THE STRANGE WORLD OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF CLEAR, CRITICAL, AND ANALYTICAL THINKING
'Tis strange-but true,
for truth is always stranger than fiction.
Lord Byron
There is nothing so powerful as truth,
and often nothing so strange.
WELCOME to the strange world of clear, critical, and analytical thinking.
Strange? Yes! It is strange because it entails thinking about our life-time beliefs so many of which we feel, with certainty, to be true but which upon applying analytical thought are shown to be either false, half true, or unable to be verified or falsified.
Strange, particularly because it entails thought about:
our use, misuse, and abuse of language that leads us to accept false beliefs as true,
how accepted ideas are promulgated and passed on to new generations of people,
why these ideas are accepted without question,
the many conflicting claims and concepts of God, gods, religion, and the theistic language that
cause us to believe what cannot be verified,
the uses of confusing language that leads us to accept imagination as reality,
the uses of words, names like "point," "number," and mathematical constructs like triangles, squares, etc., that lead us to believe they refer to something real,
failing to distinguish between reality and our experiences of it,
what we have,
as with "Pavlov's dog," been conditioned to believe,
whether we can ever know what reality is,
how much we should trust our sense faculties,
how much we should trust our "knowledge,"
how much we should trust authorities,
how much we should trust our language.
It is a strange world, also, because even when
an inkling of clear, critical, and analytical thinking is applied, it entails processes of thought that the average person not only does not use but is incapable of using or even imagining.
He has not been subjected, in our institutions of learning, to the rigors of analytic thought.
This is so because it is to the advantage of those who hold the reins of government and power to be able to use language as a regulatory device.
Updated January 19. 2008
WHAT
OUR TEACHERS DID NOT, COULD NOT, WOULD NOT, OR WERE NOT ALLOWED TO TEACH
US.
If one
is serious about becoming a critical and analytical thinker, these are important
matters to be thoroughly understood, about “language” before clarity in
intelligent argumentation can occur.
BEWARE OF THE DANGERS INHERENT IN THE USES AND ABUSES OF “LANGUAGE”
Consider:
With a spin on Socrates' admonition: "The unexamined life is not worth
living," the unexamined symbol is not worth using.
No symbols of any kind, especially those we call words, have inherent meanings,
whatever is the evolutionary stage or mode of usage and change of conventional
usage.
The source of all human meaning is the human brain.
Nothing in the universe outside the brain has an inherent human meaning.
Language is the ATTRIBUTION of meaning, not MEANING.
All the so-called "meanings" of symbols, words, for instance, are no
more than a conventional way of attempts at communicating, leading us to forget
that each of us is instructed for most of our lives, as to what meanings are to
be assigned to symbols according to the stage of evolutionary changes taking
place in the uses, and mostly abuses, of them.
All the meanings we attribute to them are the meanings our parents, teachers,
friends, priest, etc., have told is to give to the symbols we call
“language,” -- unless we personally conceive meanings ourselves. Hence
the problems of the world!
Rarely does a teacher, if ever, inform students about the role of conventional
language as a source of beliefs.
If the above is fully understood, an electrifying awakening should occur as to
why beliefs are so readily accepted without benefit of offered supportable
evidence – true, false, or
neither preventing becoming victims of unverifiable and unfalsifiable claims.
To understand the above is to understand that all
“language,” i.e., meaning, is about what is occurring inside our brains,
whether one is a scientist, a pope, a priest, a teacher, a parent, etc., and
relates to nothing more than our perceptions, conceptions, and experiences of
what we, rightly, assume is a physical world beyond them. Where truth and knowledge claims are concerned, only verified
predictable perceptions justify our acceptance of them.
People with untrained minds should no
more
expect to think clearly and logically than
people who have never learnt and never
practised can expect to find themselves good
carpenters, golfers, bridge-players, or pianists.
A. E. Mander
SEE FILE 21: PERENNIAL QUESTIONS
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