Re: "rational"

Posted by Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/11-American-Nations-tp7584250p7584652.html

Glen Sed:

> 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.

well articulated...
> 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).
I certainly hope not (to your parenthetical), the map is not the
territory, the finger pointing skyward is not the moon, the model is
insufficient, by definition.

>
> 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?

Politics make strange bedfellows.   I do know that of recent years, many
LIbertarians have joined with Tea Partiers or vice-versa, probably over
"small government" or "states rights" or
"personal-liberty-as-long-as-it-involves-a-gun" kinds of topics.

But Nick's question about Right-Winghers is still somewhat open.   I
*have* had the experience of RWs using LWs willingness to accept various
premises for a discussion as the opportunity to do precisely what Nick
is describing... to not just start with false premises but to introduce
them along the way as-needed.

Since I'm confident that we have more than one Right-leaning member
here, I want to add, that this behaviour, in my opinion is only in
evidence in *some* who choose that label... just as "knee jerk" and
"bleeding heart" does not describe every Liberal/Progressive I know...
just enough that those labels are not entirely unmotivated.

- Steve


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