Rathering is a way of sliding you swiftly and gently past a false dichotomy. The general form of a rathering is “It is not the case that blahblahblah, as orthodoxy would have you believe; it is rather that suchandsuchandsuch—which is radically different.”
"When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence.
"Jootsing stands for “jumping out of the system.” This is an important tactic not just in science and philosophy, but also in the arts. Creativity, that ardently sought but only rarely found virtue, often is a heretofore unimagined violation of the rules
"In many fields—not just philosophy—there are controversies that seem never-ending and partly artifactual: people are talking past one another and not making the necessary effort to communicate effectively. When experts talk to experts, whether they are in the same discipline or not,
"The process in which inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another." Source: Philosopher Daniel Dennett's Book Intuition Pumps
Named after the friar William of Ockham, Occam’s Razor is a heuristic by which we select among competing explanations. Ockham stated that we should prefer the simplest explanation with the least moving parts: it is easier to falsify (see: Falsification), easier to
In late August of 2005, one of the most dangerous tropical storms in history began brewing. The waters of the Gulf of Mexico were unusually warm that month, and the high temperatures transformed the ocean basin into a giant cauldron with the
Summary Each individual tends to have an area or areas in which they really, truly know their stuff, their area of special competence. Areas not inside that circle are problematic because not only are we ignorant about them, but we