Philosophy 1200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 45: Dennis Amiss, The Main Point, Douglas Lenat
6 Aug 2020
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Document Summary
We have been focusing on how to determine the relevance and the adequacy of premises for different types of reasoning. Reasoning, however, is only as good as what goes into it. If an argument has false premises, it cannot be sound, no matter how good the reasoning is. In this unit we consider result from psychology about how we form beliefs in order to understand how reasonable people, ourselves included, can come to have false beliefs. When thinking critically we have to keep these in mind as a check against our own beliefs. No one is immune to these factors; it is a fact of our psychology as humans that they influence us. There are many factors that lead us to have false or questionable beliefs. These can be grouped into perceptual, cognitive, and social determinants, corresponding to the main ways we come to believe things, namely through experience, by thinking, and from communication with other people.
