Date: Sat, 1 Nov 1997 21:18:40 -0500
From: ldkaplan-AT-unccvm.uncc.edu (Laura Duhan Kaplan)
Subject: PLC: Arguing from ignorance


No one needs my help on this one, that's for sure, especially as I'm
posting from ignorance, having missed much of this thread.

Though I took 3 semesters of undergraduate and two of graduate school
logic, no one ever taught me the "informal fallacies," as they're called by
the critical thinking industry.  And, frankly, I didn't succeed real well
at figuring out from the critical thinking textbooks I taught from what
"argumentum ad ignoratium" is supposed to be.

I came away with the impression that it's the posture, "I don't know
anything about this, so it must be false."  Sort of like what Marilyn Frye
says about the erasure of lesbians in the English language: people are
encouraged to think, I don't know much about it, so it must not exist much.
Or maybe it's a version of "false generalization," wherein a person
generalizes from their own anecdotal experience a little prematurely: "I've
never heard of that happening [with an implied, "so I don't think it
happens much."]"  Or maybe its the step of moving from "there is no
evidence that cigars cause cancer" to "there is evidence that cigars cause
cancer."

so who knows.  The bigger question that I see when people get entangled in
trying to sort things out with A --> B's and such is...what is logic?  How
does it map onto the world?  descriptive rules of thought?  prescriptive
rules of good thought?  a skimpy formal system that captures some features
of language and thinking but not others?

Useless.  Me, not logic.  BTW, have you even noticed the similarity between
the words "logic" and "magic"?  It is as if someone (?) were trying to call
attention to a similarly in meaning.  Perhaps both are members of the same
set of something or others.  Just a playful fragment, nothing worked out
here.

Laura Duhan Kaplan
Philosophy, Women's Studies, Liberal Studies at UNC Charlotte
ldkaplan-AT-email.uncc.edu




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