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Connedincalifornia posted an update 7 years, 7 months ago
My granddaughter asked me if I had any ‘informational’ books she could read for school. I figured out, she meant non-fiction. Needless to say, I registered my objections to the term. It’s not easy helping our children/grandchildren navigate these times.
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Start with Babylon’s Banksters. 🙂
If the teachers are worried she can always say that it is a “baby banking” manual which sounds more innocuous.
Ihave to contend with her parents. What I did do is give my grandson Rules for Argument. I’m advising develop an argument for alternative points of view as an intellectual exercise. My granddaughter will take a debate class this year. That should help.
Debate class? There are a few books around on how to argue a case and to detect and counter false arguments (such as when people, instead of replying on what you say, reply with personal labelling (e.g. “if you say that it means that you are a…”)
Struggling with discipline. I want to read Babylon’s Banksters and Mind and Medium, however I am reading the books in order. Sigh. I’m just finishing The SS Brotherhood of the Bell. 😊
Here’s a compromise: read several books at the same time including B.B. !
The name of the game is analogy and not chronology 🙂
Wish I could ‘double like’ your comment 🙂
Yes, reading several books simultaneously is an excellent strategy for acquiring the skill of “connecting the dots” by osmosis. 🙂
Ditto. I’m reading Wall St &FDR, War and Society in Renaissance History and The South China Sea at the moment.
Thanks for the tips folks.
Another resource or two to recommend … S. Morris Engel’s – With Good Reason. The earlier editions can be found very reasonably on Addall.com. The other would be An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Alsomossawi. The latter here a kind of “graphic comic” introduction to the fallacies for those who have no background.
This might serve as a “teaching moment” for owning the culture. I think good argument could be made that Nominalism has (at least for the moment) won the day over Realism. Many of our “cultural difficulties” I think are traceable to the ascendency of Nominalism.
If asked why one should prefer Realism (any version, e.g. Objective Idealism) over Nominalism is that with Realism one at least has a hope of acquiring knowledge whereas with Nominalism one has, paraphrasing Dante, “abandoned all hope” of such acquisition.
Yes, logical fallacies was the expression I wanted!
After one studies the Engel book it is truly startling to see how many of these fallacies are out there in “our everydayness” (Walker Percy’s term for the background of assumptions within which we operate and that we unknowingly absorb osmotically not from the original clear Aether but instead from its unclear replacement) in what we read and hear. With Good Reason is very useful to both our listening and writing. The informal fallacies invite classification. To which side of the Strait of Messina do each of them lean? I have to watch for the seduction of these Sirens in my own speaking and writing. It is a quite simple thing to suddenly find oneself having been unaware of being in their employ.