Ramón V. León

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. 

Catechism of the Catholic Church

Seminar Description

 

Assessing facts and being able to arrive at correct conclusions from them is surprisingly rare, though most everybody thinks they do. To learn to do this consistently one needs to learn about fallacies, cognitive biases and propaganda. A fallacy is a plausible reasoning that fails to satisfy the conditions of a valid argument. A cognitive bias is a person's tendency to make errors in judgment based on cognitive factors. Cognitive biases induce one to commit fallacies and make one unaware that one is doing so. Propaganda is an appeal to emotions used to lead one to commit fallacies as a means of convincing one of something desired by the propagandist. Thus, cognitive biases, coming from within ourselves, and propaganda, coming from outside ourselves, both induce one to commit fallacies and thus to invalid reasoning. This seminar discusses these topics.

 

Topics

 

·         Respecting data: not being a loudmouth with an opinion

·         Statistical fallacies

·        Reasoning about uncertainty and risk

·        Logical fallacies

·        Cognitive biases or distortions

·         Judgmental heuristics and the wisdom of the unconscious

·         Behavioral economics: Kahneman and Tversky

·         Propaganda techniques

·         Myth of the rational voter

·         Rational ignorance and its antidotes

·         Neuroscience: framing and its new conception of reasoning

·         Ideology and its distortion of ethics, reason and facts

·         Cognitive dissonance

·         Characteristics of the ideologue

·         Rhetorical versus heresthetic persuasion and talk radio

·         Pragmatism guided by empathy, ethics, reason and data

·         Thinking about ethical dilemmas

·         Ideological versus pragmatist frames for taxation

·         Ideological versus pragmatist frames for health care

·         How science works: philosophy, methods and sociology

·         Common sense and data are not enough. One also needs scientific theory. Or how could the great depression have been shortened?

·         Determining what authors, articles, books and scientific papers one should trust