Critical Thinking – notes

Lesson 8 – linguistic pitfalls

 examine certain way in which language use can go wrong and lead to clear and ineffective
communications

Ambiguity: ambiguous expressions are expressions that means or refer to more than one thing

Three types of ambiguity

Lexical ambiguity: when it has more than one literal meaning
Ex: “big rig carrying fruit crashes on 210 freeway, creates jam”
Referential ambiguity: when it is not clear what is being referred to, this can happen where
there are multiple interpretations for pronouns or quantifiers
Ex: “Elizabeth told Amanda she had a problem”
Syntactic ambiguity: when a case in which an expression can be understood as having multiple
grammatical structures with different meaning
Ex: “friend help murder victims’ family”

Disambiguation: to disambiguate and ambiguous expression, we specify the various

interpretations
Example: “sherlock saw the man using binoculars”
Interpretation 1: sherlock used binoculars to see the man
Interpretation 2: sherlock saw the man who was using binoculars

Equivocation: an argument equivocated when a key term in it switches meaning in an argument

or discussion
Example:
1. Philosophy is deep
2. It’s possible to drown in deep things
3. Therefore, it’s possible to drown in philosophy
This argument equivocates on the word deep

Linguistic pitfalls:
- Various linguistic pitfalls and hinder clear and effective communication
- Recognizing these pitfalls will help us express ourselves more clearly and accurately and
better understand and asses the claim of others
Vagueness:
- A term or statement is
vague just in case it is
indeterminate exactly
which thing it applies to
(or is true)
- Ex: tall, small, dark

Incomplete meaning:
- Some terms have incomplete meaning in that their use presupposes certain standards of
comparison
- It isn’t clear what the intended standards are true are their meaning are unclear
- Ex: “similar, “useful”

Inappropriate emotional connotation

- Occurs when emotionally laden language is inappropriately used (to bias our reaction)

Category mistake
- Occurs when a statement ascribes a property to something that it does not make sense for
an object of that kind to have
- Ex: “information wants to be free” (information can’t “want” anything)
- They can convey the truth
- But the literal meaning doesn’t not make sense

Empty meaning
- Little or no meaning
- Expresses a logical necessary truth
- Ex: “Diana was still alive hours before she died”

Jargon and gobbledygook

- Specialized vocab to communicate quickly and effectively
- But when jargon is used to communicate with an audience that doesn’t know what it
means it impedes effective communication
- Gobbledygook is obscure and convoluted language that is full of jargon wordy or
convoluted language
- Sometimes people use it to sound smart or convey authority
Lesson 9 – scientific reasoning

Scientific reasoning: is the reasoning used to explain predict, and control empirical phenomena
in a rational manner
This includes:
- Designs experiments
- Test hypothesis
- Interpret data

 used by scientists but many principles are used in everyday life too

Involves explaining aspects of the world using theories that offer explanting’s and make
predictions

1. The world
- Aims to understand some aspects the world around us
Example: a physicist might aim to understand whether a light is a wave, particle or both

2. Theories
- Statements of laws, hypothesis and other punitive facts about the world
Example: Oxygen theory of combustion (Lavoisier)
Theories of special and general relativity (Einstein)

3. Explanations and predictions

- Theories explain certain aspects of the world and make predictions
- Predictions can be about the future, present, or the past (retrodictions)

4. Data (evidence)
- Is information gathered from observations or experiments
- Used to test theories or point towards new theories
Example: evidence from fossils supports the theory that dinosaurs once roamed the earth

Miss conceptions about theories

- In everyday language a “theory” is sometimes used to means a tentative hypothesis
- But scientific theories in our sense are often well-supported by evidence

The hypothetico-deductive method

- Is a very important scientific method of testing theories and hypothesis

You can break this method down into 4 steps

- Step 1: identify hypothesis to be tested
- Step 2: generate predictions from the hypothesis
- Step 3: used experiments to check whether the predictions are correct
- Step 4: of predictions are correct, the hypothesis is confirmed, otherwise the hypothesis is
disconfirmed
Example of applying the method
 Suppose your battery powered camera won’t turn on. You wonder whether the batteries
are dead

Hypotheses must be testable

- The HD method can only confirm or discomefirm hypotheses that are capable of being
tested
Example:
- The hypothesis that there is ghost that do not interact in any way with us or the (rest of)
physical word is not a testable hypothesis

Confirmation:
- The HD can confirm a hypothesis but cannot conclusively establish it
- A hypothesis is confirmed when it is more likely than before to be true
- But this does not conclusively establish it, because it does not rule out alternative
hypothesis that are consistent with (or even confirmed by) the same evidence

Disconfirmation:
- The HD
method can disconfirm a
hypothesis but can’t
conclusively show that it is
fake
- A hypothesis
is disconfirmed when it is
less likely that before is true
Disconfirmation:
- The HD method can only disconfirm, and not conclusively rule out a hypothesis because
hypotheses generate predictions only with the help of certain assumptions, which are
called auxiliary (background) assumptions

Auxiliary assumptions: camera case

- If a prediction is false, we don’t know whether for sure this is because the hypothesis is
false or because an auxiliary assumption is false

Theory choice: how do we decide between competing theories?

Example: battery-powered camera won’t turn on

- Hypothesis 1: the batteries are dead
- Hypothesis 2: the batteries are incorrectly solved
- Hypothesis 3: the camera is broken
- Hypothesis 4: tiny robots have infested the camera and messed up the wiring
HOW DO WE CHOSE?!?!
Theory choice: 6 considerations:
1. Consistency with the observation we are trying to explain
a. Which theories are consistent with our observations?
2. Predictive power
a. Do the theories make interesting predictions that are later confirmed?
b. We are interested in both the quality and the quantity of predictions
c. Quantity: does a theory make many predictions or only a few
d. Quality: are the predictions precise or vague? Do they cover a wide range of
phenomena?
3. Mechanism
a. Do the theories reveal underlying casual mechanisms?
b. This helps explain the relevant aspects of nature
c. It also helps us make more predictions
4. Fruitfulness
a. Do the theories make surprising or unexpected predictions, which are later
confirmed?
b. Do they provide new explanations for other phenomena?
5. Simplicity
a. How simple a theory is?
b. A simpler theory has fewer assumptions and posits fewer entities than a more
complex theory
c. Two reasons to like simpler theories
i. It’s easier to fir in a more complex theory to the data in contrived way, so
a more complex theory is more likely to be false than a simpler theory that
also fits the data
ii. You might assume that the world is relatively simple
6. Coherence
a. Are the theories coherent?
b. Two types of coherence:
i. Internal consistency
ii. Consistency with other knowledge

SUMMARY:
- To determine which theory is a given aspect of nature is correct we should consider the
main competing theories
- We can then use factors such as these ones to evaluate the theories and decided on the
best one

Understanding and assessing scientific research

Scientific research
- We use scientific reaches to make decisions about what to eat, what medical treatments to
undergo, and basically how to live our lives
- But scientific research is created by biases and fallible human beings
- How can we improve the quality of scientific research?
Replicability
- Scientific experiments should be replicable
- Sometimes scientific experiments get interesting results by accident
- When lots of labs are doing lost experiments, we are guaranteed to get some results by
change alone
Peer Review
- The process of reviewing scientific work by other scientists before it is published
- More trustworthy

Lesson 10 – Fallacies

Fallacies: mistakes in reasoning

Example: denying the antecedent: if P then Q. Not P. therefore not Q

Biases: persistent and widespread psychological tendencies that can be detrimental to objectivity
and rationality

Common Fallacies

Ad hominin:
- arguing against an opponents claim or argument by attacking the opponent rather than the
argument

Ad ignorantiam (appeal to ignorance):

- claiming that something is true because it hasn’t been proven false (or that something is
false because it hasn’t been proven true)
Example: the lochnes monster exists. No one has proven it doesn’t exist

Ad misercordiam (appeal to pity):

- trying to evoke pity to argue for a conclusion
example: “the defendant is not guilty putter her in jail will ruin her life”

Ad populum (appeal to popularity)

- arguing that a claim is true because it is popular
example: “over 90% of the population believes in god, they can’t all be wrong”

affirming the consequent:

- arguing as follow: if P then Q. Q therefore P
- deductive argument
example: “if we get through the material quickly, then class will end early. Class ended early. so
we got through the material quickly”
Denying the antecedent
- arguing as follows: if P then Q. not P therefore not Q
example: “if jess gets cancer, then she will die. Jess did not get cancer. Therefore, she will not
die”

Begging the questions:

- making an argument with premises that presuppose its conclusion
example: “people like her. I know she’s popular”

loaded question:
- posing a question that contains an unfair or unwarranted assumption
example: “have u stopped doing drugs”

composition:
- assuming that a whole has thew same properties as it parts
example: “spinach contains oxalates. Oxalates are bad for you. Therefore, spinach is bad for
you”

division:
- if the parts of a whole have the same properties as the whole
example: the company is performing really well. All its units must be performing really well”

equivocation:
- making an argument in which a key term switches meaning
example” they steal in baseball all the time, if baseball players can steal so should I”

false dilemma
- presenting a limited source of alternatives when there is other that should be considered
example: “you can either use toxic pesticides or you can lose your whole crop. I think you
should choose the toxic pesticides”

gamblers fallacy:
- concluding that an event is more of less likely because of independent events
example: “I’ve lost the last three bets. In in for a win”

genetic fallacy:
- judging that something is likely to have some property because it came from something
else that has that property
example: “democracy is a good thing cause it came from Greece”

non sequitur
- making an argument whose conclusion does not follow from or receive support from its
premises
example: “ari is very handsome he must be very nice”
post hoc, ergo, propter hoc:
- inferring that X is the cause of Y because Y occurred after X
example: “ I walked under a latter and had bad day all because of it”

red herring
- invoking an irrelevant issue that diverts attention from the main subject
example: in the middle of a debate over the existence of God, someone asserts “the belief in god
brings well documented positive psychological benefits to believers”

slippery slope
- falsely claiming that if were accept a claim, we will eventually have to accept an absurd
or unacceptable conclusion
example: “if we decided to permit first trimester abortions, then before you know it well be
permitting infanticide”

straw man:
- misrepresenting a claim or argument in order to make it easier to ague against
example: “those liberals think everyone should get abortions all the time. That’s absurd”

supressed evidence
- presenting only confirming evidence when there is also disconfirming evidence
example: “there is no global warming. Yesterday the weather was cold and today it was hot”

naturalistic fallacy
- inferring that something should be a certain way because it is that way
example: “animals kill and each other, therefore nothing wrong with killing and eating them”