Why Fallacies are False 001 -- Introduction

I wish I didn’t feel compelled to do this, but people with the best and worst intentions in the world both promulgate fallacies.

It’s partly because nobody taught them about it. Even people who get through college – even people who teach college as I show on another thread – write fallacies.

So how can you expect people who didn’t get to college to do any better?

And it’s partly because so few people pull their education up by the bootstraps. One of my favorite actors, Burt Lancaster, grew up in the New York slums, but he had access to libraries run by the Settlement House program – and he used them. He read everything he could get hold of and got good grades at a challenging high school – but he went to college as a jock and got treated like one. That was no challenge, so he and his best friend ran away and joined the circus – and the rest is history, except that he never stopped reading. One reason he annoyed people in Hollywood so much, is that they expected him to play lover boys, cowboys and athletes, and leave the intellectual roles to people like Orson Welles. Burt was having none of that and turned in one of the most impressive histories of films in the history of films.

I have read obsessively since I taught myself at the age of four. I studied four languages, two in high school and two in college – but I learned five outside college because they were the gateway to things I wanted to know. Rene Descartes agreed that languages are the beginning of knowledge, but he went on to say that academe keeps chewing over the same old fat and there are new things on the horizon, that they will never have anything to do with. This is in his Discours sur la Method and boy was he right.

He was talking about the liberal arts, and that’s where I find the fallacies. When you come to STEM, the method promulgated by Descartes has two important features. One is, following the method means you will usually pass the Test of Occam’s Razor. The other, which Descartes might not have expected, is that STEM fits together around the edges.

But people whose concentration is run out of the Liberal Arts department at a university are, like their forebears, pipelined. So you have archaeologists who ignore radiocarbon testing, hard evidence about how old material at their site is, or historians who ignore the DNA results of the Human Genome Project in discussing the origin and movements of populations.

And especially in two fields you have people with zero cross-fertilization. The professor whose dissertation showed me that Biblical Hebrew does not work the way everybody else teaches it, never heard of Axel Olrik until I told him in an email. So he was not capable of realizing that some of his grammar has the same functions as Olrik identified structures for in oral narratives. I have a thread on that.

What’s more, in Classical Greek studies, people are just starting to realize that there’s an aspectual sense in its verb system that applies, not just to usage, but to the features of conjugation. Their problem is, they fail to understand the Test of Occam’s Razor. They have built a terribly complex structure including both versions, which is the opposite of the Test. Worse yet, they do not use examples of surviving text to support their claims, which fails the other side of the Test – and some of the surviving data contradicts their claims. I have a thread about that.

So scholars of Classical Greek not only are pipelined to ignore anything outside their field, they can’t support themselves from within their field.

People in the 21^st century have the world’s greatest library and learning tool at their fingertips, and they don’t use it. The third reason why I should not have to write this thread is that there are two great resources on fallacies, Gary Curtis’ Fallacy Files website, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is peer-reviewed. But since people don’t know what fallacies are to begin with, they don’t do their homework.

So here I am, about to put up a third site. While hits on my blog pages are approaching 400,000, the number of daily hits probably reflects people ripping down posts from the blog onto storage, not people actually reading the posts. But I’m going to do this anyway. I feel obligated.

Next, I'll talk about why fallacies are not just word games.