Straw Men.

Some people are so head-first inside of straw that they can’t understand the world around them.

When I see straw men about my posts and ideas,
I wonder, how can these people even survive, day by day.

What happens when the person has straw men about his self?
That gets terrible.
Unable to properly see one’s self.

Sure, let’s bring this down to earth.

Note a particular context in which you are able to properly see your own self. In what sense? And how might another fail to see his or her true self and see only a strawman/woman instead?

Also, what happens when another challenges how you see yourself such that they criticize particular behaviors of yours as either not reasonable or not moral?

You’ve graced me with your presence?

Sometimes truth is very obvious.
Sometimes it is difficult to obtain.

Some people want to fight / argue.
Some people want to learn and teach.

Okay, but what alleged truth relating to what specific context in which one’s self is grasped either truly or as a straw man? Note some possible examples of this.

Same here. Let’s focus in on that distinction relating to how one reacts to one’s self in an actual context that most here are likely to be familiar with.

You can teach and others can learn. But there are times when what you perceive to be your true self is confronted with another who perceives her own true self in embracing a conflicting sense of right and wrong and the result is an argument [if not a fight].

When here do you suggest that one is likely to be drawn into perceiving the self of another as embodying a straw man. I’m just trying to figure out [more substantively] what you mean by your general descriptions above.

If truth doesn’t exist then there is no point in thinking or living.

Sure, okay, let’s just leave it at that. This is the sandbox after all.

the straw man is one of the more unsavory fallacies built into the very nature of philosophical argument and it’s right beside the ad hom as one of the most difficult to avoid. but there’s a simple explanation for why the straw man is so common and usually undetected. whenever a person makes an assertion, the reader automatically ‘fills in’ what the assertion could possibly imply, cause, and/or result in, and understands the assertion as necessarily leading to those conclusions. along with this comes that derridian point i raised earlier; because any philosophical text is in a state of instability and incompleteness, one can never provide a ‘final’ assertion regarding what each individual assertion means in the total relation of assertions. so this openness forces the reader to complete the meaning of the individual assertions by superimposing upon them what he thinks they would mean… the conclusions they would lead to. essentially the reader then objects to his own conclusions through the proxy of the writer.

there’s a hasty generalization in there too, as well as one involving existential quantifiers (forget the name of it). but notice how not only did B put words in A’s mouth, he also got the conclusion of his own straw man, wrong, in two ways. first, even if there were ‘unrestricted access’, it doesn’t necessarily follow that ‘intoxicated people lose their work ethic, etc’. second, even if some people lose their work ethic when intoxicated, it doesn’t follow that all people lose their work ethic when intoxicated; B says ‘any’ society, but we can imagine a logically possible society in which there was unrestricted access to intoxicants and intoxicated people didn’t lose their work ethic. so not only did A never say any of this, B got the conclusions wrong even if he did say any of this. that’s like a triple whammy!

at that moment, B stopped arguing with A and began arguing with himself. and this kind of stuff goes on ALL THE TIME in philosophy debates because it’s hardwired into the very nature of language. the fact is, you can never know what the other MEANS, only what he means at a particular point in a linear advance of singular propositions which can never disclose what the sum total of propositions can mean. it’s there that the reader completes, or ‘fills in’ that absence with an interpretation he is unable not to make, and the writer loses possession of the text.

i figure since this can’t be avoided, we ought to just design a competition to see who can commit the most straw man fallacies. that would be some good shit, and i know a few candidates who would have a great shot at winning the gold.

but no, danno. doing philosophy is out of fashion now. what’s in is analyzing philosophical process and text to identify how it’s riddled with problems and inconsistencies. all the conventional theoretical structures have already been established and nobody is saying anything new. what we do now is perform an archaeological dig to uncover the errors and confusions built into these pre-existing interpretive systems.

if you cut off the head of the philosopher, the body will die.

join biggy in the philosophy forum and establish a parameter around the top five threads. hold your position and delta team will be there shortly. alpha one, over and out. end transmission

Truth does exist, it just isn’t always objective or empirical to us yet, from our positions of ignorance. A never ending staircase to be climbed.

If there were no truth, there would be no new inventions everyday.

Speak for yourself. A lot of it is understanding language but philosophy still goes on, new philosophy. Not anyone’s fault that people here wish to discuss the same things over again, which are adopted as and from misinterpretations a lot of the time anyways.

So how do you logically assess something of which is not logical? You say it doesn’t exist. Easy answer to a misunderstanding/misinterpretation isn’t it? That answer is a ceasing of philosophy which requires an open mind, itself. So again, speak for yourself and don’t get too comfortable in your denial.

I guess the discussions of AI and our future, is nothing new.

What happens if you dig into archaeological information and /your/ the one whom is not thinking in the correct method of being able to understand its texts of which we’re from a different context (time) and text(language)? Is it logical of you to assess that information? So you can fuck it up even more by a false understanding? No, not very logical. Your dig seems for nothing when you are ill equipped with the perspective in understanding what you find in that dig and so you trap yourself in a hole with what you claim ‘useless’ information from “deluded” god worshippers, whom were describing psyche better than you can in the only language they had at the time. In general, this is what has happened and now we are all tangled up and wasting time detangling in the past when we should focus on now and the future.

So tell me, how do you see the light with sunglasses on?

the sunglasses are to protect you from the light, not me.

I’m not wearing any glasses. I’ll gladly accept something new that I do not yet know or understand. That’s why I advocate an exploration of the imagination. There is always truth attached to imagery, even if the imagery is sometimes exaggerated by emotions. I advocate for a balance of which may seek and bring a future by working past fear and for/with responsibility of oneself.

There is nothing more powerful than the human mind other than the architecture that brought it, which is a string of infinity.

Or do you mean our consciousness and how it works as a filtration? Our perception being limited and our need of science? Protects our mind from too much at once?

It can be hard to tell, I think, sometimes what is a strawman and what is a valid critique. Even slippery slope arguments can be spot on. Sometimes causal chains are likely to run in a bad direction, if the first cause, makes the next worse cause more likely. Like an alcholic having one drink. It’s not a slippery slope argument to say that this one drink has a good chance of leading to a disaster if this particular alcholic tends towards binges and risk taking. Yes, one drink does not necessarily entail the binge and the hijacking of a bus. Unless it does. Your example with the relaxing the beer laws does feel like straw man, though not 100%. Perhaps relaxing does weaken the work ethic, or at least, that a position that could be argued reasonably. But the responder made it binary and total. Though if that person lives ina society where proposals the lift restrictions nearly always are followed by more proposals that use the earlier one as a powerful precendent, the argument might be less straw man and less slippery slope fallacious.

I suppose what I am saying is that degree is involved not just discrete categories, but also that it is not always so easy to say what is straw man.

I like this creation of a category. We usually think of straw man arguments used interpersonally in arguments. But, yes, good point, there is a likely something similar in self-relation. In fact all sorts of defense mechanisms and false self images and rationalizations could be put in this category. But it’s a nice reframing.

)It would be interesting to look at psychological problems as fallacies.

Of course one way to encompass this frame of mind is to suggest that the universe is entirely determined. Human truth then becomes that which nature could only possibly be given the only possible laws of matter. Ignorance here is just an inherent manifestation of it all. As is the staircase that we are compelled to climb.

Until that is finally pinned down, however, most of us will claim some measure of autonomy in choosing to assert things that are said to be either true of false.

Fine. But we will still need a context. And, in that context, what are we able to actually establish as in fact true for all of us?

After all, what else [for all practical purposes] is there out in what may or may not be the “real world”. As opposed to, say, a matrix or a simulated reality or a dream world.

Clearly true. But these inventions invariably employ the truths that are found in the either/or world. Laws of matter encompassed in what physicists and chemists and biologists and mathematicians and geologists and meteorologists etc., have pinned down rather objectively.

As opposed to the [at times] far more problematic assumptions proposed by psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists and historians and aesthetes.

Fields where any number of straw man arguments are likely to arise. And [occasionally] even pinned down.

But, as I noted with Dan, we would [ultimately] need to bring these descriptions out into the world and situate them in a discussion that revolves around actual opinions regarding actual human interactions. As would be done with laws that relax restrictions on alcohol consumption.

We might lower the age restriction here in America from 21 to 18. And then note the avalanche of anecdotes from those with one or another moral or political or economic axe to grind.

Straw men would no doubt begin popping up in arguments everywhere. But then it still comes down to the part where some are able to prove their own accusations based on an accumulation of hard evidence and facts, and the part where the conflicts get all tangled up in the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein, conflicting goods and political economy.

The part where “I” takes its leap to a particular set of political prejudices embodied in the trajectory of the life that it actually lived. And, straw men or not, there does not appear to be a way to actually determine if changing the law was or was not “the right thing to do”.

At least not philosophically.

It’s not a but, this is you adding in what you want, rather than what ‘we need’. You are confusing your desires with our needs in the above sentences.

if we had your specfic goals, for example, and wanted this thread to be the kind of discussion you want it to be, then your suggestion makes sense.

To change your quote to make it make more sense…

But since I at least, and perhaps others, have different goals, at least at this time, I do not need…etc., here.

Dasein having given us different goals and needs and strategies and interests and desires. And further, different ones at different times.

Yet again [in my view] another post about me. I’m getting all tripped up in confusing my wants and needs with yours and/or his and/or Dan’s.

What it is not about is “the need to bring these descriptions out into the world and situate them in a discussion that revolves around actual opinions regarding actual human interactions”.

In particular, here and now, around laws that relax restrictions on alcohol consumption.

Aiming the discussion of that which constitutes straw man arguments at this part:

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Iambiguous, let me say this gently. You wrote a post to me, telling me what we need. The we included me. You told me what I need, and what others need. That was you writing about me. And I responded writing about that.

That’s your interest. Not mine. I can’t speak for Dan. You responded to my post, where I expressed what interested me about Dan’s post. I have no interest in discussing the laws around restrictions on alcohol comsumption. Feel free to start a thread about that. Or perhaps others will join you here. But I neither need nor want that discussion and I pointed this out.

And yes, I notice that you opt not to respond to my saying that we do not have that need. Your assertions seem never to need justification or when their obvious incorrectness is pointed out, there is not need to acknowledge this. It is always the other person who is the issue. You quoted a post of mine, but did not respond to anything I said. I responded to that and did respond to something you said. I pointed out it was incorrect. Simple.

I’ll ignore you again for a while. Such basic not following the discussion is not interesting.

Okay, possibly, but let’s get back to this:

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No, you don’t want to. Why? Because that is my interest and not yours.

Okay, we’re stuck then. And, by all means, ignore me as long as you wish.