The North West Passage

Here’s a progress report on the state of “Clear and Present Thinking”

As progress on the project continues, its final shape becomes easier to see. Like any writing project, this textbook might end up looking slightly different than what it was originally planned to be. But there’s an easy way to see how it is changing: simply compare the proposed table of contents as it appears on the KStart page, to the table of contents I’m posting below, right here.

You’ll notice that in this updated table of contents, some items have a checkmark beside them. that indicates a section which is done, or close to being done. Items without a checkmark are still in the planning stages.

This gives you a chance to send me a suggestion or two about other topics that you think should be covered which aren’t mentioned here. Or, you could ask me questions about how I’ve covered items that I’ve indicated are done, or mostly done.

Take a look, and let me know what you think!

…

1. Questions, World Views, and Other Basics
What is thinking? ✓
Why is good thinking important? ✓
Is logic difficult? ✓
Where does thinking happen? ✓
The Intellectual Environment ✓
Questions and Problems ✓
What is a World View? (Schweitzer) ✓
Evaluating Different World Views ✓
Value Programs (McMurtry) ✓
World Views, Civilization, and Conflict (Huntington) ✓

2. Habits of Good and Bad Thinking
Self-Interest ✓
Saving Face ✓
Peer Pressure ✓
Stereotyping and Prejudice
Excessive Skepticism ✓
Relativism (Personal and Cultural)
Willed Ignorance ✓
Curiosity
Self-Awareness
Courage
Healthy Skepticism ✓
Autonomy
Simplicity; Ockham’s Razor ✓
Precision; Crafting Good Definitions ✓
Subtlety
Consistency
Open-ness; Principle of Charity ✓

3. Basics of Argumentation
Propositions ✓
Other Parts of Arguments ✓
Modus Ponens ✓
Modus Tollens
Standard Syllogism
Hypothetical Syllogism
Disjunctive Syllogism ✓
Adjunction
Constructive Dilemma
Destructive Dilemma
Inductive Generalization
Statistical Syllogism
Induction by shared properties
Induction by shared relations
Scientific method (short version) ✓

4. Reasonable Doubt
Its definition, and circumstances that warrant reasonable doubt ✓
Contradictory claims ✓
Bias and Self-deception ✓
Lack of evidence / Weak or Inconclusive Evidence ✓
Conspiracy Theories ✓
Believing and/or Doubting the Experts ✓
Personal experiences / Doubting One’s Own Eyes and Ears ✓
Scams, Frauds, and Confidence Tricks ✓
Disinformation and Propaganda
Special matters related to the news media.
Special maters related to advertising and and mass-persuasion.

5. Fallacies
Definition of a fallacy; faulty Premises; faulty Inferences; fallacies of Irrelevance
Appeal to authority
Accident
Amphiboly
Composition
Division
Red Herring
Straw Man
Ad Baculum / Appeal to Force
Ad Misercordiam / Appeal to Emotion or Pity
Ad Hominem
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc / False Cause
Non Sequitor
Appeal to Tradition / Novelty
Undistributed Middle
Naturalistic Fallacy
Complex Question / Loaded Question
Equivocation
Appeal to Ignorance
Appeal to popularity
Appeal to Authority
Q Begging
False Dilemma
Hasty Generalization
Faulty Analogy

6. Games, Paradoxes, and Strategic Reasoning
What Games Are
Prisoner’s Dilemmas

7. Thinking about Ethics
Arguments that include moral propositions ✓
Utilitarianism ✓
Deontology (Kant) ✓
Distributive Justice (Rawls) ✓
Virtue ✓
Professional issues (‘best practices’, etc.)

8. Thinking about Religion
Why reasoning about religion is important
Some definitions: animism, polytheism, monotheism, atheism, etc. ✓
Some bad arguments for why God(s) exist: (q-begging fallacy, appeal to authority fallacy, etc.)
Some better arguments for why God(s) exist: (the Ontological argument, Pascal’s Wager, etc)
How to recognise, and avoid, a cult!

9. Thinking about politics
What is power? ✓
Hard power, soft power ✓
What is Left, Right, and Centre?

10. Thinking about Economics
The capitalist cycle (investment -> product -> consumer sale etc) ✓

11. Thinking about Science
Scientific Method explained again ✓
Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts (Kuhn) ✓
Epistemic Values (Popper) ✓
How Scientists Negotiate With Each Other

12. Thinking About The Arts

13. Glossary

Here’s another selection from the draft of “Clear and Present Thinking”.

Of all the things that people do when they get involved in their intellectual environments, perhaps the most important things they do are identify problems and ask questions.
Usually, discussions in one’s intellectual environment are prompted by a need. And often, this need takes the form of a problem which can’t be solved until you gather some kind of information. Sometimes the problem is practical: that is, it has to do with a specific situation in your everyday world. Perhaps you have an unusual illness and you want to recover as soon as possible. Perhaps you are an engineer and your client wants you to build something you’ve never built before. Perhaps you just want to keep cool on a very hot day and your house doesn’t have an air conditioner. The problem could also be theoretical: in that case, it has to do with a more general issue which impacts your whole life altogether, but perhaps not any single separate part of it in particular. Religious and philosophical questions tend to be theoretical in this sense. You might have a decision to make which will change the direction of your life irreversibly. You might want to make up your mind about whether God exists. You might be mourning the death of a beloved friend. You might be contemplating whether there is special meaning in a recent unusual dream. You might be a parent and you are considering the best way to raise your children.
The philosopher Karl Jaspers described a special kind of problem, which he thought was the origin of philosophical thinking. He called this kind of problem a Grenzsituationen, a “limit situation”.

Limit situations are moments, usually accompanied by experiences of dread, guilt or acute anxiety, in which the human mind confronts the restrictions and pathological narrowness of its existing forms, and allows itself to abandon the securities of its limitedness, and so to enter new realm of self-consciousness. (Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy, online edition, entry on Karl Jaspers.)

In other words, a limit situation is a situation in which you meet something in the world that is unexpected and surprising. It is a situation that more or less forces you to acknowledge that your way of thinking about the world so far has been very limited, and that you have to find new ways to think about things in order to solve your problems and go ahead with your life. This acknowledgement, according to Jaspers, produces anxiety and dread. But it also opens the way to new and (hopefully!) better ways of thinking about things.
In response to such problems, we ask questions. Perhaps more than the problems do, it is the questions which get the mind thinking. Questions express doubts, identify problems, call for solutions, and demand answers. Indeed we might not fully understand the nature of a given problem until we have asked a decent question about it. Moreover, the best answers to one’s questions tend to become ideas, beliefs, propositions, theories, arguments, and world views. These, in turn, guide our lives and our choices in numerous ways.
But some kinds of questions are better than others, and it can be important to discern the difference between the two.

Good questions are:
Tenacious. We cannot easily put them away or ignore them.
Direct. They address the actual problem which you are facing, and not a tangential or unrelated issue.
Searching. When you pose a good question, you don’t already know the answer. You might have a rough or vague idea of what the answer might be, but you don’t know for sure yet, and you are committed to finding out. Or, you might have several possible answers, and you want to find out whether any of them are good answers, or which one is the best.
Systematic. Although you don’t have a clear answer to your question, your question is associated with a method or a plan, even if only a loose one, with which you can search for an answer. In other words: even when you don’t know the answer, you still know what you’re doing, and you’re not scrambling in the dark.
Useful. The process of answering a good question actually helps you solve your problem.
Open. There might be more than one possible correct answer. (There can also be more than one possible wrong answer.) With several answers to your question, you also have to do a lot more more work to find which of them is the best one, if your circumstance requires you to pick just one answer. But that work is ultimately very useful, and almost always leads us to better quality answers.
Fertile. Some of the better answers to the question prompt more good questions. In this way, good questions can keep the mind active for a long time.
Controversial. A good question is often one which addresses itself to beliefs, ideas, ways of living, etc., which people do not normally question. It may even be a question which no one else, or very few others, have ever asked before. This does not necessarily mean that the questioner is being aggressive or confrontational. It should still be a searching question, and a direct question, and so on. But with a controversial question, the questioner often places herself at odds, in some way, with those who are committed to the beliefs being questioned, or who might not want the question asked at all. Indeed a controversial question often places the questioner in some danger by the very act of asking it. That danger might be social: by asking the question, she might risk being cold-shouldered or ostracized by her friends. Or it might be physical: by asking the question, she might place herself at odds against politically or economically powerful people and institutions.

The more of these qualities which a question has, the better a question it is. There are also several kinds of bad questions. Here are a few examples:

Rhetorical questions. This is a question in which the questioner already knows the answer, and is trying to prompt that same answer from his or her listeners. Although rhetorical questions can be interesting and perfectly appropriate in poems or storytelling, in a nonfiction text or in a more ‘straight talk’ conversation they are stylistically weak. Rhetorical questions are often plain statements of belief or of fact merely phrased in the form of a question. So it is generally better to state the belief or the fact directly, as a proposition. Also, it’s always possible that someone else will answer the rhetorical question in an unexpected way. Rhetorical questions can also be used as forms of verbal aggression. They position the questioner as the controller of the debate, and they place others on the defensive, and make it harder for them to contribute to the debate as an equal.

Leading questions: These are questions which are designed to manipulate someone into believing something that they may or may not otherwise believe. Normally, leading questions come in a series, and the series is designed to make someone predisposed to respond to the last question in the series in a particular way. Leading questions are often used in a form of political campaigning called ‘push polling’ (to be discussed in the chapter on Reasonable Doubt).

Loaded or Complex Questions: A loaded question is one which cannot be given a straight answer unless the person answering it accepts a proposition that he or she might not want to accept. (More discussion of this kind of question appears in the chapter on Fallacies.) Like rhetorical questions, loaded questions can also be used aggressively, to control a debate and to subordinate the other contributors.

Obstructionist questions: This is the kind of question that someone asks in order to interrupt someone else’s train of thought. Obstructionist questions often look like good questions, and in a different context they may be perfectly reasonable. But the obstructionist question is designed distract a discussion away from the original topic, and prevent the discussion from reaching a new discovery or a clear decision. Typically, the obstructionist question asks about definitions, or pushes the discussion into a very abstract realm. It may also involve hair-splitting the subtle variations of the meaning of certain words. In this sense an obstructionist question is much like the fallacy of ‘red herring’.

Framing Questions: There’s probably no such thing as a question which doesn’t frame the answers which flow from it, even if only in a small way. But it is possible to ‘cook’ or to ‘rig’ a question such that the only direct answers are ones which remain within a certain limited field of presuppositions, or within a certain limited world view. Framing questions may even share some of the qualities of good questions: they might allow more than one answer, or they might open the way to further questions. But they are also like loaded questions in that they presuppose a certain way of thinking or talking about the topic, and you can’t give a straight answer unless you reply within the bounds of that way of thinking and talking. The framing question uses specific words, terms, and phrases to limit the way a certain topic can be discussed.

Empty Questions. An empty question is one which has no answer. Sometimes people will declare a question to be empty when in fact it is ‘open’: but a question with more than one possible good answer is not an empty question. So it is important to understand the difference between the two. A question is empty when all its answers lead to dead ends: when, for instance, the best answers are neither true nor false, or when the question cannot be given a straight answer at all.4 Such questions might be interesting for artistic or religious or similar purposes, and they can be the basis for some beautiful poems and meditations, or some very enjoyable comedy. But reasoning about such questions in a logical or systematic way doesn’t produce any new discoveries. An empty question cannot tell you anything you don’t already know.

One final quality of good questions that deserves notice is this one. The answer to a good question can be expressed in the form of a proposition. But we will see more about propositions a little later on.

One of the characters in “Fellwater 2” (which I finished writing about a fortnight ago) makes the following statement:

One of these days, you will wake up and realise the people don’t want knowledge or enlightenment. What they want is validation. And that is what I provide! People want to be told that whatever they already believe, no matter how silly, is the truth. They want forgiveness for their sins, success for their endeavours, and the admiration of others. But they don’t want to change their lives to earn those things. And they don’t want to be told that they’re wrong, and they don’t want to be told what to do. They want to be told that what they are already doing is all that they have to do, and nothing more. Look at the kind of people we recruit into the organization. Petty artists, eco-activists, old hippies, perpetual college students, all singing to the wind about the moral superiority of their lifestyles. Bottom-feeders, that’s what they really are! See how they scrape a living for themselves by selling painted seashells and demanding their entitlements. Bottom-feeders! But they, too, have their pride, and whoever validates their pride will hold them in the palm of his hand.

Well, friends, is the speaker right? Or wrong? Or partially both? What do you think?

Most days, when it’s late afternoon and the sun has got down to an angle to where it shines right in my face when I’m sitting at my desk, I go for a walk in the woods. I have a semi-regular route that is about 11 kms long and takes me an hour and 45 minutes to walk it, more or less. Today, when I emerged from the woods, at the end of my walk, this is the sight that faced me:

And that shot captures less than half as many as were in the sky at the time. It was a surprisingly beautiful sight!
These balloons were part of Gatineau’s annual Montgolfier Festival. (Dear Ottawa folks: there’s a lot of cool stuff on this side of the river. And it’s closer to downtown than Westboro. Just saying.) And so I stood around for a while to watch them pass. It was really quite delightful, and did much to raise my spirits on a day when I had been feeling rather blue. I’ve never been in one of these before, and I wondered what it would be like.

This one got really close, and was falling rather rapidly:

I could see the flames of the gas burner clearly and loudly, and see the people on board shouting something in French at me. Because I am a (mostly) unilingual anglophone, I shouted back the most useful French sentence I knew: “Je ne parlez pas Francais”. So someone else on the baloon shouted in English, “Catch us!” They needed some extra weight to slow them down. So I sprinted as fast as I could – not easy for me, since I injured my ankle rather badly a few years ago – and jumped on the side. The breeze still blew the balloon all the way across a parking lot, and tipped it on its side. So I ended up riding on “top”. But the balloon stopped before crashing into anything. I got off when the balloon was flat, and then I shook the pilot’s hand and went back home.

I have to say, that was perhaps the most fun thirty seconds of my summer. Next year’s festival, maybe I’ll take a longer ride than just across the parking lot.

The following is a short, perhaps superficial sample of “World Views, Questions, and Other Basics” from “Clear and Present Thinking”, the logic text that I’ve been working on all summer. I call this “Sample 2” because the “Diversity Quotient” exercise was really the first sample, although even I didn’t know it at the time. 🙂 Please note that this is still a first draft, and I haven’t shown it to an editor or a peer-reviewer yet. So it is liable to have a few spelling errors, and may well be open to improvement. But since three or four project contributors have asked to see sample chapters as the work progresses, I thought I’d start with this little tidbit. I recognise that project contributors want to be sure that I have not been sitting on my hands. But I don’t want to “give away” too much before it’s really ready to be shown to the public. So, more will follow, in the weeks and months to come. And the complete first draft should be available in December, if all goes according to plan.
Cheers!
Brendan.

1. What is Thinking?

What is thinking? It may seem strange to begin a logic textbook with this question. ‘Thinking’ is perhaps the most intimate and personal thing that people do. Yet the more you ‘think’ about thinking, the more mysterious it can appear. It is the sort of thing that one intuitively or naturally understands, and yet cannot describe to others without great difficulty. Many people believe that logic is very abstract, dispassionate, complicated, and even cold. But in fact the study of logic is nothing more intimidating or obscure than this: the study of good thinking.

Before asking what good thinking is, we might want to ask a few questions about thinking as such. Let’s say that thinking is the activity of the mind. It includes activities like reasoning, perceiving, explaining, inventing, problem-solving, learning, teaching, contemplating, knowing, and even dreaming. We think about everything, all the time. We think about ordinary practical matters like what to have for dinner tonight, all the way to the most abstract and serious matters, like the meaning of life. You are thinking, right now, as you read this sentence.

Some may wish to draw a distinction between thinking and feeling, including sense-perception, emotional experience, or even religious faith. Some might want to argue that computers, or animals, are capable of thinking, even if their way of thinking is somehow different from the way human beings think. And some might say that the question is an absurd one: everyone knows what thinking is, because everyone ‘thinks’, all the time, and everyone can ‘feel’ themselves thinking. We are somehow ‘aware’ of thoughts in the mind, aware of information and knowledge, aware of memories, and aware of likely future probabilities, and so on. Thinking is a first-order phenomenological insight: it’s a bit like knowing what the colour ‘red’ looks like, or knowing the taste of an orange. You know what it is, but you probably have an awfully hard time describing or defining it.

Thinking, in this way of ‘thinking’ about thinking, is an event. it is something done, something that takes place, something that happens.

You might hear people say that they are no good at math, or at computer programming, or at some other kind of activity that requires a lot of concentration. When I was in high school, I used to believe that I was very bad at math. I resented going to math classes, and so I didn’t study, and (therefore!) scored poorly on tests and exams. But one day I found myself making my own video games on my Commodore 128 computer, all on my own, with no other help besides the dictionary of commands. Then a few years later I was coding HTML scripts by hand, which I learned to do by reading the source codes of other people’s web sites. I eventually realised that I was actually rather good at math, or rather that I could be really good at it if I really wanted to be.

Thinking rationally and critically is much the same. It’s actually fairly easy, once you get into the habit of doing it. Most people are born with an ability to perform complex computational tasks built right into their brains. It’s true that we often make mistakes when we try to calculate big numbers just in our heads, or when we try to calculate probabilities without much information to start with. Nonetheless, the ability to think deliberately, precisely, and analytically is a large part of what it is to be human. Indeed every human language, all 8,000 or so of them, have complex computational operators built right into the grammar and syntax, which we use to speak and be understood about anything we may want to talk about. When we study logic, we study (among other things) those very operators as they work themselves out, not only in our thinking, but also in our speaking to each other, and in many of the ways we relate to each other and the world. Logic examines not what people ought to think, but it examines how we actually do think — when we are thinking clearly!

2. Why is good thinking important?

A lot of people think of philosophy as something rather vague, wishy-washy, or simplistic. You’ll hear people quote a line from a popular song or movie, and then they’ll say “That’s my philosophy.” But there’s a lot more to it than that; and a person who merely repeats a popular saying and calls it philosophy has not been doing enough work. Philosophical questions are often very difficult questions, and they demand a lot of effort and consideration and time.

Good and bad thinking are very different from each other. Yet some people might feel personally threatened by this distinction. Your thoughts are probably the most intimate and the most precious of all your possessions. Your mind, indeed, is the only part of you that is truly ‘yours’, and cannot be taken away from you. Thus if someone tells you that your thinking is muddled, confused, unclear, or just plain mistaken, then you might feel very hurt, very offended. [Sidebar: Note how this paragraph builds an argument…]

But your thinking certainly can be muddled or confused. Normally, bad quality thinking happens when your mind has been ‘possessed’, so to speak, by other people, and made to serve their purposes instead of your own. Here’s how that can happen. In your life so far, you have gathered a lot of beliefs about a lot of different topics. You believe things about who you are, what the world is like, where you belong in the world, and what to do with your life. You have beliefs about what is good music and bad music, what kind of movies are funny and what kind are boring, whether it’s right or wrong to park your car in the wheelchair spot, whether it’s right or wrong to get a tattoo. You have beliefs about more social or political issues too, such as:

– Is wind power preferable to nuclear power?
– Who should you vote for? (Or should you protest your vote, and not vote at all?)
– Should you get married and have children some day?
– Can the police be trusted?
– Is there a god?

These beliefs came from somewhere. Most of you probably gathered these beliefs during your childhood. You learned them from your family, especially your parents, your teachers at school, your piano instructor or your karate instructor, your scout group or guide group leader, your priest, your medical doctor, your friends, and just about anybody who had any kind of influence in your life. There is nothing wrong with learning things from other people this way; indeed, we probably couldn’t get much of a start in life without this kind of influence. But if you have accepted your beliefs from these sources, and not done your own thinking about them, then they are not your beliefs, and you are not truly thinking your own thoughts. They are, instead, someone else’s thoughts and beliefs, occupying your mind. If you believe something only because someone else taught it to you, and not because you examined those beliefs on your own, then in an important sense, you are not having your own thoughts. And if you are not having your own thoughts, then you are not living your own life, and you are not truly free.

Some people might resist studying logic for other reasons. They may prefer to trust their intuition or their “gut feelings” as a source of knowledge. I’m always very curious about such people. Do they think that logic is dispassionate and unemotional, and that logical people end up cold-hearted and emotionless, like certain Star Trek characters such as Spock, or The Borg? Do they find their intuitive beliefs so gratifying that they cannot allow anything to interfere with them? Do they worry that they may have to re-evaluate their beliefs and their lives, and perhaps change their lives as a result of that re-evaluation? That may be true for some people, if not for all of them. But let me say that when your beliefs are grounded in reason, the quality of your inner life will be far, far better, in ways like these:

– You will be in greater conscious control of your own mind and thoughts.
– It will be harder for advertising, political propaganda, peer pressure, or other forms of psychological manipulation to affect you.
– You will be able to understand difficult, complex, and challenging things a lot easier, and with a lot less anxiety.
– You will be able to understand things in a more comprehensive and complete way.
– You will be better able to identify the source of problems, whether practical or personal, and better able to handle or solve those problems.
– You will feel much less frustrated or upset when you come across something that you do not understand.
– You will be better able to plan for the future, compete for better paying or more prestigious jobs, and to gather political power.
– Tragedies, bad fortune, stress, and other problems in life will be much easier to deal with.
– You will find it easier to understand other people’s feelings and other people’s points of view, and you will be better able to help prevent those differences from becoming conflicts.
– You will get much more pleasure and enjoyment from the arts, music, poetry, science, and culture.
– You may even enjoy life more than you otherwise would.

Let me add that the use of reason doesn’t shut out one’s feelings, or the benefit of the arts or of human relationships, or any of the things that make life enjoyable and fun. Indeed in classical and mediaeval philosophy Reason was said to be the very presence of God within the human soul. It is by means of reason that a human being could get inside the mind of God, and obtain an experience of eternity. Reason can be a spiritual thing. But, alas, I’ll have to discuss that prospect in more detail another time.

3. Is logic difficult?

Here’s a very short exercise which may help to show you that you already have within your mind everything you need to understand logic and critical reasoning. Consider the following two sentences:

1. All men are mortal.
2. Socrates is a man.

As almost anyone can see, these two sentences have a relationship to each other. For one thing, there’s a topic of discussion which appears in both of them: ‘men’. Both sentences also follow the same grammatical structure: they name an object and they name at least one property that belongs to, or can be attributed to, that object. But they also have another, more subtle relation to each other. That subtle relation tells you what should follow next. Here are three possibilities:

a. Therefore, we’re having Greek tonight!
b. Therefore, Socrates is a nerd.
c. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

To most people, the answer is so obvious that I don’t need to state which one it is. That’s because logical and rational thinking, as already mentioned, is something we all naturally do, all the time.

That example, it may interest you to know, was used by the philosopher Aristotle more than two thousand years ago, and it is still a favourite among philosophy teachers today: it’s our way of tipping the hat to our predecessors.

Let’s look at two more examples, which might show a little more of how that subtle relation works.

1. All the houses built in that neighbourhood are post-war bungalows.
2. My house is in that neighbourhood.
3. Therefore —
a. My house is a rotting, decrepit shack.
b. My house is a grand chateau.
c. Long John Silver was a rotten businessmen.
d. My house is a post-war bungalow.

1. Every morning, if it is going to be a sunny day, the rooster in the yard crows.
2. Tomorrow is probably going to be a sunny day, just like the last few days.
3. Therefore —
a. That rooster is more reliable as the TV weather man.
b. One of these days, I’m going to kill that horrible creature!
c. My old clock on the wall is a family heirloom.
d. Tomorrow morning, that rooster will probably crow again.

1. If the surprise birthday present is a Harry Potter book, it will be a great gift.
2. The surprise birthday present is a Harry Potter book.
3. Therefore —
a. I’m going to hide in my bedroom for a few hours.
b. I really owe the person who gave it to me a big thank-you!
c. I have to fix the leaky roof over the kitchen today.
d. It’s a great gift.

In each of these examples, the best answer is option D. So long as the first two statements are true, then the third one, option D, must be true. You also know that in both examples, option C doesn’t belong. It has nothing to do with the two statements that came before it. To claim that option C should come next is not logical. Perhaps option C would make sense if it was part of a joke, or a very complicated discussion of housing development plans for pirates, or inheritance laws involving clocks and farm animals, or how author J.K. Rowling doesn’t like leaky houses. But in these examples, we do not have that extra information. Going only with the information that we have been given, option C cannot be the correct answer. The best answer, in each case, is option D. Of all the four options offered here, option D has the strongest support from the statements that came before it.
But look again at options A and B, in all three examples. These options were not as silly as option C. They might follow correctly and logically from the statements that came before them, if only we had a little bit more information. Without your deliberate, conscious awareness, your mind probably filled in the blank space for you with statements like these ones:

1. All the postwar bungalows in this neighbourhood are rotting, decrepit shacks.
2. Maybe the rooster is really, really annoying!
3. The reason I’ll be hiding in my bedroom is because I will want to read the book without anybody disturbing me.
4. People who give great gifts deserve to be thanked.

None of these statements appeared among the initial premises of the argument. Nothing in the initial premises told you anything about these possibilities. They come from outside the argument as presented so far. But that subtle relation between statements allowed you to add something consistent and plausible to the argument in order to move the argument from the premises you had, to conclusions A or B. You might even fill the space with more than one sentence to make the move, as we did in the third possibility above.

Logic is the study of relations among ideas like these. If you could handle these three examples here with ease, then you can handle everything else in this textbook just as easily.

This is a screenshot I just took of the front page of the government’s “War of 1812” educational website.

If you roll your mouse over the four people in the banner (on the web site, of course, not on my screenshot) their names come up.

All three of the white people are listed as “Hero / Heroine” of something. But Tecumseh is just a “War chief”.

So, government of Canada, is Tecumseh not a hero?

Here’s a little question for you.
.
Suppose, when you were in your younger years and your shining days, you had a collection of masks, some of gold and some with emerald eyes.
.
Suppose that one day, you liked the mask you were wearing so much that you wore it all day, and then you wore it again the next day, and all the next day too.
.
Suppose you never took it off, and you wore it so long that you forgot it was a mask.
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Which, then, would be your real face?
…

(My own photo of Venetian carnival performers, Annecy, France, February 2008)

Concerning the critics of my piece on “Humanist Paganism”, recently published on TWH, and how I responded to those critics.

I’ve been thinking about my words a little more carefully over the last few days, and I’ve consulted some friends of mine whose judgment I trust.

I am now reasonably convinced that my first responses to my critics were written in anger. This is partly because some of the critics were, at least to my eyes, obviously attacking a straw man, and doing so in a profoundly personal way: accusing me of “elitism”, for instance. It’s also the case that there’s a number of stressors in my personal life right now (which, if you don’t mind, I’ll not list here), and my frustration with those stressors was coming out in my responses. Add to this heady combination the fact that I live alone, and so I can’t turn to a friend sitting next to me to ask, “Hey, does this sound to you like it might be patronizing?”

The result is that my first responses to my critics were, shall I say, not very wisdom-loving. I have therefore removed them from my blog.

I think I’m in a better position now to understand why some critics felt aggrieved. As they saw it, I had implied that those whose paganism is primarily devotional and practical cannot be intellectual, too. Nothing of the sort was implied as far as I was concerned. But I think I see better now why some people felt that implication was there.

I do try to hold my writing to a high standard of research and rationality, although I hold my blog posts to a somewhat lesser standard than my books. My last book, CM/LF, had 284 footnotes, most of them from primary sources. OSV had sixteen pages of bibliography in it, also mostly primary sources. (Although it also had at least one colossal factual mistake, for which I’m still embarrassed). I think that reason and rationality is a spiritual thing, and that the pursuit of knowledge is one of the ways we can relate to the divine. But it’s fair to say my recent piece on TWH represented that view rather poorly.

I will take a few days, maybe a few weeks, to collect some sober second thought, and prepare a better discussion.

“Hallowstone” is the sequel to “Fellwater” [and was published on Amazon Kindle on 26th October]. At the time of writing this blog post, the first draft is 65,000 words (Fellwater, by way of comparison, was slightly more than 90,000 words). I just thought I would share this snippet from the text, since I wrote it in a flush of nostalgia for my home town, and my childhood. And I was curious if any of my readers have similar nostalgia for the landmarks of their own pre-teen lives.
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An entirely stunned Eric entirely failed to say anything entirely meaningful for an entire minute. All he could do was dart his eyes left and right, open and close his mouth, and press his fingers into the deepest of the bruises left there last night by someone calling herself Siobhan.

“What’s the matter with you,” said Cheryl. It was not a question.

“I gotta go,” Eric eventually stammered. He mounted his bicycle and trailed off in no particular direction. The streets of his home town suddenly seemed strange to him, although he knew them his whole life. There’s the Underground, and the Carriage House, and the Fellwater Mill Inn. There’s Andy’s barber shop: Andy with the long unpronounceable Greek name. And Macondo Used Book Store, just a few doors down. It felt good to remind himself of the things he knew were certain, and consistent, one year to the next. There’s the karate dojo that I went to as a teenager. One afternoon in the summer I helped my old sensei build it. And there’s a garden, right across the road, in a hole in the ground that used to be a children’s wading pool. There’s Lou’s Diner, where Lou sometimes gave us a scoop of ice cream for a loony, back when I was ten years old. There’s The Green Owl, that used to sell us fake daggers with collapsable plastic blades, and aerosol cans that shot strings of green foam. Familiar places, and friendly memories. But now – are any of these places what they appear to be? And the people I once knew – are any of them all that they appeared to be? What are their stories? Who are they really? Can anyone truly know? And what if they are not who they say they are? Would that mean my whole life so far has been lived in a kind of cave, with no knowledge of the reality, and no knowledge of my own ignorance, as well?

A friend of mine passed this link on to me, and asked me to comment:

Stepford Comes to the 21st Century: Preventing ‘Masculinity’ in Females by Matt Kelly, author of a blog called “Tranifesto“.

In this article, Kelly describes an in-vitro medical procedure that would prevent female children from developing masculine behavioral qualities. Kelly compares it to the case of The Stepford Wives; I think that comparison is a bit of an exaggeration, but nonetheless this procedure does raise some serious moral dilemmas.

Kelly claims that the treatment confirms patriarchal and hetero-normative values, and oppresses LGBT culture, and is therefore immoral. He also poses a rhetorical question near the end of his piece, concerning how the treatment might reduce diversity in humanity’s gene pool.

But I think this is only a specific (albeit dramatic) example of a more general case of what might be called “creating designer babies”, in which parents chemically and/or genetically determine what their child’s potentials and predispositions will be.

Designing one’s children like that is probably ethically acceptable in the case of preventing certain diseases. Children really are better off without Huntington’s, or Tay-Sachs. Their caregivers, and the medical establishment in the country where they live, are better off too, as they are less burdened.

But there’s a sliding scale here, and a spectrum of values. And as you go along its length, some medical traits blend into social, cultural, or psychological traits, which can be manipulated in a similar way, either to avoid something regarded as a liability, or to acquire something regarded as an asset. A child might be manipulated so that it will be taller, or will be better at sports, for instance.

Now it might be easy to see the difference between being born with a disposition for heart murmurs, and being born a woman with a disposition for tomboyish behaviour. One is clearly a medical condition; the other, clearly, is not.

But there are lots of shades of grey in between, where it’s harder to see the difference between a truly medical condition, and a cultural or psychological trait that could be advantageously manipulated with medical science.

Deafness is an example. Most people believe that children are better off with normal hearing. It seems objectively obvious that a deaf person is physically disabled. Yet some people who happen to be deaf believe that deafness is a culture, and not a disability. There are activists who are radically opposed to efforts to eliminate deafness on the grounds that it might make it impossible for them to perpetuate their unique culture, and hence a form of oppression.

Kelly’s argument is that some gender-identified behaviour traits are being treated like medical traits, when they probably shouldn’t be. But I think the real problem is much deeper than a problem about gender identity. And I think the oppression angle is perhaps not the true core of the problem either. A more serious issue is at work here, which has to do with identity in general. But gender identity is an issue so intimate and personal that critical thinking in its field tends to make people passionate and angry, and quick to accuse someone of oppressing them.

Here’s what I think is really at stake. Parents and doctors, wanting what they think is best for the child, will do what they think is in the child’s interest. One way to do that is to chemically and/or genetically manipulate the zygote or the foetus, to favour some traits or to suppress others. But aside from a few clear-cut cases of disease prevention, what parents and doctors are really doing is designing a child who will fit their own interests.

To explain further: medically manipulating a child’s potentials and dispositions effectively removes much of the “surprise” of parenting, such that the child does not grow into unexpected potentials and dispositions. Not that the child grows into someone else’s identity. The child still grows into his or her own identity. But that identity is other than what it would have been, had the medical manipulation not been done. It is an identity (well, to be specific, it’s a body of potentials and dispositions) deliberately chosen by the parents, and which, presumably, the parents want.

Having identified what is actually at stake in principle, now we can see the deep questions more clearly.

Question 1: Is it right or wrong for parents and doctors to determine a child’s identity, and thus to shape a child in the image of their values?

Question 2: If the answer to Q.1 is: “It’s wrong”, then might it also be wrong to “design” the child in a non-medical way, for instance by giving the child religion?

Question 3: Should people accept a certain amount of ignorance concerning who their children will become? And if so, why?

Question 4: Do we “oppress” a child by designing his or her potentials this way? Do we prevent the child from becoming truly “herself?” Presumably, if the effort is successful, the child won’t know the difference, and would have the same chance of a happy life as he or she would otherwise have had, all other things being equal. The answer to Q.4 is almost certainly “no”. Remember your Non-Identity Problem! But this leads to:

Question 5: A designer child would presumably not join a subculture of people who have the traits that were medically suppressed. So, do we oppress a group or a subculture in our wider society by removing from some children the physical, psychological, or genetic traits needed for membership in that group? And might a culture-affecting version of the Non-Identity Problem indicate that our answer here should be “no” as well? But if the answer is “yes”, then exactly who is doing the oppressing?

Question 6: Do we “blame the culture”, as Kelly says? And what exactly does that mean?

Question 7: The members of such a group probably have an interest in seeing their group continue to exist, with as much freedom as possible. But are parents under an obligation to perpetuate a group that their children might some day join? Is anyone obliged to perpetuate a group whose values they do not share?

Question 8: And the deepest of the relevant questions is, What kind of people should there be?

Postscript: here’s a great book that addresses that very question, by English philosopher Jonathan Glover, and you can download the whole thing in PDF for free. I met him once, and found him very knowledgeable and personally charming.