From an episode of South Park (season 2, episode 14 “Chef Aid”), the Chewbacca defense is a funny example of a non sequitur reasoning fallacy in which someone employs an argument whose conclusion does not logically follow from its reasons. In particular, this is a red herring fallacy. Check out the link below. There is an ad first and there is some foul language but a funny clip.
An essay that summarizes the ideas in the book Descartes’ Error discussing the relationship between emotion and reason in human decision making.
“Since Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—”one of the world’s leading neurologists” (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.” -Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X
There is an age old debate about the roles of emotion and reason in our decision making. Are decision made free from emotion better? Are they possible? The conventional views have been to try to disregard emotion when making decisions but there is interesting research that disputes these ideas. Below are some interesting articles discussing these issues.
http://intentionalworkplace.com/2012/03/15/how-emotion-shapes-decision-making/
See a contrasting view by checking out Plato’s allegory of the chariot.
https://toktopics.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/how-do-we-decide-reason-vs-emotion/
This is one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time. A work of tremendous scope and implications. Kahneman is a genius in the field of economics and psychology.
From the amazon description of the book:
“Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.”
“In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within.
Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?”
-Amazon Review
One of the most famous and controversial political ads in American history, LBJ’s “Daisy Ad” was a great example of an appeal to emotion argument. Rather than present a reasoned argument or discuss facts, the ad takes one of the scariest prospects of the time, or any time, nuclear war, and tries to capitalize on people’s emotions by saying that a vote for the other guy would lead to nuclear war. The ad was only aired once but had a huge impact.
In 2011, the state of Illinois increased its state income tax rate from 3% to 5%. One could communicate this by saying that people will be paying 2% more of their incomes to state taxes which doesn’t sound all that bad since Illinois increased its rate rate 2%. Or you could say that Illinois increased its state income tax by 66% which sounds catastrophic and is also correct because you’re changing what the number actually is referring to. Increasing from 3 to 5 is an increase of 66% (or 66.6% to be more accurate with a bar over the last 6 but I don’t know how to do that on a keyboard). People would react to the news differently depending on how you communicate even though both could be considered correct.
Here are two different sites reporting the story. Notice how the choice of language and numbers changes the feel of each story even though they are both reporting the same news.
http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2011/01/illinois_legislators_increase.html
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/12/ill-lawmakers-pass-percent-income-tax-increase/
Here is a link to a great website that compiles a bunch of different Bible translations. What’s fascinating is to compare the same verse from the different translations and interpretations to see varied the texts can be. How important is language when it comes to communicating ideas particularly with something as important as religion?
Here is a link to a famous passage from the Bible, John 3:16
http://www.biblestudytools.com/john/3-16-compare.html
Depending on which translation you chose to read, you would come away with very different ideas about what God expects of people.
Here’s a link to the main site.
http://www.biblestudytools.com/compare-translations/
All of this raises interesting questions about what the job of translators and interpreters is. Are they supposed to translate literal words? Are they supposed to communicate meaning even if some words have to change? How are you supposed to know the choices they made are accurate or true?
Here is a handout I made on this topic
Here are a few sites that document words that exist in other languages but not in English.
What does it mean that these words don’t exist in English? Do these words tell us something about the cultures they come from? About us? Is it generally random chance that cultures invent words for some concepts but not for others? If a word can’t directly be translated, does it mean that the concept cannot truly be known to nonnative speakers of those languages?
http://www.babbel.com/magazine/untranslatable-01
http://mentalfloss.com/article/50698/38-wonderful-foreign-words-we-could-use-english
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