Ah yes, the old 'Advantageous Real Estate fallacy'. :)
The best defence against fallacious thinking is that sensible ways of
thinking are often technically fallacious.
For instance, David Hume pointed out that just because the Sun has
risen every day in the history of the Earth, you could not argue with
certainty that it will rise tomorrow.
This 'Probability Fallacy' would have us accept that just because
every business venture that Harry has started has gone belly up,
there is no reason for us to refuse to invest in his next one. Yeah,
sure!
Of course, you could accuse said professor of the 'Fallacy fallacy' -
the assumption that because the argument is flawed, the conclusion
necessarily must be wrong.
Many old and new high schools here named or renamed themselves after
the street they were in or anything else that sounded nice and
designated themselves as 'colleges' - this to compete with the
private schools which had always done that. Consequently no-one knows
where the hell they art. ("Box Forest College? Where the hell is
that? You're joking, there hasn't been a Box tree left standing
around there in fifty years!")
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 29/12/2007, at 10:32 AM, Bob Whitmire wrote:
> Somewhere I have a letter to the editor written by a community
> college journalism class. More Latin than English, as I recall. The
> professor, who loathed me and everything I wrote, did most of the
> creative work, I'm sure. I was accused of most, if not all, known
> fallacies. I believe they were listed in alphabetical order. <g> It
> seems he was driven by an editorial I wrote taking the education
> system to task. The basis of the piece was a new crest recently
> unveiled by the college, in which it named itself, and included its
> geographic location. The problem was this: The college did not exist
> that the location where it placed itself, a tony, very upscale area
> of the county. Rather, it existed in another area, mostly populated
> by apple orchards and trailer parks. I recall musing as to how it was
> that we should expect our students to do well in geography when our
> community college didn't know where it was--or worse, knew where it
> was and decided to be somewhere else without actually moving. (The
> president of the college didn't like the editorial either. Apparently
> he didn't think community college administrations should be the butt
> of newspaper humor. I disagreed. There was no peace in the Kingdom.)
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