Spring Fever
It’s a lovely day in Seattle today and I don’t feel like doing anything I should, from mowing the lawn to writing today’s piece. But, whereas I’ll leave the grass to grow at least one day longer, I’ll nevertheless plug my way through these 327 words before heading outdoors to enjoy the evening.
Fortunately, I got all my grading down yesterday since, had I not, I wouldn’t have made any progress on it today.
(I like those kind of counterfactual statements: if a previous state of affairs was different, then the current situation wouldn’t be what it is now, but it wasn’t, so this isn’t. My first logic teacher, John Dolan, had a name for a fallacy of that sort; I forget what he called it, but the example was a statement like, “I sure am glad I don’t like Brussels sprouts because if I did, then I would eat them, but I can’t stand the taste!”)
In the critical thinking class today, we had a guest speaker talk to students about Feng Shui, which our textbook author, Theodore Schick, takes to be another paradigmatic example of a pseudoscience. And while today’s speaker did refer to her discipline as both an art AND a science, she was also almost completely non-dogmatic about her dogma. Students found her willingness to pretty much entirely dismiss the time-honored principles of Feng Shui—just so long as a person’s intention was appropriate—to be a strong point in favor of her view.
(I appreciate that paradox, too: students seem more apt to accept a system of beliefs that the person holding those beliefs is willing to reject. Let’s call this the “whatever” epistemological stance; I say, “It’s my view that and such is the case, but…whatever,” and that makes me more credible somehow.)
Of course, if students didn’t have this view, then our speaker wouldn’t have been so epistemologically ecumenical, in which case they wouldn’t have believed her at all, but…whatever.
Fortunately, I got all my grading down yesterday since, had I not, I wouldn’t have made any progress on it today.
(I like those kind of counterfactual statements: if a previous state of affairs was different, then the current situation wouldn’t be what it is now, but it wasn’t, so this isn’t. My first logic teacher, John Dolan, had a name for a fallacy of that sort; I forget what he called it, but the example was a statement like, “I sure am glad I don’t like Brussels sprouts because if I did, then I would eat them, but I can’t stand the taste!”)
In the critical thinking class today, we had a guest speaker talk to students about Feng Shui, which our textbook author, Theodore Schick, takes to be another paradigmatic example of a pseudoscience. And while today’s speaker did refer to her discipline as both an art AND a science, she was also almost completely non-dogmatic about her dogma. Students found her willingness to pretty much entirely dismiss the time-honored principles of Feng Shui—just so long as a person’s intention was appropriate—to be a strong point in favor of her view.
(I appreciate that paradox, too: students seem more apt to accept a system of beliefs that the person holding those beliefs is willing to reject. Let’s call this the “whatever” epistemological stance; I say, “It’s my view that and such is the case, but…whatever,” and that makes me more credible somehow.)
Of course, if students didn’t have this view, then our speaker wouldn’t have been so epistemologically ecumenical, in which case they wouldn’t have believed her at all, but…whatever.
posted by Professor Dave at 6:07 PM
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