i think we should force everyone to do at least 2 years of philosophical education and study.
It would unironically be good for the average persons intelligence.
You could probably fit it into the K-12 program without losing any value elsewhere if you cut out things like memorizing maps in regions of the world that are so unstable that those maps won’t be valid anymore by the time kids graduate, studying writers like Shakespeare that lived so long ago that what they wrote in could barely be called English, and mandatory electives.
A lot of schools have this already but are very good about naming them non-obvious things.
My sons is called success 101.
mm, idk i’d have to see the class materials to be able to tell you whether or not this was true philosophy. The best phil classes are the ones by the insane teacher. That’s how you know you’re going to learn something.
you would definitely need to push this as a required junior/senior class, the unfortunate thing is that you need a legitimately insane teacher to actually learn something valuable from it. Generic course material doesn’t work as well for something like this i think.
There are definitely some interesting ways to integrate it into english though, that’s an idea.
i feel like fallacies are a bit of a golden goose, if you’re educated in the field of fallacies, you’re basically just educated in the field of debate, being educated in philosophy is going to allow you to generically recognize these fallacies, though without being able to identify them, as well as all of the additional benefits of engaging in philosophy (like understanding the concept of worldviews)
another problem with fallacy, is that you can also just kinda, make shit up. Or accuse people of doing the same fallacy you’re doing, it’s sort of cyclic in nature like that. It’s interesting in theoretical thought though, i’ll give you that one.
Interestingly enough, I had fallacies as part of my base native language class. Can’t remember if it was middle school or high school, but we definitely learned about the most common ones like ad hominem, false dilemma, slippery slope, etc.
Kinda imagined it would be similar elsewhere, but unfortunately not I guess
The thing is, fallacies do matter because they are meant to describe what is not “good faith” argumentation. They are sophistry. It’s like, the basis of our modern western philosophy, and our current legal system. How can a student tell if a philosophy is valid if they don’t even know if it’s logically consistent or argued in good faith? They don’t even know what good faith is. Fallacies are the basic arithmetic of philosophy. It’s like having students memorize math problems without ever connecting math to the real world, and then expecting those kids to actually be math literate. You can’t do it. You’re neglecting fundamental (and I mean that word emphatically) knowledge.
It’s like mental gardening. The ability to recognize and respond to fallacies in our own internal thinking helps us stay organized within our own minds and not fall victim to traps or scams.
No, fallacies are not something that you just accuse another person of. An ad hominem attack is a specific thing. A strawman is a specific thing. Yes, fallacies can be quite complicated to identify and understand (eg appeal to authority) - but that’s okay. It’s okay to learn a complicated subject.
Sometimes though, when people don’t want to do that hard mental load of learning fallacies (because they’d have to change their own mind regarding many of their own fallacies and heuristics), they dismiss fallacies and say “meh, but I don’t wanna!” That doesn’t invalidate learning about them.
At this point, we should force everyone to just line up to get a solid smack across the face. Real hard too.
