While the analogy may have been instrumental in helping change your mind, it likely did so by helping you understand the actual underlying argument.
> While the analogy may have been instrumental in helping change your mind, it likely did so by helping you understand the actual underlying argument.
The world would be a much better place if that was true, but sadly people base their world view largely on feelings and those feelings often doesn't care about the underlying arguments but they can feel the analogies. That goes for you and me as well, feelings are a fundamental part of human thinking, you can't just ignore that just because formal logic says it isn't important.
For example, a person might say that they are against racism but they are pro discriminating against white people. That aligns with their feelings, but it is inconsistent and you would need something more than formal logic to make them see that inconsistency. And once they see it you didn't do it by making them understand a formal argument, you did it by changing how they feel about things, they already agreed with you that discrimination is bad they just didn't apply that consistently due to their feelings clouding their minds.
But if the only thing that convinced you of a thing is an analogy or emotional appeal, and if in being convinced you learned nothing about the underlying argument the analogy is supporting, you are susceptible to being convinced by similarly compelling analogies or emotional appeals that may or may not have any grounding in a solid argument.
I’m not claiming that people can’t be convinced this way. I’m pointing out that this form of persuasion is problematic and insufficient. “Argument from analogy” is considered a fallacy for this reason. It can lead people to take on new beliefs for bad reasons, even if the position they take is the “right” one.
While emotions absolutely influence our beliefs, it’s not accurate to downplay the role of formal logic, which is often implicitly invoked by emotional dialogue. The two are not mutually exclusive, and they work together.
For example: in a discussion about climate change, a purely logical presentation of facts about the temperature of the ocean and receding ice is not compelling without understanding the implications. Painting a picture of potentially cataclysmic outcomes and mass extinction events and migrations evokes an emotional response that is also necessary for humans to take action.
In this example, either one without the other can be problematic. Pure facts logically presented are hard to interpret, especially if you aren’t a climatologist. And if there is no logical foundation whatsoever, the argument is on shaky ground and the person who now believes it will have no reason not to believe the next emotionally compelling thing.
It’s easy to argue against and for “badness” of any reasons. It’s a totally valid, and good argument that somebody just feels it. All of us do this on some level. Just because I feel it that we should consider things “good” when they are generally good for world’s society in general in some specific metrics, and builds my thoughts about more topic solely on that, from how to handle cigarette buds to how to ask something from a waiter, it doesn’t mean that somebody has a less valid point when they didn’t made the effort to follow through every questions regarding that, and cut it at “I feel X way”. No matter what they think regarding any topic.
Of course, when they are expressing this feeling, they should be upfront about it. But they are almost never, and they almost never too far away from the feeling.
And even then, you can have internal conflicts. Just because of your feelings.
Case in point: eating beef. It’s not good to anybody. I still do it. I violate my core principles for it. All the time.
And of course some topics are way foggier. Like travelling. It’s definitely good for my state of mind, and my friendships, but it’s definitely not good for the society that I fly every other week and I travel to other countries by other means every week.
Everybody has these.
Can you remind the class about Gödel's second incompleteness theorem and what it says about consistency in formal logic systems?
