Sunday, August 05, 2007

.: Failed Philosophers :.

It’s one of those exciting scenes in a Chinese martial arts movie. The two of you have exchanged moves, but neither one seems to be at the upper hand, attacking blocking and parrying each other with unparalleled deftness. You decide to try to end the fight by using your ultimate skill. In a flurry of hands and feet, you send rapid attacks swift and hard right at the opponent’s important acupoints. It seems that with his martial arts skills it would be impossible for him to block or dodge all of your punches and kicks, and he would definitely be hit at least once- and suffer catastrophic internal injuries. Victory is at hand. All of a sudden, you opponent makes an unexpected move. He humjis and hides behind a wall. Your lethal attacks pound fall on the wall with little effect. At least, little effect on your opponent. A jutting brick cuts your knuckle and toes and you bleed to death.

In the so-called “cultured” society we have today, no one bothers to train martial arts anymore, but still I often observe things happening that are very similar to the above-mentioned scenario. Different in form, but almost identical in the absence of what happens. Let us consider the modern version of this story:

It’s one of those exciting scenes out of a highly exhilarating GP lesson. The two of you have exchanged arguments, but neither one seems to be winning the debate, rebutting each other with unparalleled wit. You decide to try to end the discussion by using your ultimate reasoning. In a tongue twisting display of your tongue and lips and teeth, you voice incredibly long chains of rhetorical and grandiloquent statements, each line punching hard through his ears and into his brains saying that you are correct. It seems that with his vocabulary and rate of speaking it would be impossible for him to rebut all of your points, and definitely would make a serious logical flaw in the process of attempting so, and suffer the fate of losing the argument. Victory, once again, is at hand. He looks shocked by the pure brute force of your arguments. Abruptly, his worried look changes to a calm countenance. Your argument seems to lose all effectiveness as he patiently waits for you to finish. You finish your argument, wondering what tricks he has up his sleeves. He speaks. “Ah, but that’s a fallacy.” You are utterly defeated.

Fallacies. Those irritating walls that pop out of nowhere and which you have absolutely neither defense nor offense against. It allows your opponents to effortlessly destroy your carefully planned argument, and here’s why: It is possible to categorize almost every single argument under the sky as a fallacy. What’s worse, fallacies carry weight; any idiot can just holler “fallacy!” and then the next thing you know you are pitted against the rules set down by the ancient philosophers, everything just seems to crumble like houses of cards.

But for those of you who were bitterly defeated by such nonsense, let me cheer you up, for fallacies are nothing but what failed philosophers invent as a cheapskate method of breaking down others’ arguments, when they cant make their own claims nearly as convincing or sophisticated as their adversaries. Its really just abused by the desperate and weak, neither daring nor able enough to bear the brunt of the full frontal attack and resorting to cowardly tactics like escaping and hiding behind a brick wall.

Just like the brick wall is blocks out any physical kicks and punches you can throw at it, the cookie cutter strategy of calling someone else’s argument a fallacy works almost a hundred percent of the time. (That small chance of it failing is when you are stupid enough to forget the name of the fallacy)

For those who are foolish enough to even hope disputing me about this, let me just overwhelm you with some examples. And don’t even begin to say the f-word (f-a-l-l-a-c-y), for I don’t buy this rubbish. (Else I wouldn’t be writing this, would I?)

You can’t question the provenance of another’s argument, because that would be ad hominem and poisoning the well. Ironically, when you use your own arguments without questioning its source, you are appealing to false authority. You can’t even blame people for hypocrisy, because then it would be ad hominem tu quoque. Statistics on public views don’t mean anything, because that’s merely appealing to belief or common practice. You can’t make your arguments sound good to people, or that will be appealing to emotions. Your arguments cannot include any outcome of your opponent’s views that make them uncomfortable, for that is appealing to fear AND appealing to consequences of beliefs. Your arguments cannot make the opponent comfortable either, for that’s appealing to flattery. All fundamental assumptions must be removed or it would be begging the questions. Either that or your fundamental assumptions cannot have anything to do with the issue in question. Science has totally no bearing, because all of it is based on statistical experimentation and all of that can be considered to be hasty generalization. (Like, how do you know that the 100000000000001st sample would be the same?) You can’t say anything about what may happen, or it would be slippery slope.

There are a lot of more, but the above are sufficient to show how everything can be considered as a fallacy. Censor out every single fallacy from the surface of the earth, and no man will be allowed to speak. We shall all communicate telepathically.

Fallacies might have started out as valid rebuttals, but now they are made so general that people abuse them every other day. Please, if you want to rebut my arguments, don’t be lazy and scream “fallacy” every time I speak. Think of decent rebuttals for yourself. And then you can appreciate how I will totally reduce your puny arguments to oblivion.

Rejected instrumentality at 6:54 PM