When those of us who teach subjects like logic & critical thinking take the floor before a roomful of students, what, exactly, are we doing? More to the point, what should we be doing? I know where I like to begin: by explaining very basic logical relations including compatability vs. incompatibility, contradiction, possibility, necessity, & a few others; & also with the importance of defining your terms. I know where I like to end up: with students who have gained a few of the skills necessary to critically evaluate for themselves what they are told by authorities ... whether the authorities are scientific, economic, political & ideological, moral, religious, medical, etc. I have a nice little thought experience that illustrates for them how easily statistics can be doctored to arrive at a politically predetermined result. I am always amazed at how the majority of my students have never seen anything like this before!! So what frequently happens in academia? What happens is that sooner or later, those paying attention eventually learn that in the majority of cases neither scholarship nor teaching is about these things. I learned this the hard way, just by wondering if it was just or fair that women were being awarded tenure track jobs for which (if one could believe that the job descriptions I was relying on were accurate depictions of what was wanted) I was clearly more qualified (with publications, more teaching experience, etc.). Moreover, information I gathered indicated that these women often washed out in a year or two. Sometimes not before turning their departments into war zones, in pushing their radical feminist ideology. They always found jobs elsewhere. Somehow these people always managed to land on their feet. Id supported affirmative action without thinking about it before that. And considered feminism to be about justice for women. (Equal pay for equal work, & all that.) When encountering new evidence, I revise my thinking. (What do YOU do?) But this isnt about any particular political fight. It is about what we should be doing, as teachers, as scholars, as intellectuals. Noam Chomsky had this crazy idea: intellectuals arent here to playing games with words & ideas. They have a job to do in an advanced civilization. That responsibility includes producing criticisms of power, highlighting as much as possible cases of its abuse, & documenting how power cloaks itself inside frequently weaponized language. Power, not being absolute, often masquerades as something else. It often hijacks the language of science, rationality, or justice, or religiosity, to accomplish its goals, which always involve CONTROL OVER YOUR MIND! I know of -- have known -- so many people utterly locked into views of their subject matter, which may be politics where they are locked into the view that all the U.S. masses have to do to solve the countrys problems is elect more Republicans. (For others, its Democrats, of course.) Others are locked into the view that free markets are the answer (although clearly, a mass of intelligent, educated people will use markets intelligently & a mass of stupid people will use markets stupidly, & that stupid will drive out intelligent, resulting in dysfunction; sorry, anarchocapitalists). Others confuse rationality with a certain view of the universe: materialism. They are convinced -- they have no doubts whatsoever -- that the human race emerged as a result of a completely natural, unplanned process, although no one has actually observed this process occur; & the metaphysics behind the process cannot explain either the hundreds of anomalous artifacts & fossils that have been found all over the world or the anomalous experiences suggestive of non-material phenomena (disembodied spirits, etc.*). The scientific approach I have seen in dealing with, e.g., out-of-place artifacts is to put them in museum basements & forget about them. James Fetzer has become a sort of intellectual hero of mine. He is a fellow philosopher. Before I even knew his views on the JFK assassination, I had several of his books & anthologies on philosophy of science & cognitive science. While not the sort of earthshattering work we received from people like Thomas S. Kuhn or Paul Feyerabend, his conclusions about how we *should* conduct our reasoning in empirical science or daily life were themselves solidly reasoned. Why the reasoning ability so evident in his philosophical work should depart him completely when dealing with subjects like the JFK assassination, the 9/11 attacks, Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon Massacre, etc., has never been addressed ... not by anyone. Call him a conspiracy theorist or worse, if you wish. As far as I am concerned, that dog just isnt going to hunt anymore, not when I can look up a certain CIA document & read for myself how the entire *conspiracy-theorists-are-nuts* meme got established in the first place! Suppose: affirmative action does not deliver justice for blacks, much less for whites. Heck, suppose, just for a minute, that the typically unquestioned notion that all racial groups & ethnicities are of equal average intelligence is an ideological assumption not supported by actual empirical research (think: psychometrics). The question might be crucial in evaluating one of the central assumptions of affirmative action, which is that there is a correct representation of groups in the workplace (academia, student bodies), which is behind efforts at racial realignment that have been going on for the past 40 years ... without much success. I used to make the point that the common term used by bureaucrats, underrepresented groups, is dependent on the concept of correct representation, a concept never identified or defined. The dependence were talking about is logical, not ideological. A ten-year-old should be able to understand it. Yet theres a complete & total blackout (no pun intended) on this kind of conversation. The ideology persists; it fails the communities it is intended to address; those communities start burning things down rather than trying to backtrack & figure out what went wrong (very suggestive!). Suppose: the official 9/11 narrative really is just that, a narrative designed to benefit certain people furthering an agenda of power. We have certainly seen consolidations of power since 09/11/2001. I assume no one would deny that! What kind of inference are we making here? It has a name (although if I had more time I could work out its structure in more detail): *inference to the best explanation.* Note: this does not *prove* that 9/11 was the work of insidious persons behind the scenes in the U.S. government (& possibly Israel) instead of a guy with a beard in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan (former CIA agent, btw). But as critical thinkers we should at least be open to the possibilities, especially when we look at the many anomalies -- well-established facts all over the map that dont fit the official 9/11 narrative. Unfortunately these have been thrown into the mass media equivalent of that museum basement to be forgotten about. The same is true for the others (Sandy Hook, etc.). Suppose ... THIS IS THE REALLY DANGEROUS ONE, THE REAL TEST OF HOW MANY PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THIS FAR REALLY BELIEVE IN FREE SPEECH! ... that the Holocaust story, which Fetzer mentions, is *also* another official narrative, put in place by very powerful people to serve a specific purpose (the parallels to other narratives are indeed unmistakable). How many people reading this know that some who have tried to investigate what might be called the science of the Holocaust have suddenly been declared anti-semitic (for critical thinkers, thats an ad hominem argument, an informal fallacy) & had their academic careers sabotaged & destroyed? Exactly what does the narrative state, & what specific facts establish its truth? Can anyone tell me? What makes you afraid of the question? Sure, you can cite the Southern Poverty Law Center & say that I must be some kind of neo-nazi for even raising the question (ad hominem again). Also, the authority of the ADL is ... just that, an appeal to authority (another informal fallacy; neither group is neutral!). What if ... GASP!! ... the claim that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews *really cannot* be substantiated by genuine scientific-quality research, if only because not only is no actual research allowed anywhere in the world today, there are places (Germany & Canada are two examples) where you can be arrested & imprisoned just for raising the question! As a guy who tries to encourage not just students but readers -- people generally -- to ask questions based on logical & epistemological principles, instead of lap up what they are told by the authorities like a bunch of sheep, the question that often comes to mind when I see the responses to these heresies: WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? Attacks on speakers such as Jim Fetzer with ideologically heretical views should be seen for what they are: efforts to censor. British philosopher John Stuart Mill had a very compelling argument against intellectual censorship. It can be found in the first two chapters of his *On Liberty* (1859). These are efforts to avoid the truth: (in C.S. Pierces sense) to block the path of inquiry. Efforts to perpetuate positions, ideologies, & agendas. Not to produce criticisms of power which is our responsibility if we are thinkers & not shills, or more exactly, sheep. __________ *I had a family member, now deceased, who had such an experience. When I was in graduate school I had a neighbor who had one ... & watched a normally laid-back unperturbable tomcat Id adopted suddenly go crazy at something in my apartment only he could see. Ive known of other people who had encounters that had no rational explanation (i.e., an explanation compatible ... theres one of those logical relations I mentioned ... with materialism as a view of the universe).
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 23:33:46 +0000
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