Posted by
glen ropella on
Jan 07, 2014; 4:12pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/11-American-Nations-tp7584250p7584648.html
On 01/06/2014 09:53 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Speaking of shoddy reasoning, I wish somebody would give an example of
> shoddy reasoning by a Right Winger that was NOT an example of reasoning from
> false premises.
I don't think libertarians really qualify as "right wing". But some
people call them that. And I think libertarians tend to employ shoddy
reasoning from mostly true premises. The shoddiness of their reasoning
lies in it's closedness. In particular, they tend to follow only the
_canalized_ core of the reasoning and tend to ignore all the
"unintended" side effects. The reasoning tends to be a linear chain
rather than an expanding tree.
I suppose you might say that they're still starting with false premises
in the sense that their premises are insufficiently detailed (only true
as over-simplifications). But that would be parsing it too deeply, I
think. We all do that because none of us are capable of fully
delineating a concrete premise (indeed, I would argue that reality can
never be completely represented as rhetoric).
But the primary gestalt I get from talking to libertarians is this
inability to think about the variety of other consequences that obtain,
the consequences they don't want to or can't consider. If you need
particular examples, we can pull them from some of the most rational
seeming founders, how about this?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2013/12/the-daily-show-interview-with-forbes-columnist-who-thinks-food-stamps-are-cruel/Are his assumptions false? Or is his reasoning simply too simple?
--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
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