- taboos in analytic philosophy--how come it's pretty much forbidden, or at least looked down upon in certain circles, to talk about derrida, or foucoult, or any continental philosophy? (tag: metaphilosophy)
- rhetoric and logic--some interpret logic (the formal system of analyzing good arguments) to be the best kind of rhetoric (the study of persuasion). in other words, rhetoric other than logic involve appealing to emotion, arguments ad hominem, and other stuff that isn't strictly based on the soundness and validity of the arguments. so i guess my question is: are rhetorical devices other than logic sometimes justified? (tags: logic, rhetoric)
- innocent realism--yeah i just wanna talk about haack's innocent realism. don't really have any questions about it yet. (tag: metaphysics)
- evidence and the current war in iraq--on npr i listened to an interview with valerie plame, the outed c.i.a. official. most of the interview was spent discussing how the evidence for the war was flimsy. lots of variables in this one, but it seems there was an underlying epistemological issue here. (tags: epistemology, politics, applied philosophy)
- scientific puzzles-- i have two things in mind here when i say puzzles. first, that science has uncertainties, gaps, and other problems of sorts that scientists attempt to solve. these puzzles or maybe we could call them knowledge gaps are filled in depending on what is needed to be found out thus depending on the specific disciplines that tackle the problems at hand. secondly, both haack and kuhn use the analogy of puzzles to explain the scientific enterprise (to haack 'scientific' might be broad, meaning any type of refined, critical common-sense inquiry; to kuhn 'scientific' might be more narrow, as in the natural sciences). i'd like to explore this similarity and its relation to the problems that the sciences run into. (tag: science)
ok so i went into more detail with some ideas than with others, but i'd still like to expand on most of these later.
3 comments:
The second and last topic sound really interesting, but theyre all fairly good ideas. Maybe not the Iraq one, you dont want the CIA opening files on you and shit ;)
...unless what you write is so good that it impresses them. In that case, they might want to hire you.
a few disjointed but related thoughts:
my vote: other forms of rhetoric
albeit, it is perfectly "reasonable" to expand beyond conventional forms of reasoning so long as they are valid in some greater sense. incidentally it also has to do with cont/analytic, considering that one distinction between the two is that cont often appeals to phenomenological experience rather than typical analytic logic in order to communicate truths.
as i see it, "mere" rhetoric means attempting to convince one of something by bad means of reasoning. this doesn't imply that the claim that is forwarded is false, merely that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises.
i think that rhetorical devices other than "logic" are of course justified, and merely point out the narrow scope of conventional logic.
by justified i mean that arguments that appeal to the emotions, etc., are possibly valid. i.e. they are epistemologically valid. my claim wasn't regarding the ethics of bad reasoning.
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