An Introduction to Logic and Logical Fallacies

 I intend to do some work picking this to pieces. This is a talk I gave to Greater Manchester Humanists on 10th March 2019 on logic and logical fallacies. it was my first public talk, and I made a lot of mistakes, some through unpreparedness, and some through not listening carefully enough or, as I've discussed often hereabouts, passively listening.

I'm trawling my previous works looking for things I've said or written that I've changed my mind on (there are very, very many). I realised that I never published this here, and thought regulars might find interesting. It's ground I've covered at great length hereabouts, but distilled into a specific context.

Watching this back for the first time, I realise that, although I'm reasonably pleased with it (presentational caveats aside), there are some critical points where I missed some context, or otherwise misunderstood a question, and skipped or waffled, rather than simply assuming I'd made a mistake and asking to reframe. This is a fundamental barrier to knowledge that takes real effort to escape.

The real point here is that I'm human, and fallible. As much grasp as I may think I may have in any area, I'm probably wrong. I make mistakes all the time in all sorts of ways.

That said, this talk covers the core of what this blog is about. It's about, as James O'Brien put it in the title of his book 'how to be right in a world gone wrong'. More accurately, it's about how not to be wrong, or how to mitigate wrongness by seeing thought clearly.

Anyhoo, enough from me, here's me:

Hope it was fun.