[PREV - MUSIC_OF_EMPIRE]    [TOP]

LOGICAL_CROSS

                                             April 1, 2013


In high school, I had an elective class in
General Semantics, titled "The Nature of        EXCEPTION
Language" (after the text by Hiyakawa).

One day, the instructor sent us home
with two hand-outs, one a listing of
the classic logical fallacies, the
other an essay arguing against over       The argument against curse
use of "curse words".  They were          words was that they should
apparently paired only by coincidence,    be reserved for release in
and there was no assignment involving     moments of extreme emotion.
them except "read these".                 This relied a lot on the
                                          "pressure cooker" analogy
   Looking them over, I became            of the human mind.
   suspicious of the pairing of
   the two.  It wasn't at all                    A better, if not entirely
   hard to go through the essay                  satisfactory argument is that
   on curse words and circle the                 it's useful to keep your
   logical fallacies.                            behavior bland to expand the
                                                 range of people you deal with
   Maybe we were supposed to do this?            without offending for trivial
   This could have been a bit of                 reasons.
   creative teaching, proding us to
   think for ourselves.                                         MASKS


      I bumped into the instructor in the hall,
      and asked him about this: was this what he
      was getting at?  He essentially denied it.

      I filed this away as an example of human
      blindspots: he was apparently unable to
      see the problems with an argument that
      he liked, even though he should really know
      better.

                               Looking back on it, it's
                               possible to take it either way:

                               While he was the kind of guy who might
                               very well have regarded it as important
                               to convince a bunch of 70s-era Long
                               Island kids that they shouldn't go around
                               saying "fuck you" all the time...

                               He was also a pretty good teacher, energetic
                               and engaged with the material: he might very
                               well have thought that this trick was a good
                               idea, and that the trick would work better if
                               he maintained a straight face, and denied
                               everything.





--------
[NEXT - KRUGMAN_FUNNIES]