Sharon Stewart, PsyD
INTENTIONAL ENRICHMENT COUNSELING
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Intentional Enrichment Blog

This blog is intended to provoke thought, smiles, perhaps even the occasional chuckle. It is composed of quotes, poems, articles, and pictures that I find thought-provoking, encouraging, or informative. They may or may not reflect my personal experience or, necessarily, my views. Nonetheless, I found them interesting and hope you will as well. I believe an intentional life requires awareness, introspection, compassion, and effort to exercise the freedom to choose. These are some of my navigational beacons for psychotherapy.

March 3, 2019
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​Reported on goodnewsnetwork.org on February 19, 2019:

​Hearing impairment can often serve as a social barrier for those who don’t know how to speak sign language – but in this little Massachusetts town, sign language has actually brought the community together. 2-year-old Samantha Savitz is deaf, but that doesn’t stop her from being an outgoing little toddler. Whenever Samantha is out with her parents in their town of Newton, she tries to chat up everyone she meets.

As the youngster got older, she continuously tried to befriend her neighbors – and they were all heartbroken when they were unable to respond because they did not know sign language.

​Ra
ther than giving up, the entire community started attending sign language classes so they could communicate with Samantha.

February 24, 2019

“A man receives only what he is ready to receive… We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now.” Henry David Thoreau

Here is an eloquent expression of what I see as a source of much pain - our tendency as human beings to perceive that which is consistent with what we expect to see in others, the world, and ourselves while not giving our attention to that which might suggest an alternate theory about our experience or existence. Shaping reality to confirm expectations or beliefs that are painful or shameful pales before the fear of reconfiguring what we think we know or what we predict to be true. I believe that part of the stones that form the path to making life better is exposing those beliefs and expectation to the light of day, then to draw on our courage to test them.

The reliability of logic? Ask the Sophists.

7/27/2016

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Mull on That | The wide world of logical fallacies
August 08, 2014 by 
Benjamin Sylvester

Nobody likes to argue, but when you’re wrong, you’re wrong! Of course, there are many ways to be wrong when we argue, and we call these wrongs “logical fallacies.” There are formal fallacies, where the structure of a person’s argument is wrong despite possibly having a correct conclusion, and there are informal fallacies where the argument might be wrong structurally but is more-so wrong in its assertion of content.

For example, let’s take a person handing out pamphlets about being vegetarian. Someone goes up to the vegetarian and argues (usually impolitely, I might add) that there is no possible way a vegetarian diet could be healthier than an omnivorous diet, because said person cannot imagine that it’s healthy for anybody — an appeal to common sense.
This fallacy is known as “argument from incredulity,” where no matter what the evidence, a personal disbelief causes one to think it’s not healthy in general and therefore vegetarianism is a false solution.

Or let’s say the person that came up to the vegetarian is a college quarterback who just lost the Sugar Bowl and he decides to take the pamphlet from the vegetarian, rip it up in front of him, and insult his very human existence — this is a pleasant little logical fallacy known as “argumentum ad hominem,” where the actual argument is avoided by directly attacking the traits of the argument’s opponents to disprove them.

Some arguments are presented in a way that asserts that one arguer is better than the other for miscellaneous reasons. Let’s say, for instance, a student in class argues that poverty is an unbreakable cycle of poor education, poor nutrition and low employment rates. The student points to sociological research that has shown significant evidence of these dimensions relating to each other, but another student speaks up and asserts that he’s actually been in poverty, and this student has managed to break out of the cycle. Thus, being here now suggests that “you don’t know what you’re talking about because I’ve been there.” There are a couple of logical fallacies produced from this argument. One is the “moral high ground” fallacy: the assumption that a poor upbringing gives the student more real-world experience (which it may certainly have), but that because of this upbringing the student is therefore better as a person for breaking out of the cycle.

This is a logical fallacy — it gives the impression that this student is better than the other for that reason, despite the argument being about poverty’s causes and not who is better. His argument is also fallacious because he uses the mind projection fallacy, which is when people consider the way they see the world as the way it really is. For the other student’s case, this outlook on the world may be very different but nonetheless not totally wrong.

But who could forget the wonderful appeals to emotion? These logical fallacies can be fun, in a sad and meaningless way. For example, a fundamentalist Christian might project his voice on a speaker outside on 33rd and Market streets, near Mario the Magnificent. Let’s say that this speaker exclaims that all homosexuals will go to Hell, because it is a sin and God will punish them.

Despite all religious nonsense in general, this fundamentalist tries to use the appeal to fear; any good God-fearing American might be afraid to go to Hell for their actions. Rather than using valid reasons to decry homosexuality, the speaker argues by trying to instill fear. He might also use an appeal to nature, where he’ll say homosexuality is not natural, since it does not allow procreation. Any appeal to emotion or nature is usually a flawed argument that really doesn’t have solid ground to stand on, so watch out for these nasty ones!

​There are many, many more logical fallacies, and they have fun Latin names like “reductio ad Hitlerum” (take a wild guess as to what that means), “argumentum ad populum” and “ad baculum,” and “post hoc ergo propter hoc!” Each fallacy is better than the next, so read up on all of them, and make sure your next philosophical argument is logical and infallible! Everybody’s doing it!

Benjamin Sylvester is the president of the Drexel Animal Welfare Group. He can be contacted at op-ed@thetriangle.org.
“Mull On That” publishes biweekly.

Original source: Triangle.org
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