Liberals like to fancy themselves as purveyors of knowledge, who must look down from their ivory towers and enlighten conservatives to the ways of the world. How else can someone like President Barack Obama, whose life experience consisted of community organizing, find the audacity during his State of the Union speech to lecture the Supreme Court, some of the most seasoned scholars on Earth?
The problem with liberals is not their wealth (or lack thereof) of knowledge, but their use of logic. In particular, liberals like to use inductive reasoning in their arguments; a twisted, but popular, brand of logic. It is the flawed process of using specific examples to form a general conclusion, but it rarely holds up to scrutiny. For instance, if all you see are black birds flying around, inductive reasoning would allow you to say that all birds are black. Just because it may be true for your situation, the statement is not true in all instances.
Even so, liberals love to use specific examples to make a blanket statement. I had to take that reasoning to task recently when I wrote about the Columbine school shooting and the use of armed guards. Some argued that because an armed guard didn’t stop the Columbine massacre, armed guards should never be allowed in schools. By the standards of inductive reasoning, such an idea would be deemed valid, but as we all know, the logic doesn’t hold up. Just one example of a guard stopping violence (and there are many) destroys the premise. That’s why inductive reasoning is not considered a logical line of thought. And yet, liberals love to use it.
In the climate change debate, nearly every major hurricane or snowstorm is used as evidence that our climate is changing. It is perhaps the most obvious use of inductive reasoning, but still, environmentalists and the media will use it to fit their particular agenda. It doesn’t work. Instead of arguing about the flawed logic, however, we try to argue against an established fact. Rather than trying to debunk the truth, conservatives should point out, again and again, how the left uses the truth to fit their view. Once you establish their logic as inductive reasoning, and then undermine the credibility of that reasoning, you then destroy their argument.
By the same token, we as conservatives need to be wary of using that same line of reasoning for our own arguments. It is too easy to take a single instance and use it to prove our point, even if it is not the whole truth. Rather than relying on emotion and perception, we need to face the facts, even if it means rethinking our own position. We do not need to fight these intellectual battles with rhetoric. We can win them with reason.
Reason cannot change the minds of people whose opinions are based in emotions.
“Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” Robert A. Heinlein
You can’t successfully confront an emotionally based moral argument with intellectual analysis. Reasoned argument can temporarily stump them but never permanently persuade those who inductively reason because inductive logic begins with an emotional reaction to a specific moral outrage; typically, ‘the world is screwed up and its unfair!’
Emotions are an appeal to the heart, not the head.
See David Horowitz’s very astute article “How Republicans can Win” for outstanding analysis of this issue.
I have to differ with you.
Your example of the black birds is deductive, not inductive. You see all black birds, therefore you deduce that all birds are black.
Inductive reasoning uses a limited set of laws, rules, postulates, and corollaries to form an answer to a given problem. For those of us who actually took real Plain, or Euclidean Geometry in High School, we were taught the methodology of proofs. The problem consisted of a set of givens, and one was to use those givens and the related “facts” about a particular geometric puzzle to solve some functional request.
Given the flowing diagram, IF angle ABC is 90degrees, and lines AB and AC are equal prove that angle BCA = angle CBA.
There is not enough information at first, so it is necessary to use various theorems, postulates, and rules to induce the next step in the process, and form the proof. (BTW deduction is always a part of induction, and induction is always a part of deduction… It’s a disciplinary prejudice thing that prevents folks from admitting that…)
Of course deductive reasoning is necessary to check the proof.
It is what a brilliant mind like Donald Rumsfeld was talking about when he was attempting to educate moronic reporters about analyzing data. There are known, unknowns, known unknowns, and total/unknown unknowns. This is just boolean logic applied to human interaction, but it takes induction to understand the potential unknowns (those that you might be able to induce, thus reducing the problem to a more workable level of probability), however the limited set of known unknowns… can always be effected by unknown and unforeseen events. Clausewitz called this operational friction.
Induction is a very useful tool in reasoning, and is not taught in schools anymore. Geometry has become an alternate Algebra, and children are slammed into blind deduction, and therefore absent enough facts can take fewer good decisions.
The best method, of course is Retroductive Reasoning, where induced hypotheses are tested and efficacy is deduced, thus allowing the sharpening of the induction stream… In general it’s what we call real science.
The Global Warming con is a deductive enterprise it sees what it wants to see, all black birds, never questions whether there are other sorts of birds out there, and concludes that all birds are black, and there are no other birds so no further study is required.
With respect.
John – The Mighty Fahvaag
Global Cooling, Warming, Peak Oil, Overpopulation Skeptic for at least 40 of my nearly 54years on this planet. The first 14 being learning time to arrive at some level of knowledge enough to deduce that the Environmentalists were err… um… WRONG.