There are so many hypocrisies to decry, idiocies to mock, and truths to exclaim, but sometimes you need to step back and do something simple.

     It is late summer in north-western Oregon, a hot one too, and that means three things are in abundance even in suburbia: blackberries, rose hips, and apples. So I am on a quest to make (and can) preserves made of the three mixed together. I already have about 2 quarts of blackberries (a 1/2 hour of picking) but I am having a difficult time finding rose hips that I know have not been sprayed with pesticides. I am surrounded by giant rose hips, Portland is the rose city, but they all have red flags for non-agricultural pesticide levels. Apples are not as hard, but I am lacking in an accessible location that I can pick from. I guess that’s one of the problems of living in suburbia though. Humans really do need to breed less, especially the dumb ones! But I digress.

I <3 wild edibles.

Part 3! and it isn’t even an equivocation just a clarification about what an amphiboly is. And as you can see the confusion is created by a lack of distinction between “feed my baby-turtles” and “feed my baby, turtles” or “feed my baby: turtles.”

     Here we will look at the reference-switch version of the equivocation fallacy. It relies upon omission in the sentences structure to obfuscate what meaning the word in question is conveying. This makes the reference-switch a type of amphiboly: which is a sentence or phrase that has multiple meanings due to a vagueness in its grammar. That will have to wait for part 3 however, but don’t worry it will come with a Cyanide & Happiness comic to illustrate.

     “Warm beer is better than nothing. Nothing is better than a cold beer. Therefore warm beer is better than cold beer.”

     The omitted parts are where the reference-switch takes place: [Drinking] warm beer is better than [drinking] nothing. [There is] nothing better [to drink] than a cold beer.

     The conclusion that warm beer is better than cold beer relies on the structure being thus: [Drinking] warm beer is better than [drinking] nothing. [Drinking] nothing is better than [drinking] a cold beer.

     It is this non-parallelism between the structure of the second and first premise that creates the fallacy. Unless you really would prefer to drink nothing rather than have a cold beer. However there is a place we stick people like you, and it is called Utah.

     This is a fallacy where you either; use one word with more than one meaning without specifying which usage is applying when, or when you drop the context around a word to make it seem the same as the word in another context… Maybe that is a poor way to explain it. SO, EXAMPLE 1!

     “Rick Perry is an asshole. Assholes spew forth shit. Therefore Rick Perry spews forth shit.”

     As you can see the conclusion is correct, but this can happen in logic. It is just that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. And it is because ‘asshole’ and ‘spew forth shit’ are each used once in a metaphorical sense and then in a literal sense. To make this more clear we can re-write it with the fallacy(s) removed.

     “Rick Perry is an objectionably rude and contemptible person. Anuses excrete fecal matter. Therefore Rick Perry says inflammatory, misleading, and fallacious things.

Why couldn’t math have been taught more like this in High School.

Low Tide at the Oregon Coast

The field of philosophy is riddled with people who have dedicated their entire lives to the study of the thoughts of one person who lived hundreds of years ago, or more. Now I find learning both history, and the history of ideas very important, BUT at a point all you are really doing is tombstone polishing. Seriously, has anything been contributed to our understanding by quibbling over the meaning of some passages by a 300 years dead white guy that had ideas we have largely discarded? Yes we are grateful for those ideas they gave forth that illuminated something, but this obsessive studying of their every writing reeks of your inability to say anything important of your own.

   This is one of my numerous pet-peeves: People who come up to you and regurgitate some story of how their mother or grandmother saw a ghost of some person they knew, or how your buddies when camping were abducted by aliens, or how they prayed during a personal hardship and then miraculously discovered what was needed to get themselves out of a bind. Because there is only one thing that follows these stories when you are a skeptic or even a slightly reasonable person, and that is “how do you explain that?” Sometimes it comes from an ignorant ‘AHA! Gotcha.” place sometimes a place of genuine curiosity. But here is the important part IT IS NOT MY DAMN JOB TO EXPLAIN IT AWAY TO YOU!

This is nothing more than an underhanded way of shifting the burden of proof off your own shoulders. You actually need to be convincing me that your story reflects accurately what happened. Plus there are so many ways to suggest that such stories are bull-shit, but no matter how many of them you put forward they dismiss or special-plead their way out of them. They are basically duping you into playing a game of at random guess what error led to this story being believed, and see if you can get me to think you got it right. It is absolutely ludicrous. If you want to tell me a highly edited story of your mom seeing a ghost you better realize that this is not convincing to anyone who doesn’t already want to believe such drivel.

   That which is not demonstrable is indistinguishable from that which does not exist. It is a beautiful phrase, go ahead read it again, let it sink in. I first heard this phrase from the wonderful Tracie Harris.

   And this is not to say that things that can’t or haven’t been demonstrated don’t exist. It just means that they look very much alike, exactly alike in fact. A god who was objectively real that was completely non-demonstrable to us can not be differentiated from intangible, invisible, universe building Spaghetti Monsters that some guy just makes up. This is why you don’t accept things without evidence. Otherwise to be consistent you would end up believing everything, which would include contradictory thing. It is also why the one making the assertion has to justify it. It is not up to other people to falsify your assertions, and until they do you can just go on believing as you wish. Because that is all it would be, wish-thinking.

Tiny Crab with a barnacle over his right eye. He is hiding out among some muscles and barnacles with his best bud Sea Snail during low tide at the Oregon coast. I think he was jealous of me because I found a ton of beach agates that day.