranges and lemons.

You can't prove that the suitcase full of money that I found in the alleyway doesn't belong to me. Therefore, it's mine.

A fallacy

Once again, posting on Sunday; I was so preoccupied with the essay that I didn't have a chance to blog before now.

Inspired by Trevor's post:

If all dinosaurs are now dead, then they are mortal beings

All dinosaurs are now dead

All dinosaurs are mortal beings

All humans are mortal beings

---------------------------------

All humans are now dead

A useful trick

Interpret the words formal and informal literally - as 'related to form' and 'not related to form,' respectively. This makes it easier to remember the difference between formal and informal fallacies - formal fallacies have to do with the form of the argument and informal fallacies have nothing to do with the form.

Casual (mis)use of technical terms, and thoughts on time

I used to use the retort "your argument is invalid" frequently in casual conversation, but I recently realized that continuing to use it would require far too much work: analyzing the other person's statement to determine whether it is an argument at all, then if it is deductive, then testing for validity... And in any case, that would take up enough time that the conversation would have moved on by the time I got through that process.

Boarding an entirely different train of thought, Ryan Walters raised some interesting questions about time in his post from last week. It made me wonder how people began measuring time. What sort of logical process led humans to break down the natural rhythm of sunrises and sunsets into 24 equal parts, and each of those parts into 60 (almost more arbitrary than 24) smaller sections? Or did they go the other way, somehow deciding how long a second was, and working their way up? For that matter, was logic even involved at all?