4
What is the most accurate opinion?
Mike: The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour as a last ditch attempt to win an empire in the Pacific.
Susie: No, no, no. It must have been a sudden boiling over of racial tension that had been rising since MacArthur forced them open to the world and made them feel inferior.
So we have our opinions, our two opposing hypotheses. Presuming we have no personal knowledge of the subject, we have to rely on evidence provided by the participants. It's also important to remember the different kinds of disagreement: factual, inferential and value.
note: I was perhaps too harsh on inferential opinion in the previous post, as it is one of the most common forms of opinion and certainly shouldn't be 'avoided' in debate.
If the argument is centered around values then it probably isn't worth much, unless the discussion turns to the participants reasons for holding these values.
Mike: I just feel that the Japanese had an insatiable desire to expand.
Susie: That's racist! The Japanese people were peaceful and only their greedy government lead them into that war.
If the argument is centered around competing factual claims, this can usually be settled quickly in an obvious way. However, if all the factual claims are accepted as true by the participants, but different facts are given more or less weight, then this becomes an inferential discussion.
Susie: Sure, the Japanese government have been shown to have been keen to expand and they obviously couldn't have done well in a straight fight against the US, but the evidence that high ups in Japanese government and society had disdain and a racist hatred of Westerners is a far more compelling motive.
This is the most common and difficult form of disagreement and is usually where your own independent critical thinking comes in.
What is the most accurate opinion?
To make a judgement on this, or anything, you need a standard to place it against. Since no human can ever really describe ultimate truth, we must measure opinions against what is most accurate, or most likely to be the most accurate. Because we're talking about reality, which is inflexible, we sometimes have to accept that neither opinion may be significantly accurate, or that one is indeed more accurate but only in certain ways.
Mike: The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour as a last ditch attempt to win an empire in the Pacific.
Susie: No, no, no. It must have been a sudden boiling over of racial tension that had been rising since MacArthur forced them open to the world and made them feel inferior.
So we have our opinions, our two opposing hypotheses. Presuming we have no personal knowledge of the subject, we have to rely on evidence provided by the participants. It's also important to remember the different kinds of disagreement: factual, inferential and value.
note: I was perhaps too harsh on inferential opinion in the previous post, as it is one of the most common forms of opinion and certainly shouldn't be 'avoided' in debate.
If the argument is centered around values then it probably isn't worth much, unless the discussion turns to the participants reasons for holding these values.
Mike: I just feel that the Japanese had an insatiable desire to expand.
Susie: That's racist! The Japanese people were peaceful and only their greedy government lead them into that war.
If the argument is centered around competing factual claims, this can usually be settled quickly in an obvious way. However, if all the factual claims are accepted as true by the participants, but different facts are given more or less weight, then this becomes an inferential discussion.
Susie: Sure, the Japanese government have been shown to have been keen to expand and they obviously couldn't have done well in a straight fight against the US, but the evidence that high ups in Japanese government and society had disdain and a racist hatred of Westerners is a far more compelling motive.
This is the most common and difficult form of disagreement and is usually where your own independent critical thinking comes in.
~・~
To begin with, we need enough evidence and inference to work with. "Recycling is good" and "recycling is bad" are not good enough. The more detailed evidence and thought-through inference available the more closer to reality an opinion should be. Now, to decide which opinion is the closest to reality, we need to use various tools.
Occam's Razor
This is one of the most important and useful critical tools you can use to decide upon the accuracy of a claim. You must value more highly a claim that requires less to be true, to be true. We use this everyday with everyday things but often abandon it in more complex deliberations.
Mike: So weird. I was just in this room but now suddenly the chair moved. It must have been an army of mice, pushing it along.
Susie: Huh? Why do you think that? Seems more likely that someone came in and moved it, or you moved it and forgot.
Susie: The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour because their emperor just hated Americans.
Mike: Well that's interesting but I haven't read anything about his opinion. Seems more likely that the government just wanted to make it less likely that the US could interfere with them.
These examples are just dealing with the quality of alternative, single events: the least likely, or more fanciful, being cut out with our razor. Occam's razor also looks at the quantity of events.
Mike: Don't you see? The US government kidnapped the people on the 9/11 planes and just put a bombs in the buildings.
Susie: Huh? Then why haven't we heard from the kidnapped people?
Mike: Because they're too scared to tell the truth!
Mike's original claim is let down by the fact that he must make further claims to keep it valid. Occam's razor asks us to therefore give his claim less weight than an opposing claim that requires less extrapolation.
A common misuse of the razor forgets the quality aspect of it. An example of this is when people who don't believe in evolution say a god just making everything appear must be correct due to it being a simpler explanation with Occam's razor. A god making everything appear may have less events, but the one event it describes is of a very low likelihood so has lower quality, whereas the individual events of evolution, while numerous, are all independently high quality due to having scientific evidence to prove them.
More soon!
Occam's Razor
This is one of the most important and useful critical tools you can use to decide upon the accuracy of a claim. You must value more highly a claim that requires less to be true, to be true. We use this everyday with everyday things but often abandon it in more complex deliberations.
Mike: So weird. I was just in this room but now suddenly the chair moved. It must have been an army of mice, pushing it along.
Susie: Huh? Why do you think that? Seems more likely that someone came in and moved it, or you moved it and forgot.
Susie: The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour because their emperor just hated Americans.
Mike: Well that's interesting but I haven't read anything about his opinion. Seems more likely that the government just wanted to make it less likely that the US could interfere with them.
These examples are just dealing with the quality of alternative, single events: the least likely, or more fanciful, being cut out with our razor. Occam's razor also looks at the quantity of events.
Mike: Don't you see? The US government kidnapped the people on the 9/11 planes and just put a bombs in the buildings.
Susie: Huh? Then why haven't we heard from the kidnapped people?
Mike: Because they're too scared to tell the truth!
Mike's original claim is let down by the fact that he must make further claims to keep it valid. Occam's razor asks us to therefore give his claim less weight than an opposing claim that requires less extrapolation.
A common misuse of the razor forgets the quality aspect of it. An example of this is when people who don't believe in evolution say a god just making everything appear must be correct due to it being a simpler explanation with Occam's razor. A god making everything appear may have less events, but the one event it describes is of a very low likelihood so has lower quality, whereas the individual events of evolution, while numerous, are all independently high quality due to having scientific evidence to prove them.
More soon!
0 comments:
Post a Comment