The Plight of the Philosopher

By -
As a philosopher, you're trained to pick apart arguments and spot their logical errors. To point those out, you use various techniques, one of my favorite of which is to construct an argument making the same error but where the error will be more easily spotted. So, when I saw this:

"Tyler Cowen is not an authority on Austrian economics because (hey, guess what!) he's NOT an Austrian economist."

over at The Curious Capitalist, I was tempted to post something like, "So, famed astronomer X cannot be an expert on flat-earth theory because he's not a flat-earth theorist?"

But then I stopped, because I knew I'd get two main reactions:

"Ah, so Callahan says Cowen is an authority an Austrian economics," or

"Ah, so Callahan admits Austrian economics is like flat-earth theories!"

Now, no trained philosopher would ever read my argument that way. She would know that the analogy is between the argument forms, not between Cowen and X or Austrians and flat earthers. But, man oh man, I've had dozens of similar arguments misread by casual blog commentators!

Comments

  1. Unknown10:30 AM

    So, you admit that casual blog commentators are members of the flat earth society?

    ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy11:18 AM

    You're still bitter about the reception your book on the irrational voter got.

    ReplyDelete
  3. TokyoTom12:49 AM

    I am tempted to say something like "Seems like quite a bit of an effort, simply to inspire Adam Gurri to make precisely your point for you over there, with a link back to here."

    But I decline, because I think I'll be misunderstood.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unknown9:07 AM

    @Tokyo Tom

    Yeah, it was an obvious joke...but somehow I couldn't resist making it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more