Class Notes Summary: Friday, January 21st

On Friday January 21st, we did a quick overview on what we covered on Wednesday. During this quick review of different studies of Philosophy and Ethics, Dr. Layne transitioned to talking about arguments and their fallacies by discussing truth. One student commented on how there were two kinds of truth, capital “T” truth and lower case “t” truth. Capital “T” means nothing exists or is relevant to each individual where lowercase “t” means living to the truths society sets for us. I actually understand what this means because people do act differently in public then in private. Someone might be an ass to everyone they meet, but in private they might show their true feelings of sorrow and instead of overcoming they lash out to everyone. After this, Dr. Layne and Chris had a mini-debate about Skepticism, Nihilism, and Probalism until she had to move on.
We moved on to argument. Dr. Layne told us argument is not abuse, contradiction, or stating of beliefs and preferences. To have a valid argument, both sides needed to have evidence to support them. An argument is not nearly having a statement and going back forth with “is, isn’t, is, isn’t . . .” so on and so forth. Argument is the value of philosophy that uses reason and logic. Formal argument is when I got a bit lost with the word syllogism until Dr. Layne gave us two premises and then a conclusion. Syllogism was clear to me to mean, after I looked it up as well, a series of sentences that connected in some way to show how the argument process of reasoning intends to establish truth on the basis of true premises. Arguments are not all valid. To be valid, an argument must follow premises or it is invalid. After discussing premises and conclusions, we talked about two kinds of argument- Sophistic (argue both sides) and Socratic (analyze validity of premises). Before the end of class we quickly analyzed and discussed various premises and conclusions to see if they were valid or invalid. Even if premises make a conclusion valid, that does not necessarily make the argument valid. If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal, but if all cats are green and all green things have claws making cats have claws, then that is not necessarily true.