Actually don't. I'm not interested in mental gamesmanship. Instead, what I plan to bring to this blog are examples of crazy talk in the mediated world, for the purpose of encouraging at least the attention to practical reasoning. There's too much blather and jibber-jabber on the web where people don't even attempt to make sense.
We all (well, except for me ;-)) make reasoning mistakes, and there are few perfect logical arguments. But here's the thing: For all its shortcomings, logic is really all we have available to make good decisions . And it normally works if applied appropriately. I'm not talking about mapping out syllogisms. I'm just advocating trying to say and believe things that make sense.
Now I know that a lot of people are revolted by the thought of logic. So let me point out a couple of things:
- How will you make a decision without logic? Plenty of people have held dearly to their strong emotions, intuition,or faith, only to have it fail them horribly. For example, an 11-year old girl recently died from treatable diabetes because her parents thought prayer alone was going to heal her. Just because somebody believes something strongly doesn't make it so.
- Now for a little trick I learned from Jurgen Habermas. Suppose someone comes up to you and this conversation occurs:
THEM: "You can't determine anything by logic. You just have to have faith that it works."
YOU: "Say what? Why is that?"
THEM: "I just know it."Even though it seems like they have won, they have actually fallen into the trap.
YOU: "But aren't you trying to use logic now to convince me to believe you?"
Ta-Da! The other person has committed a performative contradiction, which you have wisely highlighted. It is in fact paradoxical to argue against using logic because to do that you have to use logic.
So this blog is a sort of gentle encouragement to at least recognize the value of reason. Seems like reasoning should be obvious, but you don't have to read more than a few comments on a political blog to find out its not the case.
