#sophistry — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #sophistry, aggregated by home.social.
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@CuratedEpictetus What act is Long referring to? Presumably none is completely free from errors if the degree of them is significant, even as it concerns the bundle of naming, blaming, shaming and abuse. Being ill instructed, or wealthy is no excuse for the excessive use of blame by the few to make popular the grief of the oppressor so it undermines the grief of the oppressed. #TheGreatLie #Sophistry #Stoicism #Indemonstrables #peripatetics #Aristotle #Philosophy #PosterioriAnalytics #Categories #Syllogisms
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Om Malik on why Anthropic named its most powerful AI model Mythos: "Augustus had the Senate and the priests. Dario had the Oval Office and the Vatican. The structure is the same. Two thousand years apart."
#AI #philosophy #sophistry -
MARCUS: How few philosophers are to be found who are such in character, so ordered in soul and in life, as reason demands; who regard their teaching not as a display of knowledge, but as the rule of life; who obey themselves, and submit to their own decrees!
[Quotus enim quisque philosophorum invenitur, qui sit ita moratus, ita animo ac vita constitutus, ut ratio postulat? qui disciplinam suam non ostentationem scientiae, sed legem vitae putet? qui obtemperet ipse sibi et decretis suis pareat?]Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) Roman orator, statesman, philosopher
Tusculan Disputations [Tusculanae Disputationes], Book 2, ch. 4 (2.4) / sec. 11 (2.11) [Marcus] (45 BC) [tr. Peabody (1886)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/cicero-marcus-tulliu…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #cicero #character #hypocrisy #philosopher #philosophy #practicewhatyoupreach #pride #reason #selfawareness #showingoff #sophistry #truebeliever
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Irish coffee, 3 position on it.
1. Being sure that coffee with a shot of Irish whiskey in it is better than drinking the whiskey straight.
2. Thinking that it can never be known whether a shot of Irish whiskey that is being drunk would have been better mixed into a coffee. (Agnostic)
3. Drinking Irish whiskey, sure that it would not be better in a coffee. (The spiritualist position)
Which somehow leaves 1. to be twisted into "atheism".
This is your task. -
#Knowledge is #justified #true #belief. That definition is about 2500 years old, and although #philosophers have been trying to come up with a better definition ever since, no one has. All claimed counterexamples are #sophistry.
A lot of my fellow #scientists and/or #atheists have trouble with the word "belief" because they associate it with faith—which in turn can be defined as belief *without* justification, or whose truth is unknowable. But it's really a lot simpler than that.
If I walk inside dripping wet, and someone asks me if it's raining, and I say it is because I've just been out in it, then I'm stating my belief. What you believe is anything you can honestly affirm if someone asks you, "Is such-and-such true?"
Belief can be simple and immediate or complicated and long-term. It can be trivial or profound. It can be true or false, justified or unjustified, testable or untestable. The honesty, that's the key. Knowledge, a proper subset of belief, has a much higher standard.
The above is an extended way of saying that if someone begins a loaded question with an aggressive, sarcastic "Did you know ..." then you are amply justified in truly believing they're full of shit.
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As I have always been convinced that abuse of Words, has been the great instrument of Sophistry and Chicanery — of party, faction and Division in Society.
John Adams (1735-1826) American lawyer, Founding Father, statesman, US President (1797-1801)
Letter (1819-03-31) to J. H. TiffanyMore info about this quote: wist.info/adams-john/36295/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #johnadams #equivocation #ambiguity #chicanery #deception #language #meaning #persuasion #rhetoric #sophistry #talking #terminology #wordplay #words #definition -
HECUBA: The clear actions of a man,
Agamemnon, should speak louder than any words.
good words should get their goodness from our lives
and nowhere else; the evil we do should show,
a rottenness that festers in our speech
and what we say, in capable of being glozed
with a film of pretty words.
There are men, I know,
sophists who make a science of persuasion,
glozing evil with the slick of loveliness;
but in the end a speciousness will show.
The imposters are punished; not one escapes
his death.
[ἙΚΆΒΗ: Ἀγάμεμνον, ἀνθρώποισιν οὐκ ἐχρῆν ποτε
τῶν πραγμάτων τὴν γλῶσσαν ἰσχύειν πλέον:
ἀλλ᾽, εἴτε χρήστ᾽ ἔδρασε, χρήστ᾽ ἔδει λέγειν,
εἴτ᾽ αὖ πονηρά, τοὺς λόγους εἶναι σαθρούς,
καὶ μὴ δύνασθαι τἄδικ᾽ εὖ λέγειν ποτέ.
σοφοὶ μὲν οὖν εἰσ᾽ οἱ τάδ᾽ ἠκριβωκότες,
ἀλλ᾽ οὐ δύνανται διὰ τέλους εἶναι σοφοί,
κακῶς δ᾽ ἀπώλοντ᾽: οὔτις ἐξήλυξέ πω.]Euripides (485?-406? BC) Greek tragic dramatist
Hecuba [Hekabe; Ἑκάβη], l. 1186ff (c. 424 BC) [tr. Arrowsmith (1958)]Sourcing, notes, other translations: wist.info/euripides/77262/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #euripides #hecuba #actions #evil #excuse #glibness #persuasion #propaganda #rationale #smoothtalker #sophistry #wordsanddeeds
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On nonsense: Forms thereof, falsifiability, pseudoscience, bullshit, youth culture, and other craziness
I'd begun worrying about the resilience of truth and countermeasures to bullshit particularly online well over a decade ago.
This is an early compilation of heuristics and resources which came up in discussion elsewhere recently, and may be helpful to others.
Among conspicuous omissions, Aristotle's "Sophistical Refutations" (Sophistikoi Elenchoi in the original Greek), one of the earliest recorded (or surviving) guides to countering bullshit:
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html
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If you want to know why some people are deceptive, ask yourself this #question: how many of their aims can be achieved without employing #sophistry?
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The Unwitting #Trump #Enablers
Distinct from the #Trump #sycophants are the Trump enablers, both witting and unwitting, more serious figures who eschew such crude gestures of devotion in favor of cautious minimizations that obfuscate the truth rather than openly contradict it. There are all too many serious writers willing to oblige, intelligent people making clever arguments that amount to #sophistry..they are an indispensable part of legitimizing his conduct. read free https://archive.is/W3nGY#selection-1017.137-1017.348 -
@Neil1808
Which does nothing to compensate for your pedantic misrepresentation: "to name them the first inventors is so overhyped".
@Grandalf
#Auspol #FirstPeoples #Sophistry #Argumentation -
@Grandalf
One pedantic interpretation of the series' title might be that Australia's first peoples invented everything. A more rational reading is that they were in Australia first (as in, before the British) and they invented some things.
@Neil1808
#Auspol #FirstPeoples #Sophistry #Argumentation -
@Neil1808
Reciprocating your predilection for facile sophistry:
you imply that Australia's first peoples never invented anything. You can substantiate that, of course.
#Auspol #FirstPeoples #Sophistry #Argumentation -
Hope all is well in your respective corners of the Universe.
All things happen for a reason. (Some believe that the reason is "no reason at all, stuff is just random." I don't share that outlook, but I will defend to their death their right to say it.)
Why am I saying this? No reason that I can discern. But there is a reason.
And that's today's lesson: we don't know what the reason is. Ever. We can only do what is right and good, and let the Universe play out.
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Y'all.
If I said I went off for OVER TWO HOURS about a thing, don't come here and rehash old arguments expecting me to be impressed. Do you know how many religious people still try to use Pascal's Wager to convert atheists? That argument is nearly 400 years old. Using it shows you're unprepared for an adult conversation.
That's not #philosophy. That's #sophistry ad nauseam.
Some of you need to #readMore and #talkLess. Re: #abolishPolice, this is a good start: https://www.mpd150.com/resources/
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Suppose I shouldn't be surprised that internet search fails to return hits on **not** defending unacceptable arguments.
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@woozle I was just going to ping you into this thread.
Do your own research (DYOR) seems to me a sophistical retort as typically used. I was just checking to see if Issuepedia had a similar entry, though it doesn't seem to: https://issuepedia.org/mw/index.php?search=do+your+own+research&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go
What DYOR does is:
- Deny the validity of reputable or accepted sources.
- Put all sources on equivalent footing.
- Impose an undue burden on the audience.
- Relieve the source from having to be dilligent, reliable, or credible themselves. "We report, you decide."
Trust is an essential component of any epistomological system. Each individual member cannot individually verify all facts independently. Trust is the extension of belief beyond, but not in opposition to, evidence.
The etymological root of trust is the PIE root *deru- "strong, firm, steadfast", which I find illuminating. https://www.etymonline.com/word/trust
This isn't to say that spot verification or presentation of refuting evidence is unnecessary or bad. Both are good practices. But there's a difference between "question everything" (implied: "at all times"), and "Be prepared to question everything."
Trust saves a phenomenal level of effort, at a small and controllable level of risk. Where trust is found to be unwarranted, it is withdrawn. Those promoting DYOR very often rely on absolutely untrustworthy sources.
#trust #epistemology #issuepedia #dyor #DoYourOwnResearch #sophistry
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New rule: I refuse to allow people to say "we disagree" when they reject data and evidence.
We are not disagreeing. You are rejecting data. Those are not the same, and if you are communicating with me I will not allow you to conflate the two.
-- Tori Glass
https://nitter.net/ToriGlass/status/1291872390931070981
Over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle (384--322 B.C.) wrote Sophistical Refutations, or as I prefer to call it, "Bullshit Arguments Which Must Die", highlighting thirteen specific methods commonly used to twist logic. Well worth studying even today. Or especially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophistical_Refutations
Spoiler alert: they haven't died yet.
Tori's 'new rule' isn't among these, but has a name: denial.
(The conflation is listed, that is the first, equivocation.)
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Denial
#denial #rhetoric #sophistry #aristotle #SophisticalRefutations #BullshitArgumentWhichMustDie
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For more on the Sophists, see the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sophists/
I'd also recommend the HoP episode:
https://historyofphilosophy.net/sophists
Audio: https://hopwag.podbean.com/mf/feed/6qa8mu/HoP_014_Making_the_Weaker_Argument_the_Stronger___the_Sophists.mp3References:
J.M. Dillon and T. Gergel, The Greek Sophists (London: 2003).G.B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: 1981).
#sophists #sophistry #philosophy #HistoryOfPhilosophy #podcasts