Critical Thinking

Student Loan Forgiveness Disproportionally Helps the Rich?

2022-08-31T13:07:48+00:00

A common argument against student loan forgiveness consists of a value claim and an empirical claim. The former has to do with fairness and the latter has to do with who student loan forgiveness actually helps. Both points can be debated.

https://medium.com/illumination/student-loan-forgiveness-disproportionally-helps-the-rich-af66c05854b2

submitted by /u/JasonCPhD
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Animated flow chart to help people get clear on the fundamental concepts of reasoning.

2022-06-08T21:11:08+00:00

https://youtu.be/6Sg9zI-GNsI

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Fetuses Don't Have a Right to Your Body?

2022-05-09T21:05:32+00:00

Here is an analysis of a common pro-choice argument that is shared on the internet. The argument is that nobody has the right to use your body against your will to save their life. Therefore, fetuses don't have the right to use a woman's body against her will.

https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/fetuses-dont-have-a-right-to-use-your-body-7d6842b9ab?sk=27e2c2d1d7e74cd55469d71b3637f23a

submitted by /u/JasonCPhD
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Can this be identified as a type of argument fallacy?

2022-02-22T21:10:48+00:00

Person 1: Racism is a problem, so we should take these actions to assist people of color.” Person 2: “taking these actions and talking like this focuses on their race — which is racist.” I’m thinking of a common conservative (person2) argument against things like affirmative action and teaching critical race theory. Also responding to “BLM” with “ALM” and claiming that to be less racist. Seems like they’re taking the argument and flipping it back onto the other person but in an equivocal way?

submitted by /u/Pooch76
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What Is a Sound Argument?

2022-02-11T19:35:12+00:00

Have you ever wanted to disagree with someone’s argument, but you couldn’t find any flaw in it? It’s possible you were facing a sound argument.

An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises.

Here’s a sample argument:

Premise 1: If it is raining, then the street is wet.

Premise 2: It is raining.

Conclusion: Therefore, the street is wet.

Above is an example of a series of statements that counts as an argument since it has a premise and conclusion. That’s all it takes for something to be an argument: it needs to have a premise and a conclusion.

A sound argument proves the arguer’s point by providing decisive evidence for the truth of their conclusion.

A sound argument has two features:

The argument has a valid form, and
All the premises are true.

I’m going to talk about these points in order. To understand the valid form, we need to understand the logical form of an argument and the logical form of a statement.

What Is an Argument’s Logical Form?

When we say an argument is valid, we are talking about an argument’s logical form. I wrote about valid arguments and logical forms in this piece here in detail. https://thinkbuthow.com/valid-argument/

Logical forms are like math formulas. Each comprises variables and operators. For example, the math formula “x + x = 2x” comprises a variable ‘x’ and an operator ‘+’. If we were to plug in the value 1 for x, then we would get “1+1 = 2.” Logical forms are similar. The difference is that instead of mathematical operators, logical forms use logical operators, and instead of variables that are filled in with numbers, the variables of logical forms are filled in with statements.

How do you get at the form of an argument? An argument is a series of statements, so to get at the form of an argument, you need to get at the form of the statements that compose it.

The Logical Form of a Statement

Here are a couple of examples of statements: “It is raining.”; “The street is wet.”

Statements can be combined using logical operators such as the following:

Not
Both… and…
Either… or…
If… then…
… if and only if…

When we combine two or more statements using logical operators, the result is a compound statement.

For example, the statements, “It is raining,” and, “The street is wet,” can be combined by the logical operator ‘and’ to make a compound statement as follows: “It is raining, and the street is wet.” Or they can be combined using ‘if…then…’ as follows: “If it is raining, then the street is wet.”

Here are more examples of statements formed with logical operators: “It is not raining,” “James is tall, or Adam is fast,” “Either you can go straight, or you can make a right,” “Shawn can win the race if and only if he enters it.”

Now that we understand the logical form of a statement, let’s talk about the logical form of an argument. An argument is composed of statements. The premises and the conclusion of an argument are all statements. So if you want to know the logical form of an argument, you start by identifying the logical form of the statements composing it.

Here’s an example of an argument:

Premise 1: All mammals are animals.

Premise 2: All dogs are mammals.

Conclusion: Therefore, all dogs are animals.

Here’s the form of the argument:

All M are A

All D are M

Therefore, all D are A

Logicians have a name for this form of argument. It is a valid deductive argument called a categorical syllogism.

Now, an argument’s form is valid if and only if the truth of the argument’s premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. If we plug in true premises, in other words, a valid form guarantees a true conclusion.

A valid form is similar to an accurate math formula. For example, in mathematics, if you want to get the area of a circle, you will first get the formula to calculate the area of a circle. In this case, the formula will be “A = π (r)^2.” At this point, all you need to do is plug in the radius r of the circle in the formula to get an accurate result. If you get the accurate radius, then you are guaranteed an accurate area.

The categorical syllogism is a valid form because if the two premises are true then the conclusion has to be true. In other words, if premises 1 and 2 are true, then the conclusion (All dogs are animals) has to be true–it’s impossible for it to be false.

Now that we’ve talked about forms of statements and arguments, let’s talk about what it means for an argument to be a sound argument.

What makes a valid argument into a sound argument?

Now that we understand what a valid argument is, it is easier to understand a sound argument. An argument is sound if and only if it is a valid argument and all the premises are true. Examples of sound arguments include categorical syllogisms whose premises are all true.

In order to determine whether an argument is sound, you need to ask the following two questions.

1. Does this argument have a valid form?

2. Are all the premises true?

Once the answer to both 1 and 2 is yes, then you know it’s a sound argument.

The following argument is another example of categorical syllogism:

Premise 1: All men are mortal.

Premise 2: Socrates is a man.

Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Let’s look at the above example with two questions in mind to determine whether this argument is sound.

Does this argument has a valid form? Yes. The above form is called a categorical syllogism, and it is a valid form. Logicians have compiled a list of time-tested valid argument forms such as Modus ponens, Modus tollens, and Disjunctive syllogism. Categorical syllogism is one of the most popular forms, and it is a valid form because if the two premises are true then the conclusion has to be true.

Are all the premises true? Yes. Both of the premises above are true. Premises are statements. Statements can be either true or false. A statement is true when the world matches the statement. If I were to say, “2 plus 2 is 4,” then this statement is true since it matches how the world is. If I were to say, “2 plus 2 is 5,” then this statement is false since it doesn’t match how the world is.

If you can’t determine whether the premises are true or false, you can choose to withhold judgment. Withholding judgment means you don’t make a decision to accept or reject a claim. For example, suppose you don’t have decisive evidence for or against this claim: “There is life outside of the earth.” You don’t have to make a decision about whether or not the claim is true. You can withhold your judgment till you get more evidence for or against the claim.

If the answer to questions 1 and 2 is yes, then you know that the above argument is sound. You know that the argument actually proves its point. It actually proves that the conclusion is true.

However, if the answer to question 1 is yes, and you’re withholding judgment about question 2, then at least you know that the argument is a valid argument even if you don’t know whether the argument is sound.

You can read the entire post here- https://thinkbuthow.com/sound-argument/

submitted by /u/ThinkButHow
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Is Eating Meat Wrong?

2022-02-04T20:05:06+00:00

Here's another argument presented in premise-conclusion form. It's a bit more complicated than most of the arguments in my series.

To clearly outline the structure, I color-coded the sub-arguments. Hopefully this highlights the point that I have made numerous times - that complicated arguments are like Russian dolls, with one argument inside another.

https://medium.com/illumination/eating-meat-is-wrong-9200813a6d7f?sk=b8de221847bfd7f507a633d74a74f000

submitted by /u/JasonCPhD
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“Electric cars do more harm than good to our climate”, “Vaccines cause autism”, “5G is deadly to humans" - Try our free AI powered fact-checking tool!

2022-01-28T11:50:16+00:00

Tired of your uncle making up claims during family dinner? Fact-check claims faster using AI!

At Factiverse we use AI, ML, and NLP to help researchers and journalists find the most reliable sources. We have just launched our demo, which gives you the option to check any claim or to copy your own text and check all the claims of it.

The AI is built from 12 years of research at University of Stavanger in Norway. It's trained on global fact-checking articles to identify traits and signs of credibility. We scan the entire web (not just google) to find the most credible sources.

In contrast to other fact-checkers, we do not want to tell you what’s true or not - because if we want to combat the spread of fake news we need to become better at identifying it and assessing sources on our own. We do believe AI and tech can make this a faster process, and give you a faster overview of a given subject, topic or claim.

We are at an early stage but if you want to have a look and test our demo, you can find it here:

https://factiverse.github.io/ai-editor/

To use it:

Select a claim or type your own to get an overview of the sources disputing, supporting or conflicting it.
Copy your own text and easily fact-check claims to see how balanced your story is.

Our goal is to make it faster and easier for people to understand the information around given topics - how much is disputed? How much research is done on the subject? What are the most reliable sources on both sides of the claim?

What do you think? Is this a tool that could help promote critical thinking? We want to build more interactiveness so that you would get prompts about thinking twice, checking what sources there are etc..

(Hope this is fine to post here, let me know if not and I'll delete it).

submitted by /u/gautekokk
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What logical fallacy is this?

2022-01-27T18:18:19+00:00

If being cool were illegal, I'd be a criminal. Not because I'm cool, but because I shot my wife.

repost by u/jezzer420 on r/twittercringe.

Is this a vacuous truth, for example? I think it's not, but that's the closest fallacy I can find. Or maybe it's a non sequitur?

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A Good Netizen Asks “Why” - Google-knowing, Critical Thinking, and Democracy

2022-01-21T22:36:36+00:00

[This is an excerpt from the first article of a series I'm writing on Critical Thinking and Digital Citizenship... I'll post the link to the full article at the end...in case anyone's interested.]

I started teaching a college course on critical thinking in January of 2006. I was still a Ph.D. student in philosophy and — as a young teacher — I was struggling to come up with an engaging “cold open” for my first day of class.

One late December evening I sat up, preparing my syllabus and sipping my coffee— as grad students are wont to do — and it finally hit me. I’d just received a gag-gift the week before from an old friend who liked to poke fun at the amount of coffee I’d taken to drinking.

It was a GIANT coffee mug — from a certain well-known Seattle establishment — which he claimed might help me cut back to “just one cup a day.”

It was too big to carry any liquid. Its weight alone required two hands to lift! So, I decided to put it to use in a different way.

The first day of the term arrived and I sauntered into a room full of nervous college freshmen with that behemoth in tow. I plunked it down on the table at the front of the classroom, looked up at the gallery, and in my most professorial tone I bellowed, “What is it?”

A mocking voice from the back of the room replied… “Uh… it’s a cup, dude.” Muffled giggles…

I shouted… “WHAT IS IT?!”

The smirks melted in horror as thirty-five 18 year-olds simultaneously thought… “Oh sh*t! That was WRONG????” The uncomfortable silence lingered.

“What is it!” I said again. And again… with various tones of urgency and emphasis.

Slowly, more answers trickled in: “Ceramic.” “Atoms.” “A thing.” “An idea.” They were starting to buy-in.

I pivoted… “WHY is it?”

Another pause… their gears whirring now: “Because of corporate hegemony!” “For pulling an all-nighter!” “So I can face another morning in my daily grind!”

Now we were getting somewhere. I smiled and noddingly stated: “Aristotle once said, ‘We do not think we know a thing until we have grasped the WHY of it.’…

Welcome to Critical Thinking. Here, we’ll be chasing after the WHYs.” I’ve been using this opener ever since…

[Here's the link to full article... without a paywall: https://medium.com/illumination/a-good-netizen-asks-why-44b518b62816?sk=9f63bc7ff629329c394f5beb2a395003]

submitted by /u/bundleofperceptions
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What Is Confirmation Bias?

2022-01-03T18:58:07+00:00

Confirmation bias is a tendency to consider information that confirms what you already believe and that doesn’t challenge it. The American Psychological Association defines it this way:

“the tendency to gather evidence that confirms preexisting expectations, typically by emphasizing or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence.”

Numerous experimental studies in social psychology have shown confirmation bias to be a common psychological bias, like attribution bias or the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Here’s an example. Suppose you hear about inflation in the US economy. You notice that there are two positions about it:

Inflation is transitory due to the COVID pandemic;
Inflation is already here and ramping.

Suppose that you are going to believe one of the two claims. If you are like most people, you have a tendency to favor information that confirms what you already believe and that doesn’t challenge it.

One option is to seek pieces of information that confirm that inflation is transitory. You go to your browser and type, “Is inflation transitory due to the COVID pandemic?” and then you go on to read many sources that agree that inflation is transitory due to the COVID pandemic. You continue seeking more confirmation that inflation is transitory from your family, friends, and social network. And you avoid any sources that challenge this view.

Another option is to seek pieces of information that confirm that inflation is already here. You go to your browser and type, “Is inflation already here and ramping?” and then you go on to read every source that agrees that inflation is already here and ramping. You continue seeking more confirmation that inflation is already here from your family, friends, and social media. And you avoid any sources that challenge this view.

In both of the above cases, you are only seeking sources that confirm what you already believe. You don’t want to challenge your own belief about inflation. The tendency to look at only the sources that confirm your own beliefs is an example of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is often what drives people to accept even the most absurd conspiracy theories. For example, my friend Josh believes that the species Bigfoot exists. Bigfoot is supposed to be a kind of animal living in the woods that looks half-human and half-chimp. Josh’s reason for believing that Bigfoot exists is based on two anecdotes. One night his friend, Steve, was driving around the woods at 2 am, and Steve saw something that he believed was Bigfoot. Later when Josh and Steve went to ask the local Native Americans, the locals forbade them from saying the word ‘Bigfoot’ because, they said, people who utter the word ‘Bigfoot’ have Bigfoot appear in their lives. After those two events, Josh declared that Bigfoot is real.

My friend Josh didn’t consider any information that would counter the belief that Bigfoot exists. For example, Josh never considered that we’ve never found remains of Bigfoot even though we’ve found remains of dinosaurs from millions of years ago. In addition, if it were true that uttering the name ‘Bigfoot’ were to bring Bigfoot in your life, then Josh and Steve could have sat in the woods with their guns and uttered the word ‘Bigfoot’ over and over to prompt Bigfoot to appear. Both of these considerations would have countered Josh’s belief that Bigfoot exists. But Josh wanted to believe that Bigfoot is real, and he was focused only on sources of information that supported his belief. Josh was biased.

Something similar is true of people who believe that the earth is flat, that the moon landing was staged, or that the holocaust didn’t happen. These people step into an echo chamber to confirm their existing beliefs: when they say, “The earth is flat,” the sources they’ve surrounded themselves with echo back, “The earth is flat,” to further confirm what they believe. And the echo chamber never presents them with any sources that disconfirm their beliefs. In other words, people who endorse these views don’t want to see the world for what it is; they only want to see the world for what they want it to be.

Let’s look at another scenario. Let’s say you are looking to invest in a stock. You think that Amazon is a great investment, so you go online to find evidence to support your belief. You type into YouTube, “Amazon stock analysis,” and you watch many videos that echo back what you already believe about Amazon. YouTube is programmed to recognize viewer preferences. Now YouTube starts recommending more and more videos that further convince you that Amazon stock is going to soar. And later YouTube filters out any videos that are going to disconfirm your belief that Amazon stock is a great investment.

It takes discipline and intellectual curiosity to find opposing viewpoints that challenge what you already believe instead of just confirming them. If you truly wanted to see Amazon stock for what it is, you would need to collect some disconfirming evidence and evaluate that evidence.

How to Detect Confirmation Bias

There’s an easy way to determine whether someone is manifesting confirmation bias. Ask them, “What are the arguments against your claim?” If they can’t answer the question, then they’re biased. For example, when I asked Josh for arguments against Bigfoot’s existence, it was clear to me that he had not sought any counterarguments.

You can ask yourself the question, “What are the arguments against my claim?” to detect the bias in yourself. Suppose you were looking to invest in Amazon stock. Ask yourself, “What are the arguments against buying Amazon stock?” If you can’t answer the question, then you’re biased.

How to Disarm Confirmation Bias

To counteract confirmation bias, take these two steps.

Step 1: Withhold Judgment

Withholding judgment is when you don’t make a decision about accepting or rejecting a claim. For good decision-making, you need to understand arguments both for and against a claim. You don’t make a judgment until you have looked at both sides of the claim.

By withholding judgment, you are in a position to see the claim from all angles and strengthen your commitment to knowing and understanding what’s true.

Step 2: Look for Evidence against the Claim Not Just for It.

“I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.” –Charlie Munger

This quote from Munger brings up a key strategy for disarming confirmation bias: you need to understand the argument against your position to avoid confirmation bias.

When you endorse a claim, you need to understand the arguments against it. For example, if I believe that Bigfoot exists, then I need to explore the arguments against my belief. I can start by asking some questions like these: If Bigfoot exists, then where are the Bigfoot remains? How come so many people utter the word ‘Bigfoot’ but he doesn’t appear? Answering these questions can get me thinking about possible arguments against Bigfoot’s existence.

Disciplining yourself in the way Munger describes is a way to disarm confirmation bias. When you believe a claim, you need to look for contradictory evidence–i.e. evidence that disconfirms your pre-existing belief, not just evidence that confirms it. The impact of confirmation bias on your day-to-day life are numerous because confirmation bias affects cognition and how you process information. Among other things, focusing only on confirmatory evidence can lead to overconfidence in the accuracy of your beliefs. It can also distort your memories: even when people explore evidence that contradicts their beliefs, they tend only to recall information that confirms their beliefs. In addition, when people experience cognitive dissonance (that is, when they encounter evidence that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs), they tend to dismiss that evidence in favor of evidence that confirms those beliefs.

A freethinker is committed to knowing and understanding what’s true, and that involves managing cognitive biases because the latter distort our knowledge and understanding.

Full post here: https://thinkbuthow.com/confirmation-bias/

submitted by /u/ThinkButHow
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CT in education

2022-01-01T04:34:24+00:00

This was sparked by an older post about certification in CT.

Some years ago my nephew was in private school. I was browsing his school’s web site and came across a claim on the front page “Our curriculum fosters critical thinking” or some such claim.

Since syllabuses (syllabi?) of all the courses were nominally on line I backed up and did a search for the phrase “critical thinking” site:{link to school site}

And found 1 hit: The single listing on the front page.

I wrote to them about it, asking for details on how they taught CT in their curriculum. Several years later my mailbox is still neglected.

Starting from here I did some more searches. One was using 20 of the larger schools in an index of North American private schools. One was doing this for British private schools. One was 20 Alberta schools.

NONE of them addressed the question of how they taught CT.

This is why you will see me posting here a bunch about how to teach CT and just what is the collection of skills we collectively call CT.

submitted by /u/SGBotsford
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Critical thinking as a collection of skills

2021-12-31T19:43:55+00:00

CT isn’t a single skill. It’s a collection of skills.

A: Does this agree with previous knowledge. This is a common question to ask yourself, but it requires a large background of general knowledge. This is commons sense knowledge. Since most of this data comes from sources you won’t remember, it’s important not to browse crap sources too much of the time. This is especially true for children, who don’t yet have their bullshit detector firmed up.

I think this is one of the reason that echo chambers have such an influence on people.

B: Does this make sense in terms of numbers. This requires being pretty good at “back of the envelope” computation in your head. Often this leads me to doing more homework. E.g. The number of people dying from getting hit by lighting isn’t very large. Even mountain ranges in our Alberta mountains have only a few ground strikes per year per square kilometre.

C: Does a story provide numbers? I am increasingly leery of stories without stats. And of stats without sources to check.

D: Who said it? Are they credible?

E: Is the source any good. I put more credence on something I I read in Scientific American than I do in the National Enquirer. How do I decide to do this? How do I teach this?

F: Language use. Critical thinking needs to understand the subtle differences and realize that while nigger and black both mean a person of colour, the first one is very highly charged, while the second is more neutral. Watch for superlatives and strongly emotional language.

G: Which statements are checkable? News in particular is hard to check if it’s late breaking, but some of the detail can be checked. “42 die in flood”. You can check the existence of the flood much more easily than the 42.

H: Who gains by lying? Is there some obvious winner for someone not telling the truth. Common reasons for lying include money gain, not getting caught at doing something wrong, not being embarrassed.

I: What aren’t they telling you?

This needs work, but it’s a springboard for discussion. Bang away on it.

submitted by /u/SGBotsford
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Teaching CT: Debate

2021-12-31T23:49:31+00:00

How to teach CT?

I asked this on a teaching forum. Half the teachers seemed to think it was unteachable. The other half little in the way on concrete methods.

One way that I think would help is to use debate.

In high school debate was an after school activity for nerds and dweebs. It had a very formal structure:

A team was 2 people. The topic was in the form of a resolution:

E.g. “Resolved that Roe vs Wade should be overturned, and every state allowed to decide it’s own policy on abortion.”

“Resolved that in the presence of climate change a carbon tax be imposed starting at $60/Ton and increasing by 10% per year.

Team A would speak in favour of the resolution. Team B would speak against the resolution.

The sneaky bit: You didn’t know if you were A or B until a few minutes before the debate, so you had to prepare both sides.

There are a bunch of formats described here: https://new.debateus.org/high-school-debate-events-and-formats/

In a classroom setting I would use one resolution per week or two weeks. A class of 24 would have 12 teams. Most of the formats take over half an hour, so you either tweak the format some to get two debates per period, or you have a debate, then spend class time analyzing it. Two teams per debate, it would take either 3 days or 6 days to give everyone a chance.

Ideally each team will get a chance to debate both sides of a topic. This doubles the time to 6 and 12 days respectively.

Usually when a topic extends for multiple debates, the debaters get better and better at research.

Several of the formats encourage rapid fire debate. This should be discouraged.

To make it more interesting, you can use multiple topics. So you run 3 topics. 4 teams are assigned to each topic. The debate happens 4 times with each team being once in favour and once against.

The teacher gives an initial bibliography of articles to read about the topics.

In addition each debater keeps an annotated bibliography of the points used in his debate.

I would see this as being a two semester course in high school in grade’s 10 and 12.

submitted by /u/SGBotsford
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Homelessness Morally Harms the Housed?

2021-12-30T18:32:50+00:00

Here is the author’s argument in premise-conclusion form.

All situations that lead us to take immoral actions or permissible actions that prioritize our own welfare over others’ is a moral cost to us.
Homelessness leads us to take immoral actions or permissible actions that prioritize our own welfare over others’.
Therefore, homelessness is a moral cost to us. (This follows 1 and 2.)

What are your thoughts?

https://medium.com/illumination/homelessness-causes-moral-harm-to-the-housed-1b3cdb948ae9

submitted by /u/JasonCPhD
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What Is a Valid Argument?

2021-12-29T00:39:11+00:00

Do you ever listen to someone’s argument and think that it makes sense, and all the ideas are connected, but you don’t know why? Well-crafted arguments need to have certain ingredients, and those ingredients in an argument make sense to us.

Sometimes that “makes sense” feeling is a recognition that an argument is valid. The definition of a valid argument is this: if the premises are true, then it’s impossible for the conclusion to be false. In other words, a valid argument actually proves that its conclusion is true.

What makes an argument’s form valid?

An argument is a series of statements, so to get at the form of an argument, you just need to get at the form of the statements that compose it. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say we have two statements: A and B.

If we put them in order, then we make an argument.

Premise: A

Conclusion: Therefore, B

Above is an example of something that counts as an argument since it has a premise and conclusion. That’s all it takes for something to be an argument: it needs to have a premise and a conclusion.

When we say an argument is valid, we are talking about an argument’s form. If we plug in true premises, a valid form guarantees a true conclusion. A valid form is similar to an accurate math formula. For example, in mathematics, if you want to get the area of a circle, you will first get the formula to calculate the area of a circle. In this case, the formula will be “A = π (r)^2.” At this point, all you need to do is plug in the radius r of the circle in the formula to get an accurate result. If you get the accurate radius, then you are guaranteed an accurate area.

The values we plug in for the variables in a math formula are numbers. By contrast, the values we plug in for the variables in a logic formula are statements. Let’s look at a deductive argument form that logicians call modus ponens:

If P then Q,

Therefore, Q

In the above form, ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are variables, and ‘if...then…’ is the logical operator. Modus ponens is universally regarded as a valid form of argument.

An argument’s form is valid if and only if the truth of the argument’s premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. A valid form is similar to an accurate math formula. Just as the formula “A = π (r)^2” guarantees an accurate area if you plug in an accurate radius, likewise, a valid form of argument guarantees you a true conclusion if you plug in values for the variables that yield true premises. In other words, if you plug in values for the variables in a valid form of argument, and the resulting premises are true, the conclusion is guaranteed to be true. If an argument is valid and it has true premises, in other words, then it’s impossible for it to have a false conclusion.

Note: there are two categories of invalid argument: inductive arguments and fallacies. If an argument is inductive and its premises are true, then it is possible for it to have a false conclusion; it’s just that it’s unlikely that the conclusion is false if the premises are true. If, on the other hand, an argument commits a fallacy, then even if the premises are true, they still tell you nothing at all about the truth or falsity of the conclusion. (I talk more about these invalid forms of argument in another piece.) Also, an argument with a false premise is like a fallacy: it tells you nothing at all about the truth or falsity of the argument’s conclusion.

Now let’s plug in statements into modus ponens to show that if the premises of a valid argument are true, then the argument is guaranteed a true conclusion.

Let’s suppose P is “It is raining,” and Q is “The street is wet.” The result is the following argument:

If it is raining, then the street is wet.

It is raining.

Therefore, the street is wet.

In our above example, if the premises of the argument are true, then it’s impossible for the conclusion of the argument to be false.

Let’s look at another example of a valid argument:

Premise 1: All mammals are animals.

Premise 2: All dogs are mammals.

Conclusion: Therefore, all dogs are animals.

Here’s the form of the argument:

All M are A

All D are M

Therefore, all D are A

The above form is called a categorical syllogism, and it is a valid form. This form is valid because if the two premises are true then the conclusion has to be true.

Now that we understand what a valid argument is, it is worth mentioning what a sound argument is. An argument is sound if and only if it is a valid argument and all the premises are true.

Some people mistakenly use the expression “true argument.” In fact, arguments cannot be true or false. The statements that we plug in the argument can be true or false. The argument has a form: valid or invalid. If the argument’s form is valid, and all the premises are true, then the argument is sound.

Learning forms of argument is an important step in developing your critical thinking skills. Once you understand the argument, the form of an argument, what a valid argument is, you’ll be able to evaluate even complex arguments since those arguments are built up by putting together many simpler ones.

Summary and Conclusion

An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises.
Arguments are not true or false. Statements are true or false.
When we say an argument is valid, we are talking about the form of an argument.
An argument is valid if and only if the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.
An argument is sound if and only if it is a valid argument and all the premises are true.

Note: This is a partial post. There are details, pictures, and charts here: https://thinkbuthow.com/valid-argument/

submitted by /u/ThinkButHow
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Fetuses Don't Have Rights?

2021-12-15T12:37:36+00:00

The author argues that fetuses don't have rights because they are not conscious and sentient. Here is the argument in premise-conclusion form.

Only conscious, sentient beings with a perspective on the world that can go better and worse for them are persons.
Embryos and beginning fetuses are not conscious, sentient beings with a perspective on the world that can go better and worse for them.
Therefore, embryos and beginning fetuses are not persons. (This follows 1 and 2.)
Only persons have basic moral rights.
Therefore, embryos and beginning fetuses do not have basic moral rights. (This follows 3 and 4.)

You can read my analysis here.

submitted by /u/JasonCPhD
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On wanting.

2021-12-08T20:57:35+00:00

What are someone's motivations? People don't like to say nor hear that it's money, power, sex, or attention. Those are fungible, transferrable, scarce, non exclusive things of mass appeal. Anyone can want that, and it's obvious that such things are zero sum. A group based only on the want of such things is obviously dysfunctional and jealous. Someone would betray or otherwise fight such a group, even just out of jealousy.

That's why people say that they want cooperative things like contracts or peace. But those things come with terms and conditions calling for fungible, transferrable, scarce, non exclusive things of mass appeal, such as money, power, sex or attention. Key to cooperation is patience, because cooperation is an investment in a relationship. Return on investment takes time, and if you're impatient, it's a red flag of non-cooperation. For example, that's why when you say things like "WHAT DO WE WANT? CONTRACTS! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW! [air horn]" you are likely to be on strike. It breaks the contract. It's non cooperative, and actually endangers the cooperation. When you put terms and conditions on cooperation that the other side rejects, it creates conflict. This encourages the other side to do the same thing back, claiming to want the cooperation. They are left without any explanation of the failure to reach the cooperative goal other than that you don't want it. They are encouraged to conclude things like that strikers like to break contracts or that enemies like to extort stuff from their neighbors.

The point is that we live and work in a strange trick environment with secret agendas and a strange trick language with trick words such as "want," and "now". Any position is never necessarily an accurate statement about the person's goals, and one must always have no contact with, ignore or decipher statements of motivation, starting with using an understanding of trick language to guess what goals someone has, and examine their statement for secret agendas. When someone says what they want, they may just be trying to confuse someone. Unless you can understand such tricks, the more attention you give such statements, the more you are confused.

This is how to talk with someone about their goals. If you talk to someone, instead of asking someone what they want, try to learn what substantively they are doing and what type of conflicts they get into. For example, instead of asking strikers what they want and what they are doing and being told it's contracts and what is necessary to that end, ask what they are doing and what type of conflict they are in and be told they are doing an industrial action and they are in an industrial dispute. Instead of asking the military what they want and what they are doing and being told they are promoting peace and supporting what is necessary to oppose cruelty in all of its ----ing forms, that they abhor weapons and the mop that they're swabbing the deck with, but unfortunately it is necessary to defend the nation and its interests, ask what task they are doing and what type of conflicts they get into, and be told they are swabbing the deck if they are mopping the floor, and that they get into shouting matches against unit mates in which people are told they don't need, they want, and be asked if you think that that's ----ing funny.

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The Real Reason Saying “I Don’t Know” is Hard

2021-12-07T22:15:47+00:00

As a kid, I had a reputation for being a math whiz. Whatever problem the teacher put on the blackboard, I already knew how to solve it. I aced Geometry, Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Trigonometry; math just seemed to come naturally to me.

Then, I hit Precalculus.

For the first time, I was getting many things wrong. But by then, I had come to accept the self-image of being a math whiz. I couldn’t imagine being someone who didn’t understand math. So, I began pretending that I knew what I was doing.

But you can’t do that in math. If you don’t get the right answer, you’re just wrong. That’s why math is humbling.

My lack of understanding showed up in my midterm grades, and I ended up barely passing Precalculus. Afterward, I was still pretending to know. I blamed teachers, my school workload, and my part-time job for my struggles. I refused to accept that I didn’t understand advanced math concepts.

I now know what was wrong. I was afraid to say three dreaded words: “I don’t know.”

Why don’t we say “I don’t know”?

I’m not the only one who has a hard time admitting that I don’t know. There are many people who don’t admit to what they don’t know. Why? What’s so scary about it?

It’s not that scary to be wrong about the subject matter—math, in my case. But it is scary to be wrong about yourself, to learn that you’re not the person you imagine yourself to be. In other words, it’s scary to admit that you don’t match your self-image.

A self-image is a description of what we think we are, want to be, or should be. Your self-image could be that you are a conservative—you wear a bow tie and think left-wing people are all out of touch with reality. Your self-image could be that you are a liberal—you wear a Bob Marley shirt and think right-wing people are out of touch with reality. In my case, my self-image was that I was a math whiz, and I wanted to appear knowledgeable.

When we decide on a self-image, we decide to start thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that match that image. We want to match our self-image in reality. But that can take a lot of work. For example, to match my self-image as a math whiz, I needed to work hard at learning advanced math concepts. But I didn’t do that.

If you aren’t able to match your self-image you have two options:

You pretend to live the self-image.
You reject that self-image in favor of another.

Pretending to live the self-image

Most people who don’t match their self-image pretend. I used to do the same. I refused to admit that I was actually not a math whiz. As I advanced in the math courses, they got hard. I didn’t want to work hard at math. I wanted the advanced concepts to come easy to me.

Instead of learning and getting better at math, I began to focus on appearing smart in math. The pretender in me would memorize the advanced concepts, but I wouldn’t understand them. Later my desire to look knowledgeable trickled into other aspects of my life. For example, when I showed up at my first job, I wanted to be known as the most knowledgeable person on the team. My self-image was that I was a knowledgeable employee, that I knew most of the things at work. So at my first job, I went around pretending to know things but barely understood them.

My case isn’t unique. There are many people who pretend to be someone they’re not. A lot of people want to look knowledgeable as part of their self-image. That explains why they find it hard to say they don’t know: not knowing doesn’t align with their self-image. When they fail to match that self-image, they start pretending to live their self-image.

Rejecting your self-image for another

The alternative to pretending to look knowledgeable is to admit that you have a false self-image. Once you reject the false self-image, you can pick another self-image that’s more realistic. A realistic self-image allows you to actually acquire knowledge. Your new self-image could include that you don’t understand a lot of things, that you are okay with saying, “I don’t know.”

Self-image is a big driver of how we feel, think and act. For example, if I feel, think, and act like I don’t understand advanced math concepts, then it is easy for me to say I don’t understand advanced math. When we live into that new self-image, we don’t know a lot of things, so that self-image helps us admit the things we don’t understand.

In reality, I needed to let go of my self-image as the math whiz, and create another self-image. I created a new image of myself not as a math whiz, but as a person who wanted to know and understand math. For knowing and understanding math, I needed to know my limitations in advanced math concepts, to spend extra time understanding them, and to practice them.

Understanding the difference between false self-images and real self-images helps us pick a self-image that enables us to know and understand what’s true.

Most of the people who pretend to know a lot of things tend to have a self-deception. They don’t understand what it takes to be competent. They can’t wrap their mind around the amount of work it takes to be competent in any given field. Pretending is easy but understanding takes a lot of work.

Full post here: https://thinkbuthow.com/i-dont-know/

submitted by /u/ThinkButHow
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Critical thinking and intellectual honesty

2021-12-07T17:56:04+00:00

Hi! I make videos about science, philosophy, future, technology, ethics and other topics. A recent Video i Made i wanted to talk about critical thinking so i hope you enjoy! To find any real truth in the world and in ourselves we need to be as honest with ourselves as possible. How to practice critical thinking and how to let go of beliefs that are not true.. and finding out how liberating and free that letting go actually is. Also talking about the importance of looking at the world in different ways. And the dangers of how smart people can rationalize almost anything. To not be held back by any flawed belief systems and to just be dedicated to finding out whatever the truth is. And how to accept the truth, even if we don't like it!

submitted by /u/HumanSeeing
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Free Critical Thinking Resource

2021-11-24T18:23:23+00:00

Hi everyone! I’m new to the group. I’ve been writing a series of articles in which I break down real-life arguments into premise-conclusion form. I think it’s a useful resource for those wanting to develop critical thinking skills. Here is an example: https://medium.com/illumination/we-shouldnt-give-money-to-beggars-f934e7a0f02

(If you hit the paywall, you can circumvent it by using incognito mode.)

What do you think about the author’s argument?

submitted by /u/JasonCPhD
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Call for mods

2021-11-22T23:14:34+00:00

Does anyone have interest in helping out modding this subreddit?

The reason it's set to approved users only right now is that I don't have the time to do a good job moderating on my own. With a few more people helping out (preferably in different time zones), we could switch it over to public.

submitted by /u/tanglisha
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Thinking Is a Skill

2021-11-09T17:25:46+00:00

I had just turned 40, and for the very first time I heard the expression, “Thinking is a skill.”

I thought, “If thinking is a skill, then how come no one ever mentioned it to me?”

My parents never mentioned it. My high school never mentioned it. My college never mentioned it. My professional development seminars never mentioned it. The books I read never mentioned it.

Perhaps it was obvious to others that thinking is a skill, but it wasn’t obvious to me. I thought thinking was different from activities that were obviously skill-based like sports. It was obvious to me that athletes like Lebron James had to learn basketball skills—and practice them—in order to get better at basketball. But I’d always looked at intelligent people like Paul Graham and thought that they were born thinkers. It never occurred to me that they might have learned and practiced how to think. But when I heard thinking was a skill, I realized the people I admired acquired thinking skills in much the same way I’d seen athletes acquiring athletic skills.

I felt like an idiot. For years I’d never made the connection between thinking and other skills.

For the next few weeks, I began thinking this through. If thinking is a skill, I thought, then it must be analogous to other skills. Skills in general have these features:

You can acquire skills and get better at them over time.
You can be better or worse at skills.
You can find better and worse methods for executing a skill.
You can practice skills to get better.

So if thinking is a skill, then the following must be true:

You can acquire thinking skills and get better at thinking over time.
You can be better or worse at thinking.
You can find better and worse methods for thinking.
You can practice thinking to get better.

To understand these points, let’s start by defining what we mean by ‘thinking.’

What Is Thinking?

People use the word ‘thinking’ to describe activities like calculating, remembering, planning, imagining, and deciding. Among these activities, I’m only interested in the ones that aim at achieving an accurate result. Not all types of thinking aim at accuracy. Imagining or fantasizing counts as thinking, but these activities don’t necessarily aim at representing the way the world actually is. I’m not interested in these types of thinking, but only the ones that aim at accuracy.

The goal of thinking in this sense is to come to know or understand how the world really is. When you’re doing a task like calculating numbers, deciding on a diet to lower your cholesterol, or picking a stock, you are looking to get accurate results. For example, in elementary school, all of us learned a method for adding numbers. In order to add numbers like 18 and 18, you learned to add up numbers in the 1s column and carry any extra digits.

By contrast with this method, if you were just to guess the sum, then you would be inconsistent or inaccurate in your results.

Likewise, suppose your friend recommends that you buy a stock because he notices a long waitlist for the company’s products to arrive and he thinks that the stock price will soar. You buy a few shares based on his recommendation. Later the stock price plummets because the company doesn’t have the funds to run its production line overseas. If you use shallow thinking like this to make investment decisions, then your investment results are going to be inconsistent.

These examples illustrate the type of thinking that I’m talking about here: it’s thinking that aims at achieving an accurate result. Now that we are clear on what thinking is, let’s look at skill.

What Is Skill?

Skills are abilities. In particular, a skill is an acquired ability to do something. There are two types of abilities: abilities we are born with and abilities we acquire. Skills are abilities of this second sort. For example, you are born with the ability to see, but you acquire the skill to read; you are born with the ability to hear, but you acquire the skill to understand a language; you are born with the ability to taste, but you acquire the skill to be a cook or food critic.

If you look at LeBron James, he certainly has exceptional natural abilities like height, ability to jump, and hand-eye coordination, but he won’t be an exceptional basketball player if he doesn't acquire and master basketball skills like shooting, passing, and defense.

Similarly, if you look at Paul Graham, he certainly has exceptional natural cognitive abilities, but he won’t be an exceptional thinker if he doesn’t acquire and master thinking skills like understanding arguments.

In both cases, exceptional performers aren’t born that way; rather, they’ve become exceptional by practicing the right methods over and over.

How do you acquire a skill?

First, you find a teacher–a book or person–somebody who knows how to do the thing you want to learn. The teacher gives you the method for acquiring the skill you want.
Second, you imitate the method the teacher shows you, and then you practice over and over until you become proficient in the skill.

Here’s an example. Warren Buffett attributes his success to finding the right teacher and imitating his methods. When Buffett went to Columbia Business School, he discovered that Benjamin Graham was teaching value investing. Buffett quickly took notice and started studying Graham’s methods.

Over time, Buffett would meet with Graham for investing advice, read his acclaimed book, The Intelligent Investor, imitate Graham’s methods, and practice them over and over. That’s how Buffett acquired the skill of investing.

Why Is It Important To Work on Thinking Skills?

There are degrees of mastering a skill. Those degrees correspond to better and worse ways of executing the skill. You can be a decent chef or master chef who runs a world-class restaurant; you can be a decent investor or be a professional investor who handles billions of dollars; you can be a recreational basketball player or a professional basketball player who plays at the highest level.

When it comes to outcomes, consistency is the mark of mastery. A novice can get a good outcome once by dumb luck, but can’t replicate the result over the long term. For example, a novice can get lucky and cook a delicious meal once by luck, but it is the mark of a master chef to make an excellent meal most of the time. A novice can get lucky and shoot the basketball great once, but it takes mastery to shoot the basketball great most of the time. A novice can get lucky and pick the right stock to bet on once, but it takes mastery to pick the right stock most of the time.

When it comes to thinking, consistently getting accurate results is important. For example, you can take a guess and find a flaw in someone’s argument. But if you understand the form of the argument and understand the common errors in reasoning, you are bound to consistently arrive at accurate results in your thinking.

I’ve described some of the things that thinking has in common with other skills. Let me highlight a difference: thinking is more general than other skills; it applies to more things.

Different skills have different ranges of application. Some skills are domain-specific; others are general in scope. A soccer goalie has some domain-specific skills to stop the other team from scoring, but running fast is a more general skill that can apply in many sports. For example, a fast runner is also valuable in track, football, and basketball.

Writing is even more general than running. Writing applies much more than domain-specific skills like brainstorming ideas, solving sudoku puzzles, or coding in C++.

Thinking is even more general than writing. Thinking is a meta-skill. You can apply thinking to many more things than even writing: understanding an argument, looking for scientific truth, communicating an idea, solving a problem, and coming up with creative ideas.

Not All Thinking Is Created Equal

If the objective of thinking is accuracy and consistency, then there are better and worse methods for thinking. Let’s look at some examples that show how some methods for thinking can be better or worse:

Calculating numbers

Better Method: You can calculate 2+2+2 by adding each number one by one, or multiplying 2 by 3, or using a calculator. These methods will bring you correct results consistently.

Worse Method: You can guess at an answer. Guessing will bring you inconsistent results. Sometimes your guess will be accurate and sometimes your guess will be inaccurate. In fact, most of the time your guess will be inaccurate.

Baking Cake

Better Method: You can bake a cake by emulating a time-tested method. This method will bring you consistent results.

Worse Method: You can bake based on your hunch without prior knowledge about baking principles like temperature, texture, and time. This method will bring you inconsistent results: the taste, shape, and texture of the cake will be different every time you bake. Sometimes your hunch will make a delicious cake, but most of the time you will find burnt, dry, and disgusting cake.

Picking Stocks

Better Method: You can pick stocks by looking at the company’s financials, forecasting future demand, and reviewing past trends. This method will bring you consistent results.

Worse Method: You can look at tarot cards to decide what stock to pick. This method will bring you gains and losses inconsistently. Sometimes you will just happen to pick the right stock, but most of the time you will have similar results by throwing a dart at some stock tickers and picking one.

The method you use to calculate numbers, bake cakes, and pick stocks can yield results that are consistent or inconsistent. The same is true for thinking methods.

Evaluating a claim

There are better and worse methods for thinking, just as there are better and worse methods for doing other things.

When you’re evaluating claims, for instance, you can use your intuition to determine whether or not a claim is true. Intuition initially seems right to us, but it is vulnerable to cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are judgment shortcuts that help us make quick decisions. Often cognitive biases lead us to inconsistent and inaccurate results. Using your intuition to evaluate claims makes you vulnerable to accepting false claims.

By contrast, you can evaluate a claim by evaluating the reasons to believe that it’s true. Those reasons might come from ordinary people, or they might come from experts.

An expert could be a good starting point to understand the reasons that support a claim, but thinking skills go further than consulting expert opinion. You need to understand how to evaluate the expert’s opinion. You need to acquire thinking skills that enable you to evaluate a claim from an expert or novice.

Those skills include understanding what an argument is, knowing about cognitive biases, knowing about logical fallacies, knowing how and when to use experts, and understanding the need for withholding judgment to improve your decision-making. These methods will bring you consistent results.

Developing Thinking Skills

When it comes to the development of critical thinking skills, it’s not “anything goes”; there’s a method to doing it in a better way. The people who acquire critical thinking abilities and practice them get better results: they are consistently more accurate than people who don’t. Thinking skills help you improve your critical thinking process by coming up with better possible solutions, improving your creative thinking, evaluating and synthesizing different points of view, and optimizing your problem-solving skills.

Some of those methods to improve your cognitive skills are logic, mathematics, probability, and the rules for using language—natural or artificial.

On the journey to develop strong critical thinking skills, you need to know and understand what’s true. They don’t teach these skills in high school. Many times they don’t teach them in college either. This is a shortcoming of higher education which I discuss here. Instead, adult learners have to pick up these skills on their own and practice applying them on their own in everyday life. That’s actually why I started Think, But How?—I wanted to provide adult learners with resources to improve their thought process and become strong critical thinkers.

One way to achieve this is by embarking on the free thinker journey. I write about my quest to see the world for what it is rather than what I want it to be. I hope by reading, learning, and imitating these methods you can optimize your own thinking skills.

You can read the entire post here: https://thinkbuthow.com/thinking-skills/

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CT Does experience play a part in critical thinking? : the Rogers/Rogan episode...

2021-11-10T00:43:52+00:00

Making good decisions requires discovery of facts, analysis, evaluation and action... and usually time is a factor as well. No one, it must be realized, will ever have 100% information... we can only grab a hold of as many facts as we can and process them in the time we have. A lot is made of the biases we have - the lens by which we see the world around us - but critical thinking should reveal the inconsistencies in that lens allowing us to make the best decision. We cannot eliminate heuristics, nor would we want to, but with critical thinking we can discover where they might need to be altered.

Our experiences will always play a part in our decision-making. Critically thinking about what experiences are important and valuable in any decision is what we want to improve upon. Mr. Rogers, QB with the Green Bay Packers football team, gathered facts, decided which ones were important and evaluated them. One of those gathered facts was a personal discussion with Mr. Rogan who had experience with unpopular medications and their results. Perfectly legitimate to do and to add to what he had already gathered. And he used everything gathered, then, to come to a personal decision that was consistent with all the data he'd obtained.

To agree or disagree with Mr. Rogers' decision is fine, but to condemn the decision because he spoke to someone who had experience with the subject of decision is not. Critically speaking, to agree or disagree with him, we would want to discover all the facts (or at least many of the facts) he used to make the decision, not just one particular experience.

Again, our experiences will always play a part in our thinking critically as they are part of the fact gathering process.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6iMeobYdsw

2021-11-03T20:53:46+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6iMeobYdsw

submitted by /u/jemchulo7
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Circular Reasoning: We All Saw Our Parents Doing This

2021-11-02T01:04:18+00:00

Did you ever have a conversation with your parents like this:

Parent: “It’s time to go to bed.”

Child: “Why?”

Parent: “Because this is your bedtime.”

At the time, you might have felt unsatisfied with their response, but you didn’t know how to argue against them. Knowledge is power, and in this case you were powerless to resist your parents because you didn’t know about logical fallacies—errors in reasoning.

Here’s another example to illustrate the same kind of fallacy:

Circle: “Skydiving is dangerous.”

Me: “Why?”

Circle: “Because it’s unsafe.”

The fallacy Circle commits (the same one committed by the parent in the earlier example) is called circular reasoning or begging the question. Circular reasoning happens when the arguer assumes that the conclusion is true rather than proving that it’s true. To better understand what this means, let’s first go over what an argument is.

An argument is a series of statements that try to prove a point. The statement that the arguer tries to prove is called the conclusion. The statements that try to prove the conclusion are called premises.

In order to prove a conclusion, the premises can’t include the conclusion itself. That would be like trying to prove that what The New York Times says is true by quoting the Times itself. My friend Circle can’t prove that skydiving is dangerous simply by saying it’s dangerous. In other words, he can’t prove it’s dangerous by saying, “Skydiving is dangerous because it’s dangerous.” You can’t prove something true simply by saying it or repeating it.

Rather, to prove something true, you need to bring forward reasons that are independent of the conclusion—reasons that don’t already assume or presuppose that your conclusion is true. For example, to prove that skydiving is dangerous, Circle would need to cite some data about, say, how frequently people get injured or die while skydiving.

When you present an argument you’re supposed to be giving reasons to think that the conclusion is true. But when someone commits the fallacy of circular reasoning, they’re failing to provide any reasons to think the conclusion is true. Here’s another example that illustrates this point:

God exists.

Therefore, God exists.

You can see in this example that there is no reason to believe the conclusion of the argument. Instead, the arguer has simply restated the conclusion--they’re presupposing that their conclusion is true. More precisely, they’re using their conclusion as a premise or presupposition. That’s a way of defining circular reasoning: Circular reasoning occurs when someone uses their conclusion as one of their premises.

Typically circular reasoning isn’t as obvious as this example. Usually, when people commit the fallacy they don’t restate the conclusion verbatim; they instead change the way it’s worded.

Think again about my conversation with Circle. Here’s Circle’s so-called argument:

Premise: Skydiving is unsafe.

Conclusion: Skydiving is dangerous.

Circle says skydiving is unsafe because it’s dangerous. The word ‘unsafe’ is different from the word ‘dangerous.’ The problem is, even though ‘unsafe’ and ‘dangerous’ are different words, they still mean the same thing. In reality, then, Circle is saying that skydiving is dangerous because it’s dangerous; he’s just using a different word for ‘dangerous.’

Changing the word creates the illusion that Circle is presenting real reasons to believe his conclusion that skydiving is dangerous, but in fact, he’s just restating the conclusion.

Here’s another example of this:

The word of God is true.

Therefore, the Bible is true.

Once again, the arguer isn’t providing any reasons to think the conclusion is true, but is simply replacing one expression for another: ‘word of God’ for ‘Bible.’

Here are a few more examples of circular reasoning:

Example #1

“The death penalty is justified because the government has good reason to put someone to death for serious offenses.”

Explanation: In this case, the arguer isn’t providing any reasons that prove the death penalty is justified. They are just restating their conclusion using different words. They’re using ‘has good reason to’ in place of ‘justified.’ The arguer doesn’t give any reasons to think that the conclusion is true.

Example #2

“The death penalty is never justified because taking a human life is always wrong.”

Explanation: In this case, the arguer isn’t providing any reasons that prove the death penalty is never justified. The arguer is just substituting ‘always wrong’ for ‘is never justified.’ The arguer doesn’t give any reasons to think that the conclusion is true, but is simply restating the conclusion using different words.

Example #3

“Smoking is bad because it has a negative impact on your health.”

Explanation: In this case, the arguer isn’t providing any reasons that prove that smoking is bad. The arguer is just replacing ‘bad’ with ‘negative impact.’ The arguer doesn’t give any reasons to think that the conclusion is true, but is simply restating the conclusion using different words.

Let’s go back to the parent example:

Parent: “It’s time to go to bed.”

Child: “Why?”

Parent: “Because this is your bedtime.”

Explanation: The parent is saying, “It’s time to go to bed because it’s time to go to bed.” There is no reason provided to support the conclusion. They’re just restating the conclusion using different words.

Here’s another example of a parent using circular reasoning:

Parent: “Brushing your teeth is healthy.”

Child: “Why?”

Parent: “Because it's good for your teeth.”

Explanation: The above is an example of how some parents explain to their kids why they should brush their teeth. In this example, ‘healthy’ and ‘good’ mean the same thing. The parent is not giving any reasons to believe that brushing your teeth is healthy for your teeth. They’re just restating the conclusion using different words.

How to Disarm Circular Reasoning

All fallacies are errors in reasoning. Circular reasoning in particular happens when the person making the argument assumes their conclusion is true instead of proving it’s true. It’s like a prosecutor making a case by saying, “Mr. Smith committed this felony because he did it.” The prosecutor isn’t giving any reasons to support his conclusion.

There are two steps for disarming circular reasoning:

Get clear on the terms.
Point out that the arguer is simply restating their conclusion, and not providing any reasons to accept it.

Suppose I commit a circular reasoning fallacy: “Circular reasoning is bad,” I say, “because it’s stupid.”

First, ask me to clarify my terms. For example, you can say, “What do you mean by ‘bad’ and ‘stupid’?” Asking for clarification will give you more clarity on what I am trying to say.

Second, you can point out that I’m just restating my conclusion. For example, you could say, “It sounds like ‘bad’ and ‘stupid’ mean exactly the same thing here. In that case, you are not giving me any reasons to believe your conclusion. You’re just restating your conclusion by using different words.”

Circular reasoning is a common fallacy because people simply want you to believe their conclusion without giving any support. The two-step process helps you ask for support for the conclusion, and it also helps you identify and avoid the fallacy.

Read the entire post here: https://thinkbuthow.com/circular-reasoning/

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