Plausible Problems

As a philosophy major, I was quite taken aback by some of the points made in Verified thus far. My primary educational world for years has revolved around assuming other’s ways of thinking, exercising them, and analyzing their logic. One practice that I have consistently included in my reading and study is the practice of thinking in terms of plausibility. Now, philosophy is all about seeking wisdom, but we philosophy have to be a bit honest with ourselves and admit that much of our time is spent exercising the ideas of philosophers we think are completely unhinged in one way or another. What I mean by this is that we often take on some philosophical system and begin exercising it. We take premises and conclusions and see how one comes from the other. We change premises to see how that affects natural conclusions. We change conclusions to see if premises still work for different outcomes.

None of this exercise really checks out whether something is true, but it does check the logic of something. Logical possibilities are things that just make sense. No, literally. Something being logical doesn’t make it true. All it means is that, assuming the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. Finding out if the premises are true is a whole other ball game of argumentation and investigation, both things that philosophers love to do. Nevertheless, the point here is that simply establishing logical validity does nothing to establish whether some is or is not true. Verified makes a large point about this because many people engage in this kind of thinking when considering information on the internet. At best, thinking this way will lead you to a myriad of possibilities where logic permits something to be true and well-reasoned without actually informing you of anything. While this thinking is very well suited to pissing off people on Reddit (because you can catch their logical fallacies), it’s only a small part of finding truth.

Verified basically tells you to find the true premises before engaging in this thinking at all. People enjoy engaging with what I like to call the “bullshit meter”. They take things that make less logical sense and toss them, and entertain what makes more logical sense (either inferential or deductive). Effectively, people like to throw out a philosophical vibe check to see what passes. When you take the SIFT method and apply it, you’re able to move past the bullshit meter and move on up to the truth meter. When you consider your context, investigate the source, find agreement in other sources, and trace the overall information back to a source, you’re able to establish a set of premises that are verifiably true, thus leading you to a conclusion that is both logical AND true! Why this point engaged me so much is that I often find myself utilizing pure logic to figure things out when I simply don’t have enough information. Now, I don’t think this thinking is bad, nor do I think the bullshit meter is worthless. However, if we are going to use it, we ought to be self-aware of the limits of this manner of consideration. When we want to find truth, we have to avoid it and utilize the methods provided in Verified.