« Just Try to Prove the Earth is Round | Main | Third Age, Positive Carnivals »
November 10, 2005
Confused Americans for Truth - Mary Mapes and the Twisted Syllogism
Mary Mapes is back. For those of you who don't remember, Mapes was the producer who handled the infamous memos proving George W. Bush had lied about his National Guard service.
Mapes is pushing a new book that tells her side of the story.
Mapes insists that the accusations against Bush were true, and therefore it's up to her critics to definitively prove the memos were fakes. Some of you may have difficulty following this argument, so in my capacity as a superior life form I've decided to analyze it logically.
Here is an example of the most basic Aristotelian syllogism, Barbara.
|
P1. All men are mammals. P2. Socrates is a man. |
| C3. Socrates is a mammal. |
There are two premises, and from that we infer a conclusion. Most conservatives feel, however, that the syllogism used by CBS News had different characteristics, even though it was in the same format..
|
P1. All birds have feathers. P2. Socrates is a bird. |
| C3. Socrates has feathers. |
The criticism leveled at CBS news was that since Socrates abviously wasn't a bird, you can't conclude he had feathers. Taken from this viewpoint, Mary Mapes is essentially saying no one has definitively proven Socrates was not a bird. It is true that most contemporary writers believed Socrates was a man, but it is possible that Greek philosophers had a combination of bird-like and man-like traits. Consider that there was a lot of trade going on between Egypt and Greece, and some people believe the ancient Egyptians may have had wings. None of the paintings or sculptures of the time show men with feathers, but it may have been artistic doctrine to draw men as featherless to accentuate our difference from other species, a difference that in fact the doctrine of evolution has since shown to be baseless.
By attacking the problem from this viewpoint, I believe the conservative blogosphere is deluding itself into believing we can bury Ms. Mapes under an avalanche of reason. That analysis is incorrect. The real syllogism used by Mapes (which I call Dan) was the following.
|
P1. Conservatvies think Socrates did not have feathers. P2. Conservatives are stupid. |
| C3. Socrates has feathers. |
As you can see, the fact that Socrates is a bird is simply a piece of confirming evidence, so it really doesn't matter that the proof of Socrates' avian nature was manufactured by a disgruntled guy with a fax machine.
The truth is, in order to shatter Mary's illusions, you have to prove to her that conservatives aren't stupid, and if she didn't learn that from the incident that destroyed her career, I'm pretty sure she's not going to learn it now.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Thu 11:49 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Confused Americans for Truth
Trackback Pings
» Roll the dice from NIF
Today's dose of NIF - News, Interesting & Funny ... It's Stop the ACLU Thursday (+ Open Trackbacks) [Read More]
Tracked on November 10, 2005 7:37 PM
» Moron #9 Revealed from The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns
That one sucked didn't it. It was way too obvious since so many people clearly knew who it was, and I could tell just by looking too that it would be easy, but had to do it regardless. Either that,... [Read More]
Tracked on November 18, 2005 2:21 AM
Comments
| HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it. |
