Tried With Fire

I had never heard of a beer flight or wine flight until I read Aimee Byrd's post . Apparently it is a way to sample different beverages by beginning with one that is easier on the palate and then moving on to something a bit more challenging glass by glass. Aimee's friend then suggested - Why don't we this with books? Give readers a starting point for a topic and then recommendations for further reading if they want to learn more. This sounded like a great idea to me, so I went through my shelves and compiled a book flight for logic and philosophy. Logic and philosophy??? In the past, I prided myself on avoiding philosophy like the plague in college. I had a friend in grad school with a PhD in philosophy who was now seeing the light and pursuing something practical like computer science. I did not have a high view of this subject. It was the stuff of academic ivory towers with no meaningful application whatsoever. But I was wrong. There came a point when my Christian...

Social media can be a rather rude place at times. There are moments of thoughtful give-and-take, but there are moments when the interaction consists of name calling those in the opposition. Maybe I'm becoming an old fuddy-duddy, but I'm not impressed with the latter. Rather than strengthening a person's position, it seems to weaken it, in my opinion. Any reasonable debate about an idea is lost in the rapid exchange of derogatory comments, and maybe that's the point. Maybe we've lost the whole concept of debating ideas for the sake of the truth in the desire to have the last word, even if that last word is an insult. In With Good Reason , the author gives details of several fallacies of presumption. Here's what he has to say about the fallacy of begging-the-question epithets: [T]he error lies in the use of stated language that reaffirms what we wish to prove but have not yet proved. An epithet is a descriptive word or phrase used to characterize a person,...

[F]irst comes the thing, then the idea, then the word. If our ideas are sound to the extent that they faithfully represent the thing, they will be clearly communicable only if we clothe them in words that accurately signify them . Ideas as such are not communicable from one mind to another. They have to be carefully fitted to words, so that the words might communicate them faithfully … How do we ensure that our words are adequate to the ideas they seek to convey? The process is essentially the same as the one we follow when confirming the clarity and soundness of our ideas. We must go back to the sources of the ideas . Often we cannot come up with the right word for the idea because we don't have a firm grasp on the idea itself. Usually, when we clarify the idea by checking it against its source in the objective world, the right word will come to us.   Even though this quote is about good communication in general, D.Q. McInerny's advice could well be applied to how we...