Monday, December 6, 2010

A fallacious inference...


The people at Urtext Film Productions from Adelaide have been releasing interviews filmed in portrait on their blog 'Portrait Mode'. I've watched them all and the idea is brilliant, I'd like to see more. The simple videos are of a high quality and the portrait 'mode' gives the stories a very personal atmosphere. Aaaanyway, there are more interesting things going around, BUT, I discovered one interview very amusing...Chris. Vimeo won't let me embed the video so you're going to have to scoot over there yourself.



Chris was in a first-year philosophy course (which I dropped) with me and I remember his zealous questioning and querying from the front row of the lecture hall. It seems Chris has developed his I'm-a-smart-philosophy-student aura, it's hilarious. I've included some of the transcript below:

When you do philosophy...apart from learning specific things about...the arguments Descartes gave for skepticism or the arguments Leibnitz gave for the existence of God, you learn the far more generic skills of just being able to analyse and criticise arguments...

If I'm on the phone and somebody is trying to convince me that...they should have received their order yesterday because they placed it at this time and this time and this time, well I can sorta look at that and see the structure of the argument and go 'well no, there's a fallacious inference being made there! In actual fact you've still got two days to wait because blah blah blah'.

Okay, this is a very trivial example and obviously you don't need training in philosophy to do this.



Ha ha ha...blah blah blah

1 comment:

  1. I watched again this time I actually laughed pretty hard.
    Fallacious inference.
    Well aren't you clever.

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