My Identity is Personal

Two cartoons on personal identity:

1. Does physical or psychological continuity matter? Let's think about teletransportation...
   
   


2. Perhaps our identity is all in the way we're arranged:
   
   

Suffer-iness

Here's Stephen Colbert's take on evil:

More with the Creepy Guy

Here are some recommended videos on the design argument from Closer to Truth:

• Philosopher Richard Swinburne likes the design argument. (Part 2 of his interview is here.)
  
• Philosopher Bede Rundle is less convinced.
• Philosopher Colin McGinn tackles the issue of fine-tuning.
  

Design in the Mind's Eye

Here's an interesting approach to explaining the seeming complexity, order, and functionality of the universe: maybe it's all in our mind.

Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that we see intentional design and patterns too much... including in things that are actually random. So things that seem so fine-tuned and unlikely from our perspective might not actually be. Here's a video dialogue on this topic:


Bloom has two great books (Descartes' Baby and How Children Learn the Meaning of Words) on how our minds develop from early childhood on.

Why Is Anything Anything?

The website Closer to Truth has a ton of short interviews with modern-day philosophers (and other smart people) on their thoughts about god. For instance, there's an entire episode on the cosmological argument titled "Did Our Universe Have a Beginning?" and an entire section titled "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" Here are some related videos:

• Theist John Leslie says God best explains why there is something.
  
• Theist Peter van Inwagen believes in God, but doesn't like this arg.
  
• Atheist Colin McGinn thinks it's a meaningless question.
• Physicist Steven Weisberg says we should wait for science's answer.
• Apatheist Master Shake uses it as an excuse to be lazy.
  

Speaking of silly jokes, here's one of my favorite responses to the cosmological argument (from Gerald Dworkin's list of philosophy quips:)

When a philosopher announced that the title of his talk was “Why is there Something rather than Nothing?” Sydney Morgenbesser said to the man sitting next to him, “If there was Nothing he would still complain.”

And here's a video on the relationship between philosophy and religion:

• Does Philosophy Illuminate Religion?

Am I a Jerk Because I Annoy You, or Do I Annoy You Because I'm a Jerk?

Socrates has a reputation of being a bit of a jerk. The following robot reenactment of one of his dialogues does little to dispel this reputation:

Evaluating Deductive Arguments

Here are the answers to the handout on evaluating deductive arguments that we went over in class. Perhaps I should have titled the handout "So Many Bad Args!"

1) All kangaroos are marsupials.
All marsupials are mammals.
All kangaroos are mammals.

P1- true
P2- true
structure- valid
overall - sound

2) (from Stephen Colbert)
Bush was either a great prez or the greatest prez.
Bush wasn’t the greatest prez.
Bush was a great prez.

P1- questionable ("great" is subjective)
P2- questionable ("great" is subjective)
structure- valid (it's either A or B; it's not A; so it's B)
overall- unsound (bad premises)

3) Some people are funny.
Sean is a person.
Sean is funny.

P1- true (we might disagree over who specifically is funny, but nearly all of us would agree that someone is funny)
P2- true (each "Sean" in this handout refers to your teacher, Sean Landis)
structure- invalid (the 1st premise only says some are funny; Sean could be one of the unfunny people)
overall- unsound (bad structure)

4) All email forwards are annoying.
Some email forwards are false.
Some annoying things are false.

P1- questionable ("annoying" is subjective)
P2- true
structure- valid (the premises establish that some email forwards are both annoying and false; so some annoying things [those forwards] are false)
overall - unsound (bad first premise)

5) All bats are mammals.
All bats have wings.
All mammals have wings.

P1- true
P2- true (if interpreted to mean "All bats are the sorts of creatures who have wings.") or false (if interpreted to mean "Each and every living bat has wings," since some bats are born without wings)
structure- invalid (we don't know anything about the relationship between mammals and winged creatures just from the fact that bats belong to each group)
overall- unsound (bad structure)

6) Some dads have beards.
All bearded people are mean.
Some dads are mean.

P1- true
P2- questionable ("mean" is subjective)
structure- valid (if all the people with beards were mean, then the dads with beards would be mean, so some dads would be mean)
overall- unsound (bad 2nd premise)

7) This class is boring.
All boring things are taught by Sean
This class is taught by Sean.

P1-questionable ("boring" is subjective)
P2- false (nearly everyone would agree that there are some boring things not associated with Sean)
structure- valid
overall- unsound (bad premises)

8) All students in here are mammals.
All humans are mammals.
All students in here are humans.

P1- true
P2- true
structure- invalid (the premises only tell us that students and humans both belong to the mammals group; we don't know enough about the relationship between students and humans from this; for instance, what if a dog were a student in our class?)
overall- unsound (bad structure)

9) All hornets are wasps.
All wasps are insects.
All insects are scary.
All hornets are scary.

P1- true!
P2- true
P3- questionable ("scary" is subjective)
structure- valid (same structure as in argument #1, just with an extra premise)
overall- unsound (bad 3rd premise)

10) All students in here are humans.
All humans are shorter than 10 feet tall.
All students in here are shorter than 10 feet tall.

P1- true
P2- true!
structure- valid (same structure as arg #1)
overall- sound

11) If Sean sings, then students cringe.
Sean is singing right now.
Students are cringing right now.

P1- questionable (since you haven't heard me sing, you don't know whether it's true or false)
P2- false
structure- valid
overall- unsound (bad premises)

12) If Sean sings, then students cringe.
Sean isn't singing right now.
Students aren't cringing right now.

P1- questionable (again, you don't know)
P2- true
structure- invalid (from premise 1, we only know what happens when Sean is singing, not when he isn't singing; students could cringe for a different reason)
overall- unsound (bad 1st premise and structure)

13) If Sean sings, then students cringe.
Students aren't cringing right now.
Sean isn't singing right now.

P1- questionable (again, you don't know)
P2- true
structure- valid
overall- unsound (bad 1st premise)

14) If Sean sings, then students cringe.
Students are cringing right now.
Sean is singing right now.

P1- questionable (again, you don't know)
P2- false
structure- valid (from premise 1, we only know that Sean singing is one way to guarantee that students cringe; just because they're cringing doesn't mean Sean's the one who caused it; again, students could cringe for a different reason)
overall- unsound (bad premises and structure)

An Expert for Every Cause

Looking for links on arguments from authority? This is your post! First, here's an interesting article on a great question: How are those of us who aren't experts supposed to figure out the truth about stuff that requires expertise?

Not all alleged experts are actual experts. Here's a method to tell which experts are phonies (this article was originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education).

It's important to check whether the person making an appeal to authority really knows who the authority is. That's why we should beware of claims that begin with "Studies show..."

And here's a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Christopher Walken completely flunks the competence test.

Arguments by Example

Here are a few dumb things about arguments by example (also called inductive arguments, talked about in the book chapter titled "Generalizations"). First, a video of comedian Lewis Black describing his failure to learn from experience every year around Halloween:


Next, this stick figure comic offers a pretty bad argument. Why is it bad? (Let us know in the comments!)

The Full Moon Myth?

Scientific American has a nice article examining the widely-held belief that the full moon causes strange behavior. Research suggests the full moon doesn't have this effect:

"By combining the results of multiple studies and treating them as though they were one huge study—a statistical procedure called meta-analysis—[scientists] have found that full moons are entirely unrelated to a host of events, including crimes, suicides, psychiatric problems and crisis center calls. In their 1985 review of 37 studies entitled 'Much Ado about the Full Moon,' which appeared in one of psychology’s premier journals, Psychological Bulletin, Rotton and Kelly humorously bid adieu to the full-moon effect and concluded that further research on it was unnecessary."

One reason the belief persists is a set of natural human cognitive biases in which we perceive correlations where no such correlations exist:

"Illusory correlations result in part from our mind’s propensity to attend to—and recall—most events better than nonevents. When there is a full moon and something decidedly odd happens, we usually notice it, tell others about it and remember it. We do so because such co-occurrences fit with our preconceptions. ... In contrast, when there is a full moon and nothing odd happens, this nonevent quickly fades from our memory. As a result of our selective recall, we erroneously perceive an association between full moons and myriad bizarre events."

We'll be discussing these biases more when we study arguments about causes. Here's a cool video by psychological Dan Gilbert on our mistaken expectations:

Trying to Get Away Into the Night

If only everything were as wholesome as '80's era Tiffany videos:

Philosophy: The Nagging 3 Year Old

Here's comedian Louis CK's take on the broad, fundamental questions kids ask.

Louis CK - Why?