I had a philosophy professor years ago who said that people who make catalogues of logical fallacies don’t really understand logic. The true logician simply examines the argument, notes that it doesn’t follow, and tells you why without using any jargon.
Being on the internet has convinced me this guy was completely correct.
Philosophy has a tendency to need to use very specialized language to avoid problems of ambiguity and to precisely identify concepts that have no reason to come up in the vast, vast majority of conversation among laypeople.
I mean, yes and no. You go to Aristotle, for instance, and while his work is definitely not easy to understand – it being lecture notes and all – it’s surprising how little jargon he uses, with most of it being just common words used in a restricted sense, e.g., “matter” or “relation.”
Aristotle had the benefit of not having millennia of literature to be working in relation with, and himself is quite responsible for the promotion of metaphysics as a philosophical field, which is perhaps the most obscure branch of philosophy.
Yeah, but seriously what’s even the point of such wisdom, especially when it can led people into things like subjective idealism. Or maybe it’s because idealists needs to reach insane levels of abstraction to even explain their idiotic ideas.
Probably a certain amount of specialized terminology is neccesary, and the complete lack of it, as in (say) Nietzsche, doesn’t always signify a profound thinker. But I agree with you that most contemporary philosophers use jargon simply to obscure.
I mean, from what i see Nietzsche key to popularity was precisely the fact he’s understandable, because he mostly just rambled, but laymen at least can tell what he meant.
Yeah, there was some point to it back in Aristotle’s day, but you can tell how much someone doesn’t know about logic from the degree to which they lean on pat lists of informal fallacies. Formal fallacies, as in those produced by incorrect inference in classical logic (or an argument that can be accurately reduced to classical logic), are infinite in a similar way to how “wrong answers to math equations” is an infinite category. “Informal fallacies” are a catalogue of rhetorical tricks and cognitive biases that it is good to be aware of but which don’t have very much to do with logic as a field.
I had a philosophy professor years ago who said that people who make catalogues of logical fallacies don’t really understand logic. The true logician simply examines the argument, notes that it doesn’t follow, and tells you why without using any jargon.
Being on the internet has convinced me this guy was completely correct.
It’s not only an internet, reading philosphy in general i noticed it’s awfully filled with jargon. And it tend to use it in worst possible manner.
Philosophy has a tendency to need to use very specialized language to avoid problems of ambiguity and to precisely identify concepts that have no reason to come up in the vast, vast majority of conversation among laypeople.
I mean, yes and no. You go to Aristotle, for instance, and while his work is definitely not easy to understand – it being lecture notes and all – it’s surprising how little jargon he uses, with most of it being just common words used in a restricted sense, e.g., “matter” or “relation.”
Aristotle had the benefit of not having millennia of literature to be working in relation with, and himself is quite responsible for the promotion of metaphysics as a philosophical field, which is perhaps the most obscure branch of philosophy.
Yeah, but seriously what’s even the point of such wisdom, especially when it can led people into things like subjective idealism. Or maybe it’s because idealists needs to reach insane levels of abstraction to even explain their idiotic ideas.
Probably a certain amount of specialized terminology is neccesary, and the complete lack of it, as in (say) Nietzsche, doesn’t always signify a profound thinker. But I agree with you that most contemporary philosophers use jargon simply to obscure.
I mean, from what i see Nietzsche key to popularity was precisely the fact he’s understandable, because he mostly just rambled, but laymen at least can tell what he meant.
Yeah, there was some point to it back in Aristotle’s day, but you can tell how much someone doesn’t know about logic from the degree to which they lean on pat lists of informal fallacies. Formal fallacies, as in those produced by incorrect inference in classical logic (or an argument that can be accurately reduced to classical logic), are infinite in a similar way to how “wrong answers to math equations” is an infinite category. “Informal fallacies” are a catalogue of rhetorical tricks and cognitive biases that it is good to be aware of but which don’t have very much to do with logic as a field.
Exactly. If you know how logic works – how we human beings think – you will be able to easily indentify arguments which don’t work.