[SPEAKER_00]: Let's go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, let's go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's go, boys.
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Citizen.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to do something a bit different today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been talking a lot lately about this book.
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me, it called Organon or the Organon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, it's completely referred to as the Organon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is
[SPEAKER_00]: by Aristotle.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a book on one of the very first books or maybe the first book I'm not entirely sure on logic and reason and how especially how to how to deal with arguments that you might be having and I don't mean in your personal life necessarily although I'm sure there's some degree of relevance there but there's
[SPEAKER_00]: We have this, the reason that I've been thinking about this a lot lately is because we have this issue where a lot of people are engaging in public debate and discourse.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to say they shouldn't be.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm saying that they're unprepared to.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think everybody should be involved in this stuff, but at least to the degree that you're capable of.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also think that it's a problem that
[SPEAKER_00]: The structure of arguments and what it means to know something what it means for something to be something and the chain, I guess you could call it the chain of custody, maybe for an idea and making sure that that idea doesn't have flaws in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something that has become a problem, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You see a lot of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what will articulate more about this?
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is going to be a general overview of the book and the ideas behind it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of information in there, obviously, and we're gonna break it down into six sections in the series that I'm recording right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Elsewhere, I'm not doing it right now, but I'm gonna record a six part series that delves quite a bit deeper into each one of these topics, but for now, we're just going to do a brief hour-long or so overview of what it is, what it means, how it will apply to your daily life, and maybe you can go out into, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: the space a little bit more prepared, especially not just to make your own arguments, but to this is going to be the case for most people.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ability to spot bad arguments and not just spot them, but understand why they're not good arguments.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the organon is a collective name for six works by Aristotle that form the foundation of formal logic and western philosophy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The word organon means instrument or tool and
[SPEAKER_00]: It reflects on Aristotle's view that logic is the essential tool for all scientific and philosophical inquiry.
[SPEAKER_00]: The scientific method, for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, this is stuff that can sound hybrid sometimes and applies to very high-browl stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also, we'll make you a better thinker, a better reason, or a better logic user in your own life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the six works,
[SPEAKER_00]: just briefly are classification is the first one this is obviously they're all separate works but they've been compiled into one one book categories which is a classification of all possible types of being what it means to be something that is to say
[SPEAKER_00]: The word is to be in the English language is the primary function of language.
[SPEAKER_00]: What it means for something to exist and in what form we go on to on interpretation, which is number two.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it explores the use of language and propositions and true propositions I'll get into in a minute so don't get hung up on that and truth and then you go to prior analytics which introduces a syllogistic reasoning or what we would call deductive reasoning think Sherlock Holmes.
[SPEAKER_00]: A really good example of that is
[SPEAKER_00]: All men are mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dan is a man, so Dan, therefore must be mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's, uh, Sylleges agrees.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then posterior analytics, which explains scientific knowledge and demonstration and the structure of an argument and the fact that if an argument doesn't have structure to it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if there's not a linear structure to the argument, there is no argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll get into more about what that means here in a few minutes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then of course there's topics, which is the dialectic, the argument itself, rhetoric, refutations, the general argument itself, reasoning from your own opinion, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is, I guess you could say a little bit inductive, but for the most part, it should be topics, number five, should be based on one through four.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the building blocks, and they're in this order for a very specific reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number five should be informed heavily, if not entirely, by one through four.
[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, it's just nonsense, you're just giving your opinion, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then number six is, um, statistical refutations or sophistry and what it does is exposes logical fallacies and deceptive arguments and why they're illogical, why they're deceptive.
[SPEAKER_00]: So together,
[SPEAKER_00]: These works establish the principles of clear thinking, valid inference like the example I gave before, if this is true, then this is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And rational dialogue and it lays the groundwork for pretty much all legal documentation, rhetoric, science, philosophy, all this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the point of it is at the end of the day to teach people how to think and not what to think, which is a complaint that we have a lot of these days.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's get into it a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether you've listened to all the episodes of this show or just hearing there, you know that I at least try to bring things into focus a little bit, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I want to have conversations that are meaningful and actually talk about stuff that you can carry into your daily life and, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: use it, and I'll say this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the best way that you can use it is in making sure that you're not susceptible to bad arguments from other people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's mostly what we have now is bad arguments.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they sound good, but they're not true, which is sophistry, we're going to that in a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, excuse me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's get into, excuse me, let's get into categories first.
[SPEAKER_00]: The architecture of being, what it means for something to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in categories Aristotle gives us a taxonomy of reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: His aim is simple, but it's for the time very bold.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is, again, this is a very, very old logic, which points to another problem that we continuously try to unlearn things for no reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: Aristotle lays out ten categories to identify all the possible ways something can be exist, whatever, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So substance, which is like a man or a tree or a rock, a thing, person, pleasure thing, quantity, like how much of it, six feet tall, ten pounds of something, quality, which are adjectives like courageous, blue, intelligent, relation, father, or
[SPEAKER_00]: Father would be a relationship to somebody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father is a noun, but it's also a relation to somebody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, relation to another, it's twice as long or twice as hot or something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: A place, as in the marketplace of things or ideas, a time, dawn, yesterday, years from now, whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Position, setting line down, over there, whatever, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: A state,
[SPEAKER_00]: armed or clothed or hot or cold or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: An action that's being performed, cutting or teaching or talking or sleeping or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then passion, which is he defines as being cut or being taught.
[SPEAKER_00]: So passion will be the result of action being performed on you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a really good quote from this is substances that which is neither said of a subject nor any subject.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just about the idea of what it is to be what all the if you if you were describing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's just say this big ass mug of water right here.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you could say that it's a mug, you could say that it holds sixty-four ounces, you could say, and I'm going in order here.
[SPEAKER_00]: You could say that it's gray, you could say that it's right here, or it's twice as big as the other mug that I have, which is in my car actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: You could say that it's right here, did that or sorry, you could say that's right here, you could say that's right here and now time.
[SPEAKER_00]: You could say that setting on the table, you could say that it is covered, covered with the cap on, that would be the position.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, the state.
[SPEAKER_00]: The action is it's just setting here to be honest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when I drink out of it, you could say that the passion is that it's being drunk from.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so in data science, ontology builds on the same logic, right, ontological arguments are built on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: In legal terms, distinguishing between action and state or being changes the consequences, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So intent matters and all this stuff will get into more of this here in a bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And AI, you know, machines are trained to classify in these categories.
[SPEAKER_00]: These large learning networks and stuff like that are language networks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Limited language could use this, Chris.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you confuse what a thing is,
[SPEAKER_00]: with how it is or what it does.
[SPEAKER_00]: You blur the facts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a big problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'll get some concrete examples of this as we move forward here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is, what are the other quotes that's super relevant to this whole book that I really liked.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something you've probably heard before.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a quote about the book not from the book, but it's the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what I want you to be able to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to be able to pour through information whether you agree with it or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And do your best to understand it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And...
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's lessons there, or if there's truth there, take it, apply it.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's not, you know, use it as an example to, uh, to, I guess, inform the rest of your life and then learn how to learn again.
[SPEAKER_00]: So moving on to, uh, substance.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to go back through some of these a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: Substances can, and the reason is because everything else depends on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't have blue without the thing that is blue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like this blue shirt is only blue because the shirt exists, if that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't have, it can't be on me unless the shirt and I exist, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I know this sounds pedantic, but I promise you it's going somewhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've ever looked at like a legal case, a philosophical debate or programming code or ontology, you're dealing with these categories.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason that I think it's important is that it's a reminder that language isn't just noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a reminder that it reflects the actual structure of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: When people say things, they're making empirical claims about the universe, and they are either true or they are not true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we'll get into more of this in a few minutes about
[SPEAKER_00]: the quadrant of reality, which is to say there are universal truths.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are universal falsehoods.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are particular truths.
[SPEAKER_00]: Universal makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, universal is what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: particular means something entirely different, particular means that this thing is true here and now and for me, but it may not be true for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, for example, I'm cold or I'm hot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that's true for me, but it may not be true for this person over here.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a particular truth and then it's a particular falsehood, which is something to say, like, I'm cold right now, which I'm not, that would be a particular falsehood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Got it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sweet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so moving to the next topic here,
[SPEAKER_00]: on interpretation.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is about language and truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know that the kinds of things are defined by the substance, what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we're going to talk about those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is where the idea of proposition is introduced in Oregon on.
[SPEAKER_00]: The statement is either true or false, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, the cat is on the mat.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why they chose an example that rhymes with drives me crazy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's either true or false.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cat itself is not a proposition.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's substance, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Cat exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then all of the ten features about the cat would be a thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then there's the affirmation and negation.
[SPEAKER_00]: contradictory pairs, for example, like all-meter mortal versus some-meter mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not a good example because all-meter mortal, but you know what I mean.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then modal logic, which is possibility, necessity, or contingency.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a really good quote from this is, it is impossible that the same thing belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is like,
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a really good baseline test for whether or not something is even, whether it passes the quote unquote smell test, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you expect me to believe that the same organization that was this incompetent has also pulled off the most master-minded.
[SPEAKER_00]: conspiracy of all time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe there's some possibility that's true, but that should be an immediate red flag for you when you see incongruent information like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: In debate and journalism and law, knowing how to form claims is everything, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, excuse me, let me get to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, Aristotle splits the propositions
[SPEAKER_00]: into two big categories, affirmations and negations.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the sky's blue is an affirmation.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a true statement.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the sky's not blue is a negation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Seems obvious, but air subtle is building on something.
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of defining how we can compare statements to one another and how they relate logically to one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very in the weeds and I'll get way, there's a much deeper conversation that we'll have about this later on, but for now we're going to stick with this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, back to this quadrant.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called logical opposition.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are four basic propositions.
[SPEAKER_00]: A universal affirmative, all humans are mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: A universal negative, no humans are mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: A particular affirmative, some humans are mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then a particular negative, some humans are not mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Correct?
[SPEAKER_00]: Got all that?
[SPEAKER_00]: So all versus some, and these are, you go from Adam and Samus to dynamic statements.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not just grammatical quirks, these are logical structures, and they relate to each other in specific ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, all dogs bark and some dogs do not bark, cannot be true at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They cannot be true at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not possible, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: No cats like water contradict some cats like water, so on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, your subtle takes a pretty bold step into what's called modal logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's talking not just about what it is, but what could be must be or might not be, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So he introduced the idea of necessity and contingency.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the classic example of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Suppose there is a sea battle tomorrow between two nations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it true now that there will be a sea battle?
[SPEAKER_00]: If it is true now,
[SPEAKER_00]: than the future is determined.
[SPEAKER_00]: If it isn't, do we lose the law of violence and where every proposition is either true or false?
[SPEAKER_00]: Aristotle suggests that we may need to treat further contingents differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: The question has been a big problem for philosophers and theologians for centuries, especially those trying to reconcile free will with divine knowledge and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he lays down
[SPEAKER_00]: what would eventually become the rules for the laws of thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is the law of non-contradiction, something can't be, but as we mentioned before, something can't be both B and not B at the same time in the same respect, with the same time, place, position, so on, right, state.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the law of excluded middle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every statement is either true or false.
[SPEAKER_00]: These aren't just
[SPEAKER_00]: abstract ideas it's what makes logic possible right so you can take something that might be true tomorrow and say yes in this current state for tomorrow in this time period
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is why if you've ever worked in the intelligence community or know anybody who has, you may have heard the phrase geospatial intelligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is really what it came out of is this kind of logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, yeah, we've got a picture of this particular terrorist on this location, but it's two weeks old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that doesn't mean anything to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: All it means to me is that he was there and then, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't mean that he's still there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't, you can't infer some things, but you can't draw absolutes from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: Terms alone aren't enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need propositions to make meaningful claims.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not enough to just have a flurry of information.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what you see a lot in these arguments that are that sound really compelling.
[SPEAKER_00]: They sound really compelling because there's all sorts of data, but there's no if-then statements or there's no comp.
[SPEAKER_00]: comparing of logic, the law of non-contradictions on applied, the law of excluded, middle is not applied.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you just have a bunch of facts related or unrelated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And your brain says, well, this person knows a lot about this subject.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they probably know what they're talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's not logical, actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just because somebody knows a lot of facts about a subject doesn't mean that they're argument is sound.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: It turns alone on enough when you'd proposition to make meaningful claims.
[SPEAKER_00]: Propositions can either affirm or deny, and the structure of statements determines how they relate to each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, finally, modal concepts like possibility and necessity pushed logic into the realm of time freedom and fate.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that when we're talking about predetermined stuff or anything like that, these aren't problems in the organon and Aristotle's doctrine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are completely separate concepts, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So to say that there's no such thing as universal affirmant, there's universal truth, for example, because what if it doesn't happen tomorrow, well, that it didn't happen, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, in our current logic of it's going to happen tomorrow, then it was going to happen tomorrow, and then it didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, then it didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: The terms have changed, such it is not true any longer, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully that's not too confusing, but I think it's pretty simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's on interpretation, like how to pour through this data and really think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we're going to go to prior analytics, which is one of my favorites.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in prior analytics, Aristotle creates the world's very first formal system of logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was called the syllogism, still is called the syllogism.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's S-Y-L-O-G-I-S, and if you want to look it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I encourage you for listening to this episode after the fact not live.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go look this stuff up, pause, go check it out, see what it means, and then come back and listen to more and see if, you know, in the comments even, if you make some object, this is all for all of us, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you make some observations that you think are relevant in this, put them in the comments, we really appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So back to
[SPEAKER_00]: syllogism.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking now and we're going to borrow from you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll notice this throughout the entire show.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to borrow from the previous sections to inform our current section.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now we're talking about syllogism or structure.
[SPEAKER_00]: The major premise would be that Dan is our all men or mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dan is a man would be the minor premise and the conclusion is thus or therefore Dan must be mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how that works.
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He identifies valid forms, explores figures and moods, and lays out the rules for deductive reasoning, again, think Sherlock Holmes, gathering data, and making acute and narrow observations based on that data.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a small piece of data, and then a total worldview that's supported by this really small piece of data.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the blueprint for deduction
[SPEAKER_00]: which is reasoning from general principles to specific truths is real world is like I'm thinking about in math and programming for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ductive of the little, oh my god, validity ensures airtight reasoning.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is these really complicated computer code if then statements and all this other stuff is based on this logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's based on the idea that there are formal skeletons of logic and the structure of syllogism matters, different combinations.
[SPEAKER_00]: are different outcomes, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is how logic statements are written in computer code.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not an expert in writing computer code by the way, but I know a little bit about it in programming logic is one of the first courses you take in any computer degree program.
[SPEAKER_00]: The formal skeletons of logic tell you that there are three figures based on the middle term placement.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, we'll get into way more of this in the specific episodes for these different parts of the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's dozens of moods, ways, premises can be affirmative or negative, universal or particular, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really, you're learning the structure for the formation of logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you learned about what is, and you learned about what logic is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now you're learning about how to apply those two things into a formalized structure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're not going to go through all these pieces to make your argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you should go through these places to some degree to check your argument and make sure it's not stupid and more importantly, I guess, for most of us, is to look at other people's arguments that are being made.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're making empirical claims about the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can plug this logic in and see if that even makes sense, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So here's example.
[SPEAKER_00]: All A or B. All B are C. Therefore, all A are C. And then there's a negative of that as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: No A or B.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see RB, therefore a, no ARC, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's a bunch, if you, if you actually read organon, there's a bunch of different tests in there that go through this logic that maybe some of them are more relevant to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would encourage you to even dislike.
[SPEAKER_00]: Grock or Chad GPT examples of formal skeletons of logic and the three figures and dozens of modes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So go support them and support us firstform.com slash trigger rows that's one STPH ORM.com slash trigger rows.
[SPEAKER_00]: Back to the program here.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next segment in this in prior analytics is the Mochative Reasoning versus Dialectics.
[SPEAKER_00]: So demonstration is reasoning from true known premises or scientific knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, like a point of reference, that's actually part of the epistemology.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dialectic is reasoning from plausible beliefs, debate and rhetoric and the refutations and stuff like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: prior analytics is mostly focused on the structure, not the source, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So the connection to posterior analytics, which we'll get to in a moment, is where demonstration actually meets science and we'll get to that, again, in just a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Aristotle pioneered the idea of formal proof for an argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is really, I don't know if most people know this, but if you ever studied Roman history in Roman law,
[SPEAKER_00]: Technically speaking, there was a requirement for torture, if somebody confessed.
[SPEAKER_00]: You saw the torture that otherwise the confession was invalid, not always, but it's certain periods of Roman history.
[SPEAKER_00]: And instead of that, we have built in the West, and this should have happened because they were a style of predated that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've built an evidence-based system, and as well, not just our court system, but in our daily discourse.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the structure is right, and the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this becomes the basis for medieval scholasticism, modern logic, mathematical proof, all this stuff, including a computer logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Contrast with inductive reasoning, which is more uncertain, more empirical.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason to this still matters is that
[SPEAKER_00]: All formal systems are built on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Legal reasoning, medical diagnoses, everyday arguments, computer logic, this is what logic is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you are breaking down somebody's argument that are making claims about this thing or that thing and it doesn't follow this logic, then it's not true, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's an argument that could make it true, but the argument that you're listening to has not done that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, Arizona didn't have Venn diagrams yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't have symbolic logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't have truth tables or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He gave us the foundation.
[SPEAKER_00]: of how this is all possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: The entire edifice of logic through Boole, like Boolean code, Boolean numbers, frag, Russell, Turing, et cetera, traces back to this very moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And next, we're going to talk about posterior analytics.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what we really know.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do in this section or in this work, I guess you could call it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Aristotle asks, what do we really know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And when do we actually know that it's true or not?
[SPEAKER_00]: And his answer to that was, we know something is true when we know what's cause, cause and effect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good quote from this is, we think we understand something absolutely when we know what's cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can look there for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: obviously it's translated from Greeks, so it's probably some wildly different, but possever analytics, real knowledge, or epistome, or what we call our epistemology.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be necessarily true.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be explanatory, meaning if there's no structure to the argument, then the argument is completely invalid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it has to be derived from, like, really importantly, it has to be derived from first principles.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he introduces this
[SPEAKER_00]: demonstration, a syllogism with premises that are true, immediate, and explanatory.
[SPEAKER_00]: But where do first principles come from?
[SPEAKER_00]: Aristotle says that through induction and intellectual insight, we would say that these are natural law that are observed through experience or whatever, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And these are natural laws.
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael Malice actually talks about this a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if one of the ways to observe this, that's kind of, and your everyday life, you can kind of observe some of this stuff is how,
[SPEAKER_00]: If something is ubiquitous throughout humanity, there's probably something true about it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't necessarily mean that the behavior or the action or the belief is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is means there's some underlying, if it's that ubiquitous, there is some underlying first principle to it and that's something that we can sus out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, excuse me.
[SPEAKER_00]: A demonstration in these terms and the terms of posture or analytics is, oh, let me, let me go back.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what is epistemology?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is something that we lack in current society today, and it's why you find yourself in these arguments where nobody agrees on what the hell you're talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you can't get the facts correct between two people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a huge problem right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I heard
[SPEAKER_00]: What's that dude?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's that old comedian who just yells angrily all the time?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's still around.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Lewis Black.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lewis Black is talking about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there was this comedy central special back in two thousand four and it was during all the Iraq debates and stuff like that and he goes, we can't even agree on what the meaning of the word is is and the word is or to be is the fundamental of our entire language capability.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we can't agree on that, then we can't agree on anything ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why you find yourself in these things and these situations where you're just arguing back and forth with each other and the information is just going in different directions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's one of the reasons that in
[SPEAKER_00]: in couples counseling, Jordan Peterson uses this methodology, where if two people are at an empath, he will make each party explain the other party's position back to them to their satisfaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it goes something like, so what you're saying is XY and Z, and the reason you believe this is ABC, and they're like, yes, that's exactly what I believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we can have a conversation, but before then we're just talking past each other, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: So,
[SPEAKER_00]: Epistemology is knowledge that is certain, explain a tour, and based on causes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to define the conditions under which something is demonstrably true, that's what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you move on to what exactly is scientific knowledge, he defined it as knowledge of the Y. So it must be true, it must be true, it must be derived from first principles again, necessary and universal.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is to say, for the epistemology section, it's one of the universal furatives.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then explain it to where there has to be a call.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we say, it has to be explained.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't mean you can just explain it however.
[SPEAKER_00]: There has to be a root cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: This happened, or this existed, or whatever, and as a result, this.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what explain it to where it means.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the difference between knowing that, which is the fact and knowing why an explanation is how we get here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now demonstration of the structure of explanation is another good part of here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a demonstration is a syllogism that reveals why something is the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we'll keep coming back to this because it's really important.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because this process of this is a universal truth, this thing happened that relates to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a result, I can make this inference.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why we keep hammering on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It must begin with true primary and immediate premise.
[SPEAKER_00]: An example is,
[SPEAKER_00]: The premise, there's two premises.
[SPEAKER_00]: The internal angles of a triangle equals two right triangles, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's his math.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second premise is, this is a triangle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the conclusion is, it's angles equal to right triangles.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know a universal truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a subject, and we can apply the universal truth to that subject to make a conclusion about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Scientific syllogisms are not just valid.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're epistemologically grounded.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, these are conclusions that are now undeniable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what you should require.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was Christopher Hitchens or Hitchens Razor.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like extraordinary claims or choir, extraordinary evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what you should require.
[SPEAKER_00]: And instead of folding things into your worldview, that are, that sound good.
[SPEAKER_00]: They sound good.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they're not actually a good, well-reasoned arguments.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where you get into trouble.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the reason that a math teacher makes you show your work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just to give you extra busy work.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've talked about this before.
[SPEAKER_00]: The purpose for doing that is so the very well-educated math teacher can walk by and look at that paper and say, oh, here is exactly where you messed up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we can go back there and everything flows from there will be right again until you make another mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what you have to do with arguments as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So first principles and induction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do these true and primary as he defines them?
[SPEAKER_00]: Premises come from.
[SPEAKER_00]: They come from induction, which is observing particular cases, which is an intuitive grasp of the universe, or the universal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is not
[SPEAKER_00]: the modern empirical method, unfortunately, it involves an elective insight.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the role of experience, sense perception and habit, informing first principles, what they actually come from, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we know that, for example, talk about lock for a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: We believe that through, you know, locks logic, that the ultimate property or the ultimate right is property rights and the ultimate property is oneself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your thoughts, your actions, you control that, that belongs to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we see that as a result of
[SPEAKER_00]: What happens when that's interfered with?
[SPEAKER_00]: People become slaves and not just that, but additional epistemological data such as people become less creative.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can see that in communist societies, even though they have very smart people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you can send people from the Chinese government, from Chinese education system into
[SPEAKER_00]: academic to catholines, and they will do very, very well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you try to get them to be creative and ingenuity, they can't do it because they have violated this very fundamental law of the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then there's four causes in scientific knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Real knowledge includes knowing the cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the cause of something is, there's four causes, according to Aristotle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Material, what it's made of,
[SPEAKER_00]: formal, what kind of thing it is, efficient, what brought it into being, and then final, what's its purpose or what's it for?
[SPEAKER_00]: True demonstration ideally will capture the formal and efficient causes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those two middle causes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of thing it is and what brought it into being, because from that you can infer the final, what is it for?
[SPEAKER_00]: Scientific acknowledges and just knowing that something is true but why it must be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: So to put a bow on posterior analytics, it is the foundation of Aristotle's theory of science, the scientific method, sprung forth from this, from Sylvester's structure, which is prior analytics to explainatory substance, which is posterior.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is all very important to understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, when I go deeper, I'm recording a series on this.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I go deeper into this, we'll go through way more data like on, for example, on first principles.
[SPEAKER_00]: We start with sense perception.
[SPEAKER_00]: See here, touch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, and then from repeated perceptions, we form memory.
[SPEAKER_00]: From memory, we form experience with a grasp of patterns.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've said as many times before, but our brains are very complicated engines that determine between threads and benefits and the way that it does that is by creating patterns and shortcuts to those patterns, cataloged with information about what that pattern means.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then from experience or the mind, we perceive universal truths that are self-evident you may have.
[SPEAKER_00]: heard that phrase before in our Constitution or on our Declaration of Independence.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to give you some quick examples, because I know the four causes can be confusing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're going to give quick examples on this material cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's it made of?
[SPEAKER_00]: A statue is made of bronze.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's simple, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Formal cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the shape or essence?
[SPEAKER_00]: The statues form
[SPEAKER_00]: is in the image of a man or a god or day of whatever it is, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's whatever the statue is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who are what made it, the sculptor?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then what was it made for?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's its purpose?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the four would be to honor someone or decorate a temple or whatever we can, I mean, sometimes you can ask the sculptor, but it's not always that simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: The final cause is often quite a bit trickier.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Aristotle would say that healing, restoration, flourishing, deep science, not just data but explanation of why this thing exists and for what purpose are super important.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, obviously
[SPEAKER_00]: This kind of stuff is what helps you sort out a good from bad argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is where we get into topic number five, or work number five, which is called topics, or reasoning from opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've gone through this process of one through four.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've gone through the process of categorizing something.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand all the elements in this argument that I'm talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're substance, their quality, their relation, their position, time, all this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand these things now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand the universal and particular affirmatives and negations, affirmations and negations of this, the contradictory payers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand modal logic about these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand the prior analytics, the structure or syllogism.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand the epistemology, the things that are true and then based on those, what I can infer for those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I've got a very good system for understanding if my
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, if my argument makes any sense at all, or if it's just a bunch of facts, a bunch of facts in no particular order.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is why I don't trust anybody who speaks quickly as a, you know, these, these people who just like trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, trip, this, this and this and this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what about this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, no, that's not an argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not an argument in any meaningful way.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you arrive at five.
[SPEAKER_00]: And topics teaches us.
[SPEAKER_00]: to argue well, even when we don't have certainty, it's a guide to the dialectic reasoning from plausible beliefs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what most of the people you see in this space are very good at, whether naturally or developed over time, they've become really good arduers or debaters.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is that if you become good at five first or only, which is what usually happens, then
[SPEAKER_00]: you end up at number six, which is sophistry, and we'll get into that in a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this teaches you to argue, well, this is an important part.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying that it's intrinsically negative.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I'm saying is that you need to build this foundation first, where you get to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: We call it the dialectical method or the Q&A format.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I asked this question, I expect this response or whatever, and then I respond back to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're basically using, for example, if you're doing this correctly, I could say, our own in-mortal.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the person would say yes, if they're not, you know, stupid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I could say, okay, is, is, am I a man?
[SPEAKER_00]: And they would say, yeah, you're a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, okay, so you can conclude then what?
[SPEAKER_00]: And they would say that you're mortal, like, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: There we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a well-reason argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know that's a kind of a basic example, but that's a very well-reason argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the structure of a well-reason argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now what we're doing is shifting from science to debate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Posterianologues dealt with knowledge and demonstration.
[SPEAKER_00]: topics deals with the dialectic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reason discussion about opinions, probabilities, assumptions, whatever, right, dialectic is reasoning from generally accepted premises rather than demonstrative truths.
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of relying on the demonstrative truth, now we're starting to expand into the dialectic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the purposes for this is to identify both good and bad ideas in my opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now dialectic is different from demonstration.
[SPEAKER_00]: Demonstration seeks necessary scientific truths.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dialectic tests, explore, refute, and clarify.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is the refinement period.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not the period where you introduce a bunch of new facts to the conversation and then argue for them no matter what anything else is going on or what you hear and defend them.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, this has meant to be the point where you clarify that belief.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is something I really like.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was talking to Candace about this warning actually about
[SPEAKER_00]: my conversations with Michael Malis.
[SPEAKER_00]: He seems like a very disagreeable person to some people, but for me, he and I always, and you can go watch our episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably the first one in the list if you're watching right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, when he and I discuss things, you will see us come to points of disagreement and then work to refine that disagreement.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe it persists, but most of the time we actually find common space there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's because both of us follow this method.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a couple of things that Aristotle outlines the four uses of dialectic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Intellectual training, sharpening your reasoning skills, obviously, engaging others in dialogue, refuting them or defending opinions or having them do that to yours to refine your opinions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Discovering truth, that's something that happens as well as a result.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then testing the opinion of others, exposing contradictions or weaknesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dialectic is both
[SPEAKER_00]: pedagogical and investigative, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're trying to understand and form clarity out of an argument whether it actually exists or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then
[SPEAKER_00]: There's the common places of reasoning, and there's dozens of lines of attack, as he calls them for constructing or refuting arguments, from definition, division, cause, and effect comparison.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any of the things that you've read about so far are listened to me about so far.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's an error in any one of those, it doesn't necessarily mean the conclusions, not true.
[SPEAKER_00]: What it means is that the R-U-R has not made their point.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there are errors in your argument, then you have not made the final point.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can either remove the errors or correct the errors and see what the point is afterwards.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is something that we absolutely have to do because there's so many bad arguments about things out there that are based on the intelligence community again.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a big big no-no to operate on what we call single source information.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was this source called curveball that was allegedly a German source.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, that's the guy that said there was WMD Interac.
[SPEAKER_00]: That person never existed.
[SPEAKER_00]: German intelligence found out that it was completely fictionalized.
[SPEAKER_00]: They told everybody that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The US government used that intelligence anyways to invade a country.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's not really the point what we're doing here today.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's the danger of believing bad information.
[SPEAKER_00]: Think of all this information that you have, your world view about a particular subject or just generally.
[SPEAKER_00]: as the mechanics of like a baseball swing or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: If any one part of it is not correct, you are in big big trouble.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're in big trouble because now you're stacking what might be completely rational and logical observations and truths on top of untruths and it's like building on quicksand.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a big big problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, this is another thing that people get wrong about the dialectical and the refutations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dialecting an action is meant to be a method, not just a contest.
[SPEAKER_00]: The point of a debate is not just to win the damn debate.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about getting to the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what this was designed for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why we have the structure of Q&A format, opponent and respondent, and then the use of premises that are both reputable and widely held.
[SPEAKER_00]: When people get challenged to debates and to accept it, most of the time these days, like Pierce Morgan show is nonsense, for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: They just shout at each other about their worldviews.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no exchange of
[SPEAKER_00]: and actual dialectic.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no, excuse me, there's no use of categories or interpretations or prior or posterior analytics or any of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: People to say, this is my worldview, here's a set of facts that I think supports that, just a flurry of information, they're like, all right, cool man, I mean, I guess that's something.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've said a lot of words, and this is what we mean, I guess, by word sell.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've said a lot of words, but there's no constructed argument in there anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you skip to five and lose the fundamentals of one through four, you end up at six.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would say six is the thing that
[SPEAKER_00]: really defines the modern discourse today, and that is, of course, sophistry, the way that, excuse me, sorry, get a little getting over a little thing here.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason that this one comes last is because these are the warnings.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the last chapter of the last work, and it's the warning of what happens when you don't respect the foundational information in this process.
[SPEAKER_00]: The final book,
[SPEAKER_00]: Not all arguments are sincere, bad actors, summer, uh, statistical, or to say, uh, sophistry designed to mislead while sounding logical.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's thirteen total fallacies, uh, equivocation, false cause, beg in the question, irrelevant inclusion and blah, blah, blah, blah.
[SPEAKER_00]: You, I'm, certainly you've heard of logical fallacies before.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are a little bit, um, uh, more detailed than the typical logical fallacies you're going to hear about.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite quotes from this is a statistical refutation is not a real refutation but the appearance of one.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why you have to be extremely careful about who you listen to and even when you're listening to somebody that has a
[SPEAKER_00]: demonstrated record of being trustworthy and with good logic and all this other stuff they could still make mistakes it is very important that in these types of arguments that we really get it right it's very important that we get these things right because otherwise once again we're building on bad logic in the future so
[SPEAKER_00]: Some examples that happen now are clickbait headlines using complex questions or just ask in questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just asking questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: This person that says they're just asking questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: What they're trying to do is to put an idea in your head without providing any evidence for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any structured argument or any of that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anybody that orders that phrase should be immediately, that should be an immediate red flag for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Should immediately look at that person.
[SPEAKER_00]: with skepticism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you should look at everybody with skepticism to be fair, but you should be on high alert with that guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another example is politicians shifting definitions, mid-sentence, like how during the Biden administration, for example, the definition of inflation just changed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just changed.
[SPEAKER_00]: They changed how they calculated.
[SPEAKER_00]: They removed housing and energy from inflation.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They've changed the change sections one through four, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They changed the facts, the category, the change of categories, all the stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they have made inferences
[SPEAKER_00]: from those that are just not true and now they're presenting that as new fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then this idea that like studies show which claims that the mistake correlation claims that mistakes correlation for causation.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've all seen bad studies.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can make a political poll say anything you want, depending on how you ask the questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a big problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: The danger that's obviously is that once people can't tell the difference between logic and trickery, truth collapses.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I say that we don't have a shared epistemology anymore, then
[SPEAKER_00]: That's exactly what I'm talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Falsies, a road trust, reason, and civic dialogue, you go from having a conversation with each other to yelling at each other and now the only way you can reach each other was with bullets and bombs.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how it works in society.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whether or not it's intentional, doesn't really matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: What matters is that you build these systems inside yourself to be resilient to that nonsense.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what really matters.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about sophistry versus philosophy.
[SPEAKER_00]: What exactly do we mean when we say sophistry?
[SPEAKER_00]: And Aristotle's day, sophists were traveling teachers who taught young men how to argue persuasively, often for money, which is
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of weird, and often without much concern for whether their arguments were actually true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if that sounds like every political influencer on social media right now, your goddamn right it does.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's exactly what these people are.
[SPEAKER_00]: So where Western philosophers sought wisdom, Western's office sought victory.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are not the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: If somebody is just trying to win the debate, again, big red flag.
[SPEAKER_00]: If somebody says,
[SPEAKER_00]: taking people at their at the worst possible meeting or taking things out of context intentionally that's a bad actor they are a softest and they cannot be trusted now this frustrated Aristotle deeply again he comes he's a student Plato and logic really matter to him that this is a big thing for him it was his core cause for life because for him reasoning wasn't just a performance it was a path to understanding logic sacred
[SPEAKER_00]: This, it has rules, and if you broke them, you didn't just make bad arguments.
[SPEAKER_00]: You distorted the meaning of every discourse that involves that subject.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in statistical refutations, Arizona sets out to name and classify every trick that the surface use.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it gives us a field guide to fallacies.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's move on to what a reputation as a reputation is when someone tries to prove you wrong, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fine and even healthy.
[SPEAKER_00]: You should accept that.
[SPEAKER_00]: You should be willing to defend any idea you have.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, a statistical reputation is a fake reputation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks like a logical or a bottle, but it only succeeds by cheating the rules of logic or language.
[SPEAKER_00]: Aristotle says, uh, statistical refutation is a refutation, not according to the fact, but according to the appearance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how you can tell.
[SPEAKER_00]: Looks good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, in other words, it pulls the ear, not the intellect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, they sound clever.
[SPEAKER_00]: They use real words.
[SPEAKER_00]: They often follow a familiar pattern, but deep down their hollow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is why you have to understand section to one through four to be able to identify this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the better you get at it, the easier it is, obviously, someone would say.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more experience you have is the more you pay attention, the more you witness it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The easier it is for you to see what's happening there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll get weighed more deep into these fallacies when we do a full show on this but on this section.
[SPEAKER_00]: But some of the fallacies are equivocation using the same word in multiple meanings.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the feather is light, what is light can't be dark, so a feather cannot be dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's stupid, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're brain immediately.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a very obvious example.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're brain immediately rebels with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But equivocation comes in many forms.
[SPEAKER_00]: ambiguity with from grammar or sentence structure is another one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, I saw them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw them in with the telescope who had the telescope you were the man, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not obvious.
[SPEAKER_00]: From that sentence, I saw the man with the telescope.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you use the telescope to see the man?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or did the man have a telescope and you saw him?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Intentionally, obtuse or obfuscating language, very common in these arguments that we hear today.
[SPEAKER_00]: What Aristotle called the accent or changing the meaning of something based on the emphasis or tone, like highlighting a certain word, like somebody's quoting somebody and they highlight a certain phrase, or the better example I guess these days is the very fine people hoax where you clip something on both sides and make it look like they just said this part when actually the longer explanation conveys a completely different understanding what they were trying to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in the question is, obviously, obviously one that you've probably heard of before, which is assuming what you're trying to prove or what the other person's assuming what you're trying to prove.
[SPEAKER_00]: Democracy is the best system because it's superior.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just restating the claim, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you haven't actually added any information or made an argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way to refute this stuff, this is, again, we're going to go way deeper into this, some point soon, but the way to fight back against this
[SPEAKER_00]: Aristotle gives us these tools not just to spot fallacies, but also to disarm them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, clarify definitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take the time to ask, what exactly do you mean by that?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is where a lot of these arguments completely fall apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: People that are trying to rewrite the history of World War II, for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you ask them deeper and deeper questions, you will see the exact same pattern.
[SPEAKER_00]: Literally the exact same pattern every single time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It'll either be.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was joking or tongue and cheek.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not an expert.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not my field.
[SPEAKER_00]: or some other form of obfuscation, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It'll be one of those three things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then breakdown structure is the conclusion really supported by the premise.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what you're saying is that this, because of this and because of this, this is your conclusion, clarify these things and see if there's any errors there, they're probably will be you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Watch for shifts in meaning, is this person using a term in different ways or a fact in different ways?
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, this is a really good recent example actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: The definition of certain words have been changed recently.
[SPEAKER_00]: I talked about the one with inflation.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a very specific and narrow law about what it means for one country to occupy another country.
[SPEAKER_00]: And recently, over the last twenty years, that definition has been changed for only one country is real.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's some new doctrine called remote occupation, which has never been a thing in all of human history, not in the law of armed conflict or the Geneva Convention to the genocide convention and none of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: They just kind of made it up, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounded good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounded good, but it's not real, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, then there's slow these arguments down.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the last one that Aristotle recommends.
[SPEAKER_00]: Falsies often work because they move too fast to catch.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a very important one.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why I don't like these people who talk fast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they're either hopped up on Adderall or Crazy, one of the two.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they're not making good sound arguments, and they're trying to get all this information out as quickly as possible, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're trying to sneak in through the back door before anybody recognizes them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And most importantly, stay calm, sophistry, thrives on confusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: They thrive on you getting angry.
[SPEAKER_00]: or saying, no, I'm not going to deal with this anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how manufacturer consent happens over time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Clear thinking is their kryptonite.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, just a couple of examples of sophistry that we deal with in the twenty first century, emotionally charged arguments that completely misrepresent data, for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: This whole thing the last couple of years about how guns are the number one killers of kids not true that only exists by the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you change the definition of a child, you take out zero to one and go to it in nineteen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well that's crazy right you've been manipulated the data and you've made an emotional argument as a make any sense so.
[SPEAKER_00]: ads that say four out of five doctors recommend, but they don't tell you which doctors.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, a chiropractor technically could be a doctor, a dentist.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the hell's I got to do with my joint health or whatever, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't make any sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And influencers use anecdotal stories all the time to sell supplements or this thing or that thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's all sorts of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure you're thinking of some now that you've experienced.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to wrap up now, let's zoom out, across the six works of work and on, Aristotle has walked us through the entire ecosystem of human reasoning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Categories, what kind of things exist?
[SPEAKER_00]: Interpretation or on interpretation.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we speak truth or how do we speak falsehood?
[SPEAKER_00]: Prior analytics, how do we form valid arguments, posterior analytics, what counts as real knowledge?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is demonstrably true?
[SPEAKER_00]: Topics, how do we reason when certainty is out of reach?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we apply one through four?
[SPEAKER_00]: two topics so we can make good arguments or good refutations.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, so if it's good refutations, how do we protect logic from abuse?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's more than just the system.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a moral vision of the mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how your brain is supposed to work and it was observed two thousand years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not new, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We have intentionally been untot this stuff so that we can be manipulated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the only way, you're not going to, we can't run enough people for office.
[SPEAKER_00]: to fix these problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't have the money.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll never have the influence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The influence you have is by making yourself in those around you resistant and resilient against these bad ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you care about the truth, you must care about how you're reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the end, logic isn't about winning arguments.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about living truthfully questioning wisely and seeking understanding in a world that's full of persuasion and pressure and pretence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that more than anything is what the series is going to be about.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you'll tune in.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to be producing them soon.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether this, and in the meantime, I recommend either reading, organ on, works, or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's your first time, if you ever read it, whatever, or find a primer on it, something that you can study to get more information about this, and we'll go through way more later.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you found some usefulness here today, some that's sharp in your mind a little bit, and challenge your thinking instead of your speech.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I appreciate y'all tuning in.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is, have been setting.