C
Charlemagne_II
Guest
Doc Keele
Agreed, argument ad numerum is a logical fallacy. But that’s what common sense means, what the majority of people feel is right. So you realise now you can’t appeal to commonsense!
Argument ad numerum is not necessarily a fallacy. If you tell a child that everyone in the world knows that what goes up must come down, you have presented the child with a good reason to believe it to be so. In the field of science, peer evaluation is an important element of establishing the believability of a proposition. Without peer evaluation the scientist is left hanging and twisting in the wind. So the “common sense” of a proposition is established, because the “common sense” finds the proposition eminently reasonable.
However, when I use the term “common sense,” I’m not using it in that context. I’m using it in the sense that a thing is evidently true, and everybody should be able to see it as true (unless they have been fooled into thinking it is not true). The “fooling” has indeed been accomplished by the media, by academia, by the leftist propaganda machine, by the feminists, by the hedonists, by the abortionists, by everyone who has a stake in the matter or has been so fully conditioned by all of the above that he cannot see the truth because he is wearing the blinders that prevent common sense.
In that sense I think Lincoln meant that sooner or later the common mass of humanity at some point cannot be fooled all of the time. That is when common sense returns and the blinders will fall away.
And that takes time, effort, hope, and courage for those who believe in common sense:
We do not kill our children.
Agreed, argument ad numerum is a logical fallacy. But that’s what common sense means, what the majority of people feel is right. So you realise now you can’t appeal to commonsense!
Argument ad numerum is not necessarily a fallacy. If you tell a child that everyone in the world knows that what goes up must come down, you have presented the child with a good reason to believe it to be so. In the field of science, peer evaluation is an important element of establishing the believability of a proposition. Without peer evaluation the scientist is left hanging and twisting in the wind. So the “common sense” of a proposition is established, because the “common sense” finds the proposition eminently reasonable.
However, when I use the term “common sense,” I’m not using it in that context. I’m using it in the sense that a thing is evidently true, and everybody should be able to see it as true (unless they have been fooled into thinking it is not true). The “fooling” has indeed been accomplished by the media, by academia, by the leftist propaganda machine, by the feminists, by the hedonists, by the abortionists, by everyone who has a stake in the matter or has been so fully conditioned by all of the above that he cannot see the truth because he is wearing the blinders that prevent common sense.
In that sense I think Lincoln meant that sooner or later the common mass of humanity at some point cannot be fooled all of the time. That is when common sense returns and the blinders will fall away.
And that takes time, effort, hope, and courage for those who believe in common sense:
We do not kill our children.