LOGIC

The FALLACY OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE - presented to The Villages Philosophy Club by Ira Glickstein, 30 May 2014

This is a "neat" rhetorical trick to entice an unsuspecting audience to take an extreme action by presenting only two extreme alternatives and excluding all the moderate choices in-between.

This presentation starts with "Pascal's Wager" in which Blaise Pascal, the famous seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist (1623–1662) "proves" that it is a better bet to choose to believe in God than not to do so, which appears to many people to be a good logical argument. However, it does not stand up to close examination. For example, WHICH GOD should we believe in? The KIND, LOVING GOD of many main-stream religions, or the STRICT, VENAL GOD of, for example, the Spanish Inquisition or the Islamic Jihad? Well, if you follow the technique shown in the PowerPoint Show, it turns out that the "best bet" is to believe in the STRICT, VENAL GOD!

This FALLACY has been used by the (in)famous "One Guy With a Marker ..." to "prove" that it is a good bet for us to take maximum action to prevent catastrophic Global Warming, even if this leads to a Global Depression!

Download the PowerPoint Show that should run on any IBM-compatible PC here:

Click to download: https://sites.google.com/site/irabestpps/research/2014%20Philo%20Excluded%20Middle.pps?attredirects=0&d=1