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almossawi / badarguments

Book of Bad Arguments & Mr. Rabbit's Guide to Sneaky Rhetoric
https://bookofbadarguments.com
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Circular Argument example #2

Open prhammar opened 8 years ago

prhammar commented 8 years ago

On page 44, the example of one character claiming a non-believing character is condemned to hell doesn't seem correct. Maybe there is something missing? The text says:"In this example, the unstated premiss is that there exists a God who sends a subset of people to hell. Hence, the premiss ‘There exists a God who sends non-believers to hell’ is used to support the conclusion ‘There exists a God who sends non-believers to hell.’" To put the example in the form of an argument would imply the premiss (if is wasn't stated explicitly as such in the scene) that there exists a God who sends non-believers to hell. However, for the brief description of the example scene, that premiss is used with the premiss that the other character is a non-believer (apparently supported by the evidence of attestation to that fact) to support conclusion the non-believing character is going to hell. This is an example of the valid argument construction, If A->C;A|-C. The criticism of this argument as circular, therefore, appears to be a straw man. The argument is unsound, however, as the non-believer does not feel that the evidence supports the implied premiss, and the believer is not offering evidence in support of the premiss nor another argument for which that premiss could be a conclusion. It would be circular if the accuser took the non-believer's heel-bound status (as deduced from the argument) as proof that there was a god who sends non-believers to hell.

almossawi commented 8 years ago

Wonderful, thank you. Would you like to share the proposed correction in a Pull Request or a reply? Whichever is more convenient. I can then go ahead and deploy it to the website.

prhammar commented 8 years ago

I created a fork, edited the text for the example, and created a pull request. Hopefully I did all that correctly so you can find it😀.

Hope this is helpful Phil

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 17, 2015, at 2:28 PM, Ali Almossawi notifications@github.com wrote:

Wonderful, thank you. Would you like to share the proposed correction in a Pull Request or a reply? Whichever is more convenient. I can then go ahead and deploy it to the website.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

almossawi commented 8 years ago

Great. Generally, what you'll want to do is commit your changes in your fork and then create a PR. Right now, the PR is in your fork, so go ahead and merge it, and then click on the green button to create a new PR.

For instance, say that I've forked mozilla/mrburns to almossawi/mrburns. I've made a change and committed it:

1

I'd now create a PR that the owners of mozilla/mrburns will be able to merge into their repo:

2

Once you do that, your PR will show up here.

I can also move over your changes manually, though this workflow would help keep track of contributions :)

almossawi commented 8 years ago

Merged in #3 and deployed to the website. Thank you :+1: