(no subject)
Dangerzooey's Law #1:
The Ought-Is Fallacy
You may be familiar with the naturalistic fallacy, the is-ought fallacy, but this is another fallacy entirely. The ought-is fallacy is committed by such diverse thinkers as Plato, Berkeley, Hobbes, G.E. Moore, Roderick Chisholm, Richard Taylor, Peter Van Inwagen, most Kantians, all Hegelians, and nearly all existentialists.
This is the fallacy of arguing that something is so on the basis that humans believe and/or desire it to be so, that something is so because it seems prima facie to be so. I'm not addressing merely explanatory entities. Those are perfectly acceptable so long as they are recognized as being such. What I'm talking about is much more serious. It is a fundamental problem with burden-shifting arguments. It is the attitude of "I am right until you prove me wrong." On the contrary, buddy. If you have an argument for one position, and I have an argument for the other, and each of these arguments is valid (or inductively strong), the burden is equal. This is so even if your conclusion has more appeal (e.g., that human action is indeterministic, that minds directly control actions, that moral values can be known, that reason alone is sufficient for action, that introspection is more immediate and self-justifying than perception, etc.). The burden may even be in my favor, as seen especially in the case that my argument is an inductively strong argument based on empirical evidence and yours is some deductively valid a priori argument based on verbal locutions. That is of course, assuming that the truth value of statements corresponds in some way to how the world actually is. While a deductive argument may be more likely to be certain, it is also more likely to be vacuous and contentless.
Oh, and yes, I do believe and expect to someday show that each of the following is in some way false or imprecise: that human action is indeterministic, that minds directly control actions, that moral values can be known, that reason alone is sufficient for action, that introspection is more immediate and self-justifying than perception. You will find at least most of these proofs in my dissertation, once I finally have the freedom to compile my data and write it.
Unfortunately, inductive arguments take a lot more time and work to set up. Too bad for me.
The Ought-Is Fallacy
You may be familiar with the naturalistic fallacy, the is-ought fallacy, but this is another fallacy entirely. The ought-is fallacy is committed by such diverse thinkers as Plato, Berkeley, Hobbes, G.E. Moore, Roderick Chisholm, Richard Taylor, Peter Van Inwagen, most Kantians, all Hegelians, and nearly all existentialists.
This is the fallacy of arguing that something is so on the basis that humans believe and/or desire it to be so, that something is so because it seems prima facie to be so. I'm not addressing merely explanatory entities. Those are perfectly acceptable so long as they are recognized as being such. What I'm talking about is much more serious. It is a fundamental problem with burden-shifting arguments. It is the attitude of "I am right until you prove me wrong." On the contrary, buddy. If you have an argument for one position, and I have an argument for the other, and each of these arguments is valid (or inductively strong), the burden is equal. This is so even if your conclusion has more appeal (e.g., that human action is indeterministic, that minds directly control actions, that moral values can be known, that reason alone is sufficient for action, that introspection is more immediate and self-justifying than perception, etc.). The burden may even be in my favor, as seen especially in the case that my argument is an inductively strong argument based on empirical evidence and yours is some deductively valid a priori argument based on verbal locutions. That is of course, assuming that the truth value of statements corresponds in some way to how the world actually is. While a deductive argument may be more likely to be certain, it is also more likely to be vacuous and contentless.
Oh, and yes, I do believe and expect to someday show that each of the following is in some way false or imprecise: that human action is indeterministic, that minds directly control actions, that moral values can be known, that reason alone is sufficient for action, that introspection is more immediate and self-justifying than perception. You will find at least most of these proofs in my dissertation, once I finally have the freedom to compile my data and write it.
Unfortunately, inductive arguments take a lot more time and work to set up. Too bad for me.