Opinion Article Analysis

The Nobel Committee recently awarded the European Union the Nobel Peace Prize. I was unaware that there is a history of the Nobel Committee giving this award to organizations and not persons. This article rather gives a slight critique of the Nobel Committee using it's clout to act as an agent on the world stage.

If there is an argument in this article I believe it is in this perplexingly written paragraph near the end:

"Yet we find ourselves asking whether it is really the job of the committee to use this award to get involved in current affairs rather than to single out great achievements, as the awards to Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa did. And we find it a bit hard to accept the singling out of the E.U. (which Norwegians have voted against joining) for its fostering of peace in Europe since World War II, when NATO and the United States were at least as responsible."

If anything he seems to be describing an argument for why the EU should not have been awarded the Prize.

1)The role of the committee is not to get involved in current affairs
2)Awarding the EU the Nobel Peace Prize is getting involved in current affairs
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3)The role of the committee is not to award the EU the Prize

Reflecting Reality

Does language reflect reality or is it a self contained system only incidentally referring to realty?

Language's job is to function as the medium of dialogue about reality. Because this is it's job it seems that language would reflect reality because that is what it is referring to. Though this is hard to test because there is no way to see language discuss anything else besides what exists.

Language must therefore function and refer to the structure of reality. For example, the concept of a-thing v no-thing reflects the existence or nonexistence of a thing. All these concepts refer to real things and their actual relationships in the world. If this was some other universe where language could exist, language would reflect different rules existing around whatever there was in that universe.

Response to Bridget (Logic is Cool)

I think a lot of people in class are having a hard time distinguishing the ideas of truth and validity. If you do not understand the content of a statement then the only way that you would not be able to evaluate its validity is if you also did not understand the form. To evaluate the soundness, or weather it is reasonable to think that the conclusion is true (matching with reality), then you would need to understand the content.

Logic is cool because it reflects the structure of reality, and exploits it to discover truth.

Investigating Logic

Investigating Logic itself seems impossible. I have to make an argument right now (see this is a premise) in order to discuss logic. Why do we accept the truth of logic if we cannot investigate it's truth except only logically? It may be a sort of personification, but it seems to me that logic would support its own claim to usefulness.

Even if that is not true, how do we begin to investigate the foundations that logic rests on?

Possible Logic Project

One thing that really fascinates me about modern political discourse is how 'opposing' groups can talk right past each other. Libertarians and socialists, for example, get so hung up on their differences relating to the state that they almost totally forget that they are natural allies when fighting for greater personal and, in some cases, economic freedom.

The two possible categorizations of politics popularly portrayed by the media (republican/democrat, conservative/liberal) are obviously convenient categories that oversimplify what political discourse actually should be like. That being said, there do seem to be some political differences that fall down familiar lines (which are then taken up by the two parties). The end result of these divisions often seems to be people yelling conclusions at each with no premises.

You cannot have a conclusion with out an argument, even a very bad argument, sot that leads me to believe that premises to political arguments are implicit to the conclusions that are being yelled. But only the people in support of the conclusions can decipher the argument. My dream project is to find a way to thoroughly reverse engineer the implicit arguments behind the conclusions, and maybe learn something about the groups who support certain ideologies in the posses. The most challenging part of this project is that it will not be possible to decipher the argument without the help of knowledge outside the conclusions themselves, thus leaving me wide open to unproductive bias.

Opinion Article Analysis

Every so often I come across an article and I find it useful to formalize the argument being made so I an better understand the point the author is getting at. 'How the War on Terror is a War of Terror' is not one of those articles, but the author makes it a point that he is making three arguments, and he says this in a way that insinuates he means logical argumentation. However, when he seems to be summarizing his arguments in the begining it appears he is only stating his conclusions. Here is his first argument:

"The near consensus that terrorism is an act of violence by non-state actors to enact political change through fear is not only dubious and historically untenable it is also unethical as it unqualifyingly legitimises the state violence/terrorism which is responsible for killing far more number of people than those killed by terrorists. "

The statements seem to be these:

- The near consensus that terrorism is an act of violence by non-state actors to enact political change through fear (C) is dubious (D)
- C is historically untenable (H)

- C  is legitimizing state violence/terrorism (L)

There does not seem to be a way to arrange these statements into an argument. The first two statements seem to be dealing with semantic issues, but there seems like there are some implied premises backing up 'C is L.' My stab is:

-C is legitimizing state violence

-Violence is bad

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-C is bad

Badness is not a very clear component of a statement. Any thoughts on how this can be done? Maybe without referring to 'bad.'

Why I'm Doing More Logic

I've done one logic class with prof. Silliman and I'm doing it again, first off, because logic is fun and , secondly, it has turned out to be academically and personally useful.

Logic is a lot like math. Some people just keep banging their heads up against it, and some people seem to grasp it almost intuitively (I'm sure there is also a category in between those as well). For math I am one of the people in the first category, uniformly resenting every second of math whenever it is required  that I learn it. But in logic I'm more in the second category. I think if you already read a lot\ you come across the forms of logic in your reading and on some level you are already working with concepts you have not formally learned yet.

In the last logic class I took the time was spent almost evenly between formal and informal logic, and while informal logic is very useful for casual applications, such as pointing out to your other philosophy major friends when they have committed a fallacy, I am ready to do some more formal logic.