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There's nowhere near enough bewbies in this thread.

There. Fixed.


Edited, Feb 13th 2009 7:39pm by paulsol

If I may ask, what field are you in? I'm just curious because usually when I run into someone who insists on tossing logic jargon around, they just recently learned it in a class and think that by using it a lot it makes them experts on using it. The problem is that the real world rarely fits nicely into the kinds of examples used to illustrate said proofs when you were in a classroom.

Outside of mathematics and strict philosophical discussions, there's rarely going to be anything you can apply the kinds of arguments you are using. For exactly the reason your argument failed here. In a classroom you can be "given" a set of truths. In the real world, you aren't. You made an assumption and treated it as a given, resulting in your entire argument failing.




Unlikely. I've just got about 20 more years of seeing how the things I learned in university courses actually work when applied outside a classroom setting. And part of what I learned is that the words you use only matter to a small segment of people who stuffily believe that the words matter (usually academics). To everyone else, the concepts and rationality of a position is what matters.

The danger of following strict logical progressions is exactly that you can arrive at horribly wrong conclusions if any of your assumptions are wrong. But due to how logic is taught, most students come out knowing how to use the formulations, but *not* how to derive a valid assumption. It's just not taught, because it's not technically part of logic, right? Logic only teaches us how to take truths and determine other truths from them (or the converse of course).


The most important thing you can learn in life is to constantly re-examine your assumptions. If you just accept them and then strictly follow a set of rules (logical or otherwise) based on them, you'll constantly wonder why the things you are doing, which ought to work, don't. I'd make a wider point about the frequency with which social theories fail when applied to actual real societies, or how often economic theories fail for the same reason, but hopefully you get the point already.




Sure. But it's usually semantics on the part of the person I'm debating with. The reason I write long paragraphs and repeat points over and over is specifically to attempt to avoid semantic arguments. I will make the same point using 3 or 4 different sets of words to explain it. I don't do this to be inconsistent, but hopefully to make sure that regardless of what definition of this word or that word you think I'm using in one case, between 3 or 4 of them, you should be able to puzzle out what I'm actually saying.

Sadly, too many people have been trained to look at the specific meanings of words so this often fails. Even though I wrote the same statement using 4 different words so that the reader would hopefully take just the common meanings of those 4 words in context, someone will inevitably ignore 3 of the statements, focus on the one that includes a word that can mean something totally different, assume that totally different meaning and then call my statement wrong because of some trivially easy proof.


I don't write that much stuff just to see my words appear on the screen. I write it out of a desire to be as absolutely clear about what I'm saying as possible. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work...




It really isn't. You were the one who's argument was being refuted remember? You claimed that parents should have no greater rights to raise their children than the state. Perhaps you want to try again to defend that statement?

It's an esoteric philosophical debate. It also rests on yet another assumption of the validity of determinism, which is itself subject to debate. Your mistake isn't so much in the formation, but in the application. If you're going to attempt to debate something based on unproven sets of assumptions, you should analyze the results based on all combinations of those unproven assumptions. You applied just the one that you liked and which helped your position and used it as a given in your argument. While that's great if you are doing a class assignment to explore said possibility, it's not terribly useful when discussing a real world question like the issue of parental rights.


You'll note though, that I did do what you didn't. I followed each case and showed that your statement that parents had no more right to raise their children than anyone else was not supported by either of them. I did simplify the issue down to just two cases, but IMO those were the only two that mattered in this context. And honestly, I only did that because it appeared as though something that was incredibly obvious to me (that it didn't matter either way) was clearly *not* obvious to you...


I think you're trying to toss in extraneous ideas here, maybe because you learned them recently and think they're important somehow (or just want to show off your knowledge I suppose). In the real world, you can (and should!) strip down arguments to just the things that matter. In this case, the question is whether or not a child being raised by the state or the parents is any more or less likely to become a mindless clone of whomever raises it. And in that context, the entire question about free-will and determinism is moot. Those conditions, whatever they are, exist in both cases we are examining. Thus, unless you can argue that the relationship between free-will and determinism changes based on whether it's the state or the parent doing the raising, there's no reason to even bring either one into the discussion, right?


Does that make more sense? You're focusing waaaay too much on the structure of an argument and losing sight of what you're actually arguing. Again. that's handy if you're about to take a quiz on logical formulations. It's not useful *at all* if you're actually debating a real issue in the real world. The phrase "missing the forest for the trees" applies here. When you do this, your argument bogs down on minutia that ultimately don't matter at all to the issue being debated. Like whether or not free-will can co-exist with determinism. Who cares? It doesn't matter in this case.

Irony, thy name is gbaji

Do you actually think that I care about changing your opinion? Why would I go to all that trouble to have you ultimately revert back to your own beliefs. Guess what gbaji, the fact that states should have more rights than parents is just as obvious now as it was before, and the reverse is just as not obvious as before. I don't care a whit about convincing our token small government guy why he should become a radical socialist. It's too much work and I ain't getting paid.

The only thing that matters on a forum is making a good argument and seeing if like minded people think that you're onto something. It's practice, and it's fun.