[Buddha-l] Prominent Neobuddhist proposes religion based blacklisting for government jobs

[Jim Peavler]

On Aug 1, 2009, at 5:09 PM, Richard Hayes wrote:

> On Aug 1, 2009, at 8:23 AM, Alberto Todeschini wrote:
>
>> How about we just don't define it as a fallacy to start with?
>
> I think a step in this direction has been made for centuries by
> calling it an informal fallacy. Everyone acknowledges that informal
> fallacies are not anywhere nearly as serious as formal fallacies. They
> tend to be regarded more as stylistic infelicities in presentation
> than as errors in logic.

They are inductive, rather than deductive, fallacies. Deduction is  
easy because you
can define every step precisely, and you can discover and discuss  
every possible ballacy
that results from a flawed form.  Inductive arguments can never be  
either quite true or
false because the number of instances that can be thought up are  
infinite. One can only
argue, as my good friend David Hume so brilliantly pointed out, from  
experience. Hence
some arguments are better than other. My ad hominem complaint against  
Rush Limbaugh, while quite good,
was, as Professor Hayes pointed out, far to weak.


>

Jim Peavler
jmp at peavler.org