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Interior Design For New Homes
When decorating or making decorating decisions for new homes, it is important to remember that your major decisions could affect decorating choices for quite a long period of time. Commitment to bold or unusual color treatments before you have...
Jump Start For An MBA Education
Traditional MBA programs provide students with a two-fold advantage: a wealth of business knowledge, and the credentials necessary to advance in the business world. Yet many of these programs require previous managerial experience, not to mention an...
Massage Your Mind!: A Spontaneous Woo to You!
As I was driving to a friend’s house recently, I passed the Dublin Pub, a local watering hole known for its live music. On the reader board, one band’s name caught my eye: Spontaneous Woo. Hmmm, I thought. What a great concept. There is nothing...
Planning Your Job Search
Article:
Today's job market is a dog eat dog environment. You are
competing against global candidates, ever younger, ever more
technologically competent, ever more willing to work for less.
How you approach your job search is key to your...
Whatever It Takes!
I have a sign on my office door. It pretty much summarizes my philosophy of life. The sign simply says…..”Whatever it takes.”
Short. Simple. To the Point.
“Whatever it takes,” means exactly that. That I will do “whatever it takes” to get what...
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The Bush "There Or Here" Fallacy and the War in Iraq
Today we wish to examine a fallacy, or error in reasoning, which we have found springing up now and again in today's popular discourse about the so-called War On Terror. This one comes straight from the top -- well, not the VERY top -- but from Washington D.C. You have heard the President say it on national teevee, and so have we: "We either have to fight them [the terrorists] over there [i.e. Iraq], or we have to fight them over here [i.e. inside the U.S. border]."
Now we have chosen to examine this particular Bushism because, here, Mr. Bush has offered quite the textbook example of what informal logic-addicts call, a "false disjunction," or simply the "either-or" fallacy. To commit this error in reasoning, you only need to oversimplify a range of many options, reducing it to a pretended range that limits them to two logically-possible options only.
For instance, isn't possible that, if the U.S. pulled its troops from Iraq, using many of them to assist with border patrol duties, that we could avoid fighting "them" here by not letting them in, and yet not fight them "there" either? Now, to be sure, many will hasten to point out that they see this as impractical, ill-advised (for whatever reason), etc. My only point remains this: the option I have mentioned is logically possible. And I could imagine quite a few others.
For instance, the U.S. could spend a handsome little sum on policing our domestic internal affairs, and arrest all terrorists before they can do any harm. We have already arrested quite a few of them here without any fight whatever. One might argue that bloodless arrests seem much better, not to mention a good deal cheaper, than national invasions where the whole countryside gets shot up.
Now, if the U.S. can act with pre-emptive success in Iraq (for the president has suggested many times that it
can), why can it not do so also much closer to home? But if the U.S. cannot do so on its home turf, why should anyone think they can do it in Iraq?
Remember, I do not mean to argue here against the U.S. presence in Iraq, but only to critique one particular reason offered for it by the president. He has, after all, listed quite a few different reasons for the invasion, at different times -- which may or may not be a good thing.
For today, then, let the reader take away this lesson in the logic of popular discourse -- never reduce a range of many possible options to two only, unless you prepare well enough to show that the others do not represent truly logical options. Otherwise, you will have committed the either-or fallacy.
About the author:
Christopher Brown enjoys writing articles and books, building websites, trading stocks, blogging, and studying a wide variety of subjects.
He taught both English and Philosophy on an adjunct basis for two different colleges, and has tutored numerous students in various subjects. He has also hosted a radio talk-show in Santa Rosa, CA, and wrote a book on the philosophy of science.
In March, 2004, he founded Ophir Gold Corporation of CA, a for-profit corporation which aims to earn money in advertising by offering free services, and by trading equity securities.
Please stop by and visit us at our Blogic For Writers site, http://blogique.blogspot.comor at our Free Web Traffic Site at http://ophirgoldcorp.blogspot.comor at our Writing With Power site at http://scriberight.blogspot.com
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