How does an irrational argument affect your opinion about the original premise?

Ever have a discussion with someone who believes in god? Was your opinion of the original premise affected?

Participation here has given me a new perspective on these matters.

When people are engaged in spirited debates, they are looking for validation of their feelings at that particular time and on that topic. Even if I agree with the person, I am aware they are looking for validation. It is emotionally driven at base. I assume if they run into a logical roadblock, or something derails them they did not expect, they will resort to ad hominems and other crazy stuff.

When people are asking and listening, making statements and describing them as opinions, then and only then are they looking for connection and understanding. In fact, I find people are often far more logical when they care little about a topic.

Well, due to my own views of the universe, even a premise can be irrational from the start, so at that point, I’m just trying to understand the other person’s view instead of their argument. I admit, sometimes I may disregard the argument altogether if the arguments and premise are too irrational.

No but I’ve abandoned tons of threads when particular members show up and start back-and-forthing with their self appointed expertises.

This is what I call a Dog Chasing Its Tail. A total waste of time. When it happens, it is time to move on to another question. My life is too short to burn finite energy on a hopeless cause.

I generally start to feel as if the premise is flawed since nobody can make a rational argument to support it. Note that “rational” does not mean that I have to agree, merely that you don’t come across as talking out of your ass.

Rational arguments made in defense of an opinion don’t guarantee that the opinion itself is rational and irrational arguments don’t necessarily mean the opinion is invalid. We have to take a lot on trust.

Solid logical principles are certainly worth learning. Thanks for the link. I’ve seen a few threads go awry, and have probably caused one or two, inadvertently, here and elsewhere. I see no point in continuing participation when this happens as I usually don’t see a way to bring it out of the muck.

OP: “In your eyes, does backing up one fallacious argument with a chain of additional logical fallacies strengthen or weaken the case for validity of the original premise?”

I’m not sure what you’re asking. Premises are true or false, not valid or invalid. Arguments, not premises, are valid or invalid.

“And it puts you at risk of holding beliefs and opinions that you reached not by rational thought but rather by reverse engineering—starting with a conclusion you wanted to be true, then trying to build a structure of premises and logical arguments to support it.”

Reverse engineering, literal or metaphorical, is not irrational. Remember doing proofs in geometry class? Given X, prove Y. You had to fill in the steps in between, and sometimes it was easier to work backwards from the conclusion. But you had to make sure each step was correct.

Are you really asking anything here or are you just sharing your links and exhorting us to be more logical?

@submariner The point about premises (and conclusions) being true or false and arguments being valid or invalid is quite on target, but the comment about reverse engineering is not as straightforward as you present it. I think @ETpro is worried about the ways in which starting with a belief can cause us to fall into confirmation bias. While it might be possible to honestly reverse engineer a rational argument for a given thesis, it is much easier to convince ourselves that our premises are true and our evidence reliable when we know in advance what we are trying to prove.

To use your own example of geometry proofs, were you ever given a problem that turned out to be insoluble (that is, it turned out that the conclusion towards which you were supposed to be working was actually unprovable, or even false, given the premises you had to work with)? I do this sometimes when I teach logic. Interestingly, it will rarely occur to students that the conclusion might simply not follow or be false. Some will even make up rules to get to the desired conclusion.

This is fine in a classroom and can be the setup to an excellent lesson, but it is perhaps less desirable when adults are trying to figure out whether or not everyone deserves the same rights or what sort of governmental and economic institutions we should have.

@city_data_forum Yes, I certainly have, and no, no one has provided a rational argument for their intital premise that I found persuasive.

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought I am sure you are right that having less invested in “being right” breeds more open debate. But fortunately for humanity, there are and always have been those individuals who are open to challenge, who are simply seekers of the truth. Without such people, the earth would still be flat and would still be the center of the solar system. The stars, Sun and Moon would still be firmly mounted in a dome revolving around the flat Earth. And if you sailed far enough from any shore, you would fall off the edge into the abyss.

I always hope that a few more people will join the Age of Reason. Even Einstein was initially outraged by quantum mechanics. “God doesn’t play dice.” he famously and wrongly insisted. But when faced with the evidence for quantum mechanics, he dropped his objections. Truth mattered far more to him than dogma.

@Blackberry The fact that an initial premise can be wrong is the whole point here. That is what logic and rationality are used to determine, is a starting premise valid or unsupported by logic?

@Neizvestnaya I’m not sure what question your “No.” is an answer to. But consider staying in such a thread as a silent observer and dispassionately testing who is right and who is wrong. If you run from every heated debate, you also end uo running from any challenge to your own pet positions—positions that just may prove wrong if you stay the course and listen to solid logic disproving that position.

@saint Of course, when two or more Jellys completely derail a debate with a back and forth of irrational proselytizing, it’s time to leave that thread. No light will be shed by cuch a discussion. I should have noted that in replying to @Imadethisupwithnoforethought and @Neizvestnaya as well. I would only suggest hanging in there when at least on party to the debate is remaining calm and using sound logic to refute false premises and bogus arguments to support them. In my experience, watching that kind of a back-and-forth is generally not a waste of time.

@Jjerv Ditto. That’;s just how it hits me.

@flutherother Are you suggesting the there is no cuch thing as objective reality? Is this statement debatable? Premise: A = 1 + 3. B = 2 + 2. A = B. C = 1×4; Therefore, A = C.

@DaphneT Any of us who have spent any time here have seen many (and probably caused a few) dead-end threads where positions hardened and it got mean spirited. Just saying the more we can confine ourselves to the search for truth instead of the search for validation of our current positions, and the use of reason and logic to uncover that truth, the less often that will happen.

@submariner Thanks for catching that. Believe it or not, I actually spent a fair amount of time looking for just such misuses of terms, and I missed that one. I meant to write, ”... case for the truth of the original premise?”

Regarding the “reverse engineering” issue, @SavoirFaire has articulated my concern exactly. Deciding that ancient aliens must have built the pyramids because the stones are so heavy and hard move, then searching the world for dots that don’t connect to “prove” the hypothesis is a far cry from accepting a set of givens in geometry class, then deriving a proof based on the givens.

@ETpro Here’s another introduction to logic site . Beware of learning logic from ideologues. The application of informal fallacies is an art, not a science, and people with an ax to grind, like those behind the skeptical site, may provide misleading examples.

On the “reverse engineering” thing—we all have convictions. There is no simple way to decide when to give them up. Where is the line between irrational obstinacy and insight? Show me a scientist who was proven right after being initially ridiculed and I’ll show you someone who used the form of reasoning you decry.

Your pyramid example is a case of jumping to conclusions, not reverse engineering. Having convictions doesn’t make one irrational, but there are better and worse ways of getting them in the first place. Unfortunately, logic alone won’t resolve this. Garbage in, garbage out.

@SavoirFaire If a problem is insoluble then by definition they won’t be able to get from the given to the conclusion, but working backwards as well as forwards may help them figure out that it is insoluble.

@submariner Thanks for the link. I have more comments to respond to yet tonight, but will read it tomorrow. As to your dismissal of my pyramid example, that’s just what reverse engineering in logic is about, jumping to a conclusion, then looking for arguments to support it.

@submariner Read my response again. The point about reverse engineering and insoluble problems is psychological. It’s not that working backwards is a bad strategy. Indeed, I said quite the opposite. The problem is that, even in straightforward cases of logic and mathematics, people will delude themselves rather than accept that the proof cannot be done. This tendency compounds itself when the conclusion matters to us. What @ETpro is worried about is not reverse engineering per se, but rather a common byproduct of it. The sentence with which you take issue could be rewritten, then, as follows:

“And it puts you at risk of holding beliefs and opinions that you reached not by rational thought, but rather by confirmation bias——starting with a conclusion you wanted to be true, then looking only for evidence that supports you and ignoring counterarguments.”

^If that’s what was intended, then I agree.

@submariner Yes, @SavoirFaire‘s interpretation is exactly what I meant. And thinks for the link to PhilisophyPages.com. I’ve had the time to poke around a bit, and it appears to be a great resource.

I am curions. Why do you feel the people involved in the Skeptics’ Guid to the Universe site are ideologues?

^These folks are neither extreme skeptics in the way the Pyrrho of Elis was, nor more moderate skeptics like David Hume was. They’re using skepticism as a sort of brand identity, but what they really seem to be offering is scientism. This colors their interpretation of their opponents’ arguments, especially the religious ones.

@submariner But not liking their examples doesn’t make their introduction to logic or their guide to fallacies mistaken. Not without throwing in a few fallacies of your own, at least.

^To take one example: the intelligent design theory may not be true, and it certainly doesn’t belong in a high school science class, but it is not based upon an appeal to ignorance, unless all hypothesizing is. That’s simply a defective example of the fallacy (indeed, characterizing the intelligent design theory that way commits the straw man fallacy), and it has nothing to do with whether or not I like it or not.

Perfect impartiality is impossible, and everyone has biases, but I don’t think I’m committing an ad hominem when I suggest that one can probably expect a better exposition of logic from a logic teacher than from someone who is mainly interested in promoting a particular worldview (ceteris paribus, blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda).

@submariner My concern was that you were dismissing the site via an ad hoiminem. I don’t find tha ragument against their position on intelligent design compelling. I think they are spot on in their analysis of it as an appeal to ignorance. It stands on belief that established falsehoods are true.

@submariner The most common popular arguments for intelligent design are based on an appeal to ignorance. “Science can’t explain _________ (frequently abiogenesis), therefore God did it” is everywhere. It’s no fallacy to point this out. And without knowing the backgrounds of the Skeptics Guide writers, it is premature—at the very least—to assume their logical credentials are insufficient for explaining the basics.

Maybe I don’t know enough about intelligent design theory. I thought it was just the latest version of Aquinas’s 5th way and Paley’s watchmaker argument. Creationism takes established falsehoods to be true, or denies established truths, but i.d. theory is not creationism.

I thought i.d. theory was just the claim that the order and apparent purposiveness of nature as a whole needs explanation, together with the hypothesis that an intelligent agent would account for that order and purposiveness. To make a hypothesis is not an appeal to ignorance. Hypothesizing is pointless unless we are ignorant about something.

This is not a scientific theory, because science doesn’t concern itself with questions of purpose in that sense, and because the hypothesis can’t be proven one way or the other. But science is not the only path to truth, and just because a question is not scientific does not mean it is not a genuine question (scientism denies this).

For any theory, there will be better or worse exponents of it. If one is going to critique the theory, as opposed to a particular exposition of it, then by the principle of charity one ought to take on the most coherent version of it. If one wants to use a particular exposition of it to illustrate a fallacy, then why not quote the individual who made the fallacy, and state it in his or her own words, instead of insinuating that everyone who subscribes to the theory makes the same error?

I made no assumption about the author’s credentials. I’m concerned that their goal of promoting their worldview (and selling podcasts and whatnot) is taking precedence over and interfering with their educational goal. Maybe not much; if this were the only logic site on the web, I’d recommend it too. But it’s not. Bottom line: there are better logic sites out there.

@submariner Both the Aquinas’ fifth way and Paley’s watchmaker argument are fallacious, so it would be no advance for intelligent design to claim allegiance with them. Indeed, I don’t think Aquinas intended the fifth way to be an independent argument in the first place. He was a much better philosopher than that, and the five ways make much more sense (though they still fail to convince) when taken as a collective argument.

Your account of what intelligent design theory asserts is also overly reductionist. No one denies that the apparent order of the universe needs explaining (though I disagree that there is any apparent purposiveness to nature as a whole rather than merely to parts within it). Moreover, no one denies that an intelligent agent could explain this order if such a being existed. Intelligent design as a theory involves—at the very least—an additional claim that such a being is the best or only possible explanation of this sort (due to putative failings of the theory of evolution by natural selection).

Regardless, you’ll note that I limited my comments to arguments. This is because fallacies do not apply to theories. As the most common arguments for intelligent design are fallacious, it is not unreasonable to use intelligent design as an example of a view that is typically defended fallaciously. Besides, there is no such thing as a critique of a theory absent that is not a critique of a particular exposition of it (or of several particular expositions of it). And when trying to combat ignorance in the public, it is most efficient to first address the arguments they are actually likely to make rather than those to which they might later resort. If your actual reason for believing X is that Y, talking about Z is idle for now.

Perhaps this is all moot, however, as you have now significantly weakened your thesis to the point that it no longer makes contact with what is actually claimed on behalf of the Skeptics Guide by @ETpro in the OP.

“If one is going to critique the theory, as opposed to a particular exposition of it, then by the principle of charity one ought to take on the most coherent version of it.”

“there is no such thing as a critique of a theory absent that is not a critique of a particular exposition of it (or of several particular expositions of it).”

I agree that this discussion is moot.

@submariner Since we are talking now about science, we should use proper nomenclature. Intelligent Design is not a theory, it is a hypothesis. If we care at all about the scientific method, it is not acceptable to promote a hypothesis to the status of a theory.

Ophir fox ache.
1. I.D. theory is not science.
2. The terms overlap.
3. Science does not have a monopoly on these terms.
4. Who put you in charge of deciding what’s acceptable?

@submariner I would guess the same person put me in charge of deciding what’s acceptable that nominated you for the job, namely, nobody that matters. :-)

Science, however, is a well defined word. If you don’t accept dictionary definitions, meaningful discussion is impossible. And by the definition of science, Intelligent Design is not science.

@submariner I think you have taken my statement out of context. I do not disagree with the principle of charity, and have defended it several times on Fluther and elsewhere. But at the same time, it is worthwhile to critique the versions of a theory that people actually hold. It just means that arguing is a multi-stage process. First you explain what’s wrong with the common version, then you explain how a suitably revised version still fails. Standard philosophical method.When giving examples, however, it is best to keep things simple.

No, since my opinions on a matter are usually determined by investigation, not debating. I’m usually wary of most mainstream ‘sceptical’ protocols since alot of the literature acquired in them borders on what I call pseudoscepticism. I’m usually wary of most mainstream ‘sceptical’ protocols since alot of the literature acquired in them borders on what I call pseudoscepticism. The conformation bias seems to be on par with most mainstream ‘sceptics’ and their tactics as well. I have ran into many logical fallacies as well trying to debate many issues not supported by mainstream science.

In fact there were numerous occasions where I couldn’t even debate some topics, merely because they were considered to be ‘irrational’ from the start, not because I didn’t have nothing to counter my opposition with. There were times (not exclusive to fluther) where I couldn’t even debate some of my topics, because of the conformation bias that my opposition seemed to suffer from as well. Some of these examples, like not attempting to debate or counter what I’ve posted but instead resorting to attacking me or considering my posts as too ‘irrational’ to even consider debating. I would suggest reading the link that I’ve provided if you’re going to respond to this post.