**I usually try to avoid quibbling over terms, l but logic is an exception because of its position **
**at the foundation of intellectually rigorous discourse. **
This is the first relevant google hit for “bad logic”:
Your own citation says “an argument can have good logic, strictly speaking, even if its premises are false.”. The statement you originally argued with says pretty much the same. You’re tilting at windmills.
Nobody here is defending the Nazis. You’re imagining it.
You could include the spice - in particular, Nutmeg - trade which shared many of the same features/entities and happened in (well, and leading up to) more or less the same historical period. Differing in that people did get hurt.
I’d nominate the reaction of the US government to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Rather than make reasonable changes to prevent further hijackings and hunt down the handful of religious extremists responsible the “most powerful” nation on Earth spent trillions of dollars and underwent a societal change betraying national ideals combating some religious fanatics living in caves.
One could make a case for much of the economic thinking behind the 20th/21st century. All the more insane as we don’t actually seem to have learned anything at all (though some schools of thought suggest there is nothing meaningful we* can* learn)
But that is by the by. Just wanted to chip in on the logic of the holocaust.
If you want to unpick the reasoning a little further then you could do worse than read up on the “Wannsee Conference” or watch the film “Conspiracy”. It covers a lot of relevant ground and in particular it shows the internal logic at work in the minds of the Nazi hierarchy.
It reads and plays just like any number of business meetings you may be involved in. Logistics, practicalities, costs, technology, resources etc. etc. And it is all the more horrific for it. Truly evidence for “The banality of evil”
So, as others have pointed out, the validity of an argument rests solely on the validity of the inference performed; the immediate truth-value of eventual premises is a non-factor. Should you not be satisfied with Wikipedia, I would suggest you read “An Introduction to Formal Logic” by Peter Smith, or any other introduction to the subject matter, which will state the exact same thing.
And to reiterate the point others have been making: no-one is defending the Holocaust or its premises - they are unilaterally seen as genocidal, and by extension, insane. People are simply pointing out that the suggested argument for it is formally logically valid, not sound, by virtue of its form. This is a simple, indisputable fact, and contesting it is an inexcusable exercise in ignorance not welcome to these boards.
You’re OK with the hunting down religious extremists, but you think fighting the religious fanatics was a mistake? How do you work that one out? (And oh yes… caves.)
Do these have to be Deadly and Short-Lived? Because I think I’d vote for the Dutch Tulip-Mania of 1637, myself (as recounted in McKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds).
If you need sudden and deadly, the Nika Riots in Byzantium in 532, started because of disagreement over the results of a freakin’ chariot race hasd anything beat for sheer waste and stupidity. You can’t even argue about any possible benefits to anyone. And it was far, far worse than any modern sports riot, with a reported 30,000 dead
Mostly with machetes. it was hand work. Women with babies strapped to their back were running from OTHER women with babies strapped to their backs wielding machetes. In this day and age. Has to be a top candidate.
My own citation says that logic may be “good” but not “sound”, and “sound”
is the term for logic of quality. “Sound” is also the term I employed from the
beginning of this discussion.
I would have used some other term than “good” because “good” may convey
to careless readers like you the sense that an argument is sound when it is not.
I did not feel like googling for another cite using a more suitable term to make
the same point.
Numerous people have defended Nazi crtitical thinking by defending Nazi logic.
I suppose they consider themselves objective realists, or some such thing.
A word that occurs to me to describe them is “sophomoric”.
colonial, it’s time for you to drop this hijack. I don’t think you understand what you are arguing against here, and your description of other posters is not appropriate for Great Debates. Start a new thread if you want to discuss this further.
A myth it is not. It’s arguably exaggerated in how widespread it was, but it certainly did occur, with ludicrous prices charged. See the wiki page I linked to.
Yes, but that’s part of it - Hitler notoriously went through the Great War as a runner, even got himself a couple gongs for bravery IIRC. And yet he still thought another go at it was a great idea for Germany.
But even if he was something of a nut, he didn’t rise to the leadership of Germany by sheer triumph of the will, pardon the pun - he had the active support of quite a few people like him, and the tacit apathy of even more. All the while preaching war, revenge and so forth.
That’s what I really don’t get. It’s not so much “what was europe to do about Hitler”, but “how did Hitler happen in the first place ?”
"If a deductive argument is valid AND has all true premises, the argument is said to beSOUND."
Affirming my correct use of the term “sound”
And from your cite:
All fire-breathing rabbits live on Mars
All humans are fire-breathing rabbits
Therefore all humans live on Mars
The problem with the argument is that it is NOT SOUND. In order for a deductive argument to be sound, the deduction must be valid and all the premises true.
So you see, your cite says exactly the same thing as mine.
I did in post #20 misuse the word “valid” when I applied it to premises.
I should have used the word “true”. Citation corrected the error. However,
my overall point was correct: as a matter of critical thinking the Holocaust
contains no SOUND logic.
That is not true it the case of the member, MOIDALIZE, who I chose to engage.
Here is his post #21
Which unambiguously approves of three premises for genocide. He is obviously
using “valid” to mean “true”. In fact the first and third premises are false when
applied to the Holocaust, and the deductions made from the second premise are invalid.
If ignorance was inexcusable here then you would have been gone long ago.
The answer to this is probably the answer to a lot of nominations in the thread, including Rwanda and my own which is that it probably wasn’t so insane to those involved. Just because someone’s motivations aren’t 100% rational from an objective point of view doesn’t make them insane.
