Category: YouTube

Sometimes you need to be “educated” to be this stupid.

Two viewers of the YouTube video “Language & Reality in the Liberal Arts” informed me that correct spelling and grammar is “elitist” and “oppressive.”

My initial reaction?

Kiel;w, bnpwl opie;a ie;’’a  b’io/ioehj.

Often, as I see it, individuals take a partial truth but then stretch it out of proportion turning it into an untruth. There’s no reason why cat absolutely must have the spelling “cat.” The sign “cat” is an English convention.

As the brilliant essayist Theodore Dalrymple writes in his book Life at the Bottom, throwing away the supposed “oppressive” forms of conventional language standards, based on an egalitarian worldview, will entrap a poor family into remaining poor: “Linguistic and educational relativism helps to transform a class into a caste – a caste, almost, of Untouchables.”

It’s difficult to think of a better way to destroy someone’s social, intellectual, and economic mobility. Isn’t it ironic?

Of course, language is not a static thing. It changes! And a good writer sometimes does play fast-and-lose with the standard rules.

Shakespeare’s English is not our English.

Grammar can be better or worse in a time and place, and that surely affects the quality of someone’s speech or writing. There’s a kind of underlying logic in simply understanding the subject-predicate relationship. We can definitely write incoherently!

While there are borderline disputes in “higher” grammar or spelling, there are traditional conventions that everyone accepts – and these conventions allow you and me to talk to each other.

Let’s stick with a traditional educator like Sister Miriam Joseph. Her book The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric will prevent us from being that stupid.

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I’ve uploaded a few other YouTube videos that reference Sister Jospeh’s outstanding text:

A theme on The Amateur Logician YouTube channel deals with contrasting “objectivism” and “subjectivism.”

Roughly, the “subjective” is someone’s private individual realm of feelings and thoughts. That’s why we often claim that taste is “subjective.” I like ice cream, though you might hate it.

And, roughly, the “objective” is what is publicly true for all individuals. It is an “objective” truth that one plus one equals two. Nobody can change that truth; it is independent of my subjective thoughts and your subjective thoughts.

If humans didn’t exist, one plus one would still equal two. It’s also an objective fact that the Moon orbits the Earth. That’s true today and it was true before any human existed.

When trying to obtain truth, we should be “objective.”

We can think of having knowledge, at least as a general rule, as the merging between the “objective” and “subjective.”

Yet, in this above video, it is very briefly mentioned that we can, in some contexts, consider evidence from the subjective realm. What’s the evidence that I’m happy or sad?

For me, it is how I personally (subjectively) feel.

Someone else can, perhaps, figure out that I’m happy or sad by various signs or by trusting in me once I tell them what I feel.

But are there more areas where good evidence comes from the subjective realm? What about self-reflection on the nature of what it means to act and choose? Or what about self-evident propositions? Are some self-evident propositions true because it is “subjectively” obvious they are true (such as the Law of Contradiction)? Maybe we have innate knowledge?

Or consider spiritual experiences. If someone has one, he cannot just dismiss it. He has to ponder it. He has to consider if it truly means something or not. Maybe the experience was so strong that he thinks it provides him with evidence over the spiritual or theological realms. Could it be good evidence? Maybe, maybe not.

While I was going through the online resources for the textbook The Art of Reasoning by David Kelley and Debby Hutchins, it happened by happy coincidence that we got to work on a problem dealing with the Fallacy of Subjectivism.

You’ll see that fallacy in the above video.

I am presently in the process of releasing a video series on (basic!) propositional logic and predicate logic based on the 1964 textbook First Course in Mathematical Logic by Patrick Suppes and Shirley Hill.

It’s the easiest, simplest introduction to symbolic logic that I know of. It’s not only a mathematical textbook, it overlaps into the liberal arts with a strong focus on translating English propositions into the language of symbolic logic.

Watch YouTube Playlist!

Consider following me along.
We’ll work on logic exercises together!

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