When someone else offers you reasons to change your mind, you should be convinced by those reasons if they are good reasons. That’s not exactly the same thing is being convinced by the person. Nobody likes to be bullied or coerced and we often resist the reasoning others offer because of this. It can feel … Continue reading Nothing Personal, it’s just Reasoning
One of the hazards of teaching philosophers like Descartes and Hume is that some students are too willing to embrace the skeptical claims and sit content with not being able to know. The idea that “It’s all just a matter of the individual’s subjective opinion” can be powerfully appealing to people who haven’t yet figured … Continue reading From Skepticism to Inquiry
We humans are very prone to suffer from a psychological predicament we might call “the security blanket paradox.” We know the world is full of hazards and like passengers after a shipwreck we tend to latch on to something for a sense of safety. We might cling to a possession, another person, our cherished beliefs, … Continue reading Note on Russell’s “Value of Philosophy”
Knowledge and understanding both require some critical thinking skill. But they aren’t the same thing and cultivating some understanding of how they differ is a worthy critical thinking exercise in itself. Here I’ll be concerned with propositional knowledge, knowledge of truths, as opposed to knowledge by acquaintance (knowing your friend) or know how (knowing how … Continue reading Critical Thinking Note 25: Knowledge and Understanding
Twenty four notes into this series, it has been a while since we’ve laid out the basics. So, time for another pass. Critical Thinking is basically about getting at truths and avoiding falsehoods as best we can. So how do we tell if a proposition is true? The simple answer is to examine the evidence … Continue reading Critical Thinking Note 24: Critical Thinking Basics
Imagine your love is forbidden. Imagine that the kinds of relationships that animate your affection, bring meaning to your life and inspire your devotion are deemed taboo, intolerable, unacceptable to polite company in your society. If you happen to be LGBT or Q, this may be less an exercise of your imagination than mere contemplation … Continue reading Critical Thinking Note 23: An Exercise for Your Moral Imagination
We live in unreasonable times. This much seems clear. It’s not just that people are easily wounded, indignant on a dime, or chronically resentful, though we see plenty of that. But people also seem to be unreasonable in the more literal sense of just plain being unresponsive to reasoning. The ideas that people are hopelessly … Continue reading Critical Thinking Note 21: Are we Incurably Unreasonable, Lazy, or Maybe just Poorly Trained?
A few brilliant recent essays in the NY times on these topics. I’ve become a admirer of Charles Blow’s work lately. He illuminates some important points in moral psychology in this editorial. The key insight here is that moral injury and moral outrage are not the same thing and should probably be kept separate. Blow … Continue reading Race and Political Correctness
Towards a Property Theoretic Account of Counterfactuals Some Good and Some Not so Good Arguments for Necessary Laws Indignation and Hatred Climate Change vs Nihilism
Here is a common sense view about truth. There is an external world that is the shared object of our experience and it is some ways but not others. To say the world is a certain way is just to say that it has some properties and lacks others. This is the standard issue common … Continue reading Why you might not want to say “What’s True for You isn’t Necessarily What’s True for Me”