Argumentum ad "Woo"
"Argumentum ad 'Woo'"
"Appeal to 'Woo'"
One of my hobbies is listening to podcasts done by people in the online atheist and freethinking communities. I enjoy most of those podcasts, but even among those there are a few that tend to irritate me for a number of reasons. One of the reasons I have in mind right now is the tendency for certain podcasts (especially those done by a certain smokin hot' group and another goddamned one...) to weaken the term woo-woo (or its shortened version woo) in such a way that it becomes essentially another way of saying something like "some belief that I find unusual that another person accepts; it can't be proven true to my satisfaction with scientific data." "Woo-woo belief" is so that it is simply another way of saying "strange belief." And so, all of us believe in some kind of woo-woo, regardless of how rational we consider ourselves to be, and it is therefore acceptable to ask another person "What kind of woo-woo do you believe in?" or "What is your woo-woo?" (Someone might as well ask me "Have you stopped beating up your wife Melissa yet?)
Perhaps my biggest objections to this bizarre use of the term is that it is not unlike how we might say that all people are liars provided that they have in their lives either told one little lie or ten million bigs ones, or that all men who who have sex with women are rapists, or how all people who have stolen things are theives or kleptos. We have in our languages a number of words used to describe people who have a predilection for performing certain actions. We refer to a person with a predilection for speaking loquacious, but we would not use that word to refer to someone who is a verbally taciturn person. Woo-woo, a term of disparagement, is normally used in reference to pseudoscience, quackery, appeals to mysterious occult forces or powers, conspiracy theories, and the like, usually in conjugation with fallacious reasoning. I would not consider, things like the hope that we can find extraterrestrial life forms one day, and the possibility that we can find cures for some of the most dangerous diseases, as examples of woo-woo. To refer to things like that as woo-woo simply cheapens the term when we use it to refer to real woo-woo, just as we are cheapening the word klepto to refer to everyone.
We also have to be very careful about using scientific data as a measuring stick in determining what is and what is not woo-woo. After all, what scientific data did we use to validate the efficacy of the scientific data itself in the first place? How on earth can the method of determining non-woo-woo stuff through scientific data apply to itself? If something is non-woo-woo through scientific data, then we must know it through scientific data. But that doesn't make any sense because we actually seem to know the validity of the statement through some kind of non-scientific or pre-scientific kinds of philosophy. If we can't know it through scientific data, then the statement is self-referentially incoherent. We in fact do know the efficacy of scientific data through non-scientific or pre-scientific kinds of philosophy such as axioms (the Axiom of Existence, the Law of Identity, the existence of sentient minds to think these things) and properly-basic beliefs such as memory, and the combination of our five senses together, et cetera.
Finally, we also have to look out for the tendency to believe that if something is not a thing, something you can perceive with your senses, then it really does not exist. This is a combination of the Greedy Reductionist fallacy and the Reification fallacy: we pretend such "things" must be concrete, and then suggest that if something does not reduce down to perceivable entities, then it does not really exist. But this could not be right because we might ask ourselves "Where are the Atoms of Thought?" or "Can you show me the Atoms of Love?" or "Where are all of the atoms of the concepts that I am using to make this statement?" Such questions do not make any sense at all. We can look around the cosmos searching for such things, but we would be hard-pressed to find something like them. Such "things" like evil, hate, love, and other conceptual "things" are not actually things or perceivable entities, but rather abstract concepts within sentient minds. Such abstractions describe categories of combinations and permutations of perceivable phenomena, not to specific perceivable entites. We can say that evil does not exist, but does that make any sense? It exists as an abstract concept in order to describe a range of phenomena, but it does not really exist perceivably like atoms or trees.
I am concerned about atheists using that bizarre use of the term woo-woo because it leaves them open to all sorts of easy attacks by crafty theist debaters, particularly those who employ presuppositional apologetics. While debating with presuppositionalist Paul Manata, the famous atheist writer and musician Dan Barker said that the only way to know anything is through scientific methods. I can just imagine how much Manata loved this claim because it gave him the perfect opportunity to show that there was something internally wrong with Dan's epistemology. It seems that many atheists become blinded by the evidentiary nature of the scientific method, and are prepared to debate with theists in terms of whether there is sufficient evidence for a particular deity according to the scientific method. However, the presuppositionalists are not in the business of proving that their worldview is true. They already "know" that it is, and they are not going to offer any proof for the validity of their position. They are just there to show that atheism is incoherent and completely irrational by default. Consequently, presuppositionalists end up pwning the atheists in cringe-worthy debates.
Such debates end up looking like this:
Atheist: "Evidence! Evidence! Evidence!"
Presuppositionalist: "Evidence? Why should we use that? What is your evidence that all of us should go by evidence? Hmm?"
Atheist: "Um..."
Presuppositionalist: "See?"
"Appeal to 'Woo'"
One of my hobbies is listening to podcasts done by people in the online atheist and freethinking communities. I enjoy most of those podcasts, but even among those there are a few that tend to irritate me for a number of reasons. One of the reasons I have in mind right now is the tendency for certain podcasts (especially those done by a certain smokin hot' group and another goddamned one...) to weaken the term woo-woo (or its shortened version woo) in such a way that it becomes essentially another way of saying something like "some belief that I find unusual that another person accepts; it can't be proven true to my satisfaction with scientific data." "Woo-woo belief" is so that it is simply another way of saying "strange belief." And so, all of us believe in some kind of woo-woo, regardless of how rational we consider ourselves to be, and it is therefore acceptable to ask another person "What kind of woo-woo do you believe in?" or "What is your woo-woo?" (Someone might as well ask me "Have you stopped beating up your wife Melissa yet?)
Perhaps my biggest objections to this bizarre use of the term is that it is not unlike how we might say that all people are liars provided that they have in their lives either told one little lie or ten million bigs ones, or that all men who who have sex with women are rapists, or how all people who have stolen things are theives or kleptos. We have in our languages a number of words used to describe people who have a predilection for performing certain actions. We refer to a person with a predilection for speaking loquacious, but we would not use that word to refer to someone who is a verbally taciturn person. Woo-woo, a term of disparagement, is normally used in reference to pseudoscience, quackery, appeals to mysterious occult forces or powers, conspiracy theories, and the like, usually in conjugation with fallacious reasoning. I would not consider, things like the hope that we can find extraterrestrial life forms one day, and the possibility that we can find cures for some of the most dangerous diseases, as examples of woo-woo. To refer to things like that as woo-woo simply cheapens the term when we use it to refer to real woo-woo, just as we are cheapening the word klepto to refer to everyone.
We also have to be very careful about using scientific data as a measuring stick in determining what is and what is not woo-woo. After all, what scientific data did we use to validate the efficacy of the scientific data itself in the first place? How on earth can the method of determining non-woo-woo stuff through scientific data apply to itself? If something is non-woo-woo through scientific data, then we must know it through scientific data. But that doesn't make any sense because we actually seem to know the validity of the statement through some kind of non-scientific or pre-scientific kinds of philosophy. If we can't know it through scientific data, then the statement is self-referentially incoherent. We in fact do know the efficacy of scientific data through non-scientific or pre-scientific kinds of philosophy such as axioms (the Axiom of Existence, the Law of Identity, the existence of sentient minds to think these things) and properly-basic beliefs such as memory, and the combination of our five senses together, et cetera.
Finally, we also have to look out for the tendency to believe that if something is not a thing, something you can perceive with your senses, then it really does not exist. This is a combination of the Greedy Reductionist fallacy and the Reification fallacy: we pretend such "things" must be concrete, and then suggest that if something does not reduce down to perceivable entities, then it does not really exist. But this could not be right because we might ask ourselves "Where are the Atoms of Thought?" or "Can you show me the Atoms of Love?" or "Where are all of the atoms of the concepts that I am using to make this statement?" Such questions do not make any sense at all. We can look around the cosmos searching for such things, but we would be hard-pressed to find something like them. Such "things" like evil, hate, love, and other conceptual "things" are not actually things or perceivable entities, but rather abstract concepts within sentient minds. Such abstractions describe categories of combinations and permutations of perceivable phenomena, not to specific perceivable entites. We can say that evil does not exist, but does that make any sense? It exists as an abstract concept in order to describe a range of phenomena, but it does not really exist perceivably like atoms or trees.
I am concerned about atheists using that bizarre use of the term woo-woo because it leaves them open to all sorts of easy attacks by crafty theist debaters, particularly those who employ presuppositional apologetics. While debating with presuppositionalist Paul Manata, the famous atheist writer and musician Dan Barker said that the only way to know anything is through scientific methods. I can just imagine how much Manata loved this claim because it gave him the perfect opportunity to show that there was something internally wrong with Dan's epistemology. It seems that many atheists become blinded by the evidentiary nature of the scientific method, and are prepared to debate with theists in terms of whether there is sufficient evidence for a particular deity according to the scientific method. However, the presuppositionalists are not in the business of proving that their worldview is true. They already "know" that it is, and they are not going to offer any proof for the validity of their position. They are just there to show that atheism is incoherent and completely irrational by default. Consequently, presuppositionalists end up pwning the atheists in cringe-worthy debates.
Such debates end up looking like this:
Atheist: "Evidence! Evidence! Evidence!"
Presuppositionalist: "Evidence? Why should we use that? What is your evidence that all of us should go by evidence? Hmm?"
Atheist: "Um..."
Presuppositionalist: "See?"