If A=B, and C=A; then C=B. But not always.
Faulty Symbolic Logic.At right is the headline portion of an ad for New York's The New School—not exactly a paradigm of stellar higher education—placed in this week's The L magazine. Get it? The New School is SMART. The school does in fact have a philosophy department. School President Bob Kerrey should make proving this headline a mandatory senior thesis.
update: I must also add that, logically, a City can't be "smart."
previously in bad headlines:
1. What's Italian for TWAT?
2. BLOW OFF AN ENERGY HOG.
3. LIFE=ACTIVATING DESTINY.
4. O' STUPID BILLBOARD, O' STUPID BILLBOARD...
5. EXPLOSION—the one word you don't want to read at an airport.
posted by copyranter @ 2:05 PM
10 Comments:
hey CR, you've posted some decent rants this week, but the quantity and quality of comments posted seems really low. Do you think your audience (probably as fickle as any other audience) was alienated by your sudden departure on vacation a couple of weeks ago (with a somewhat emphasized "fuck you douchebags" fanfare)?
I'm thinking you may need to pull out all the stops and post something that is so over the top, that the multitudes will come out of whatever butt cracks and crevices they live in and start posting again?
That's not a syllogism. It's an incomplete enthymeme, which is a rhetorical device that does not aspire to validity. Perfectly fine.
anon #1: my readership has doubled this year; people don't want to comment, it's their problem.
anon #2: thank you.
CR, sorry man without the interaction via posted comments, your blog is losing its sizzle. I guess I'm just trying to entice you into letting loose a rant that's so provocative - so vile - that you’ll spark everyone up.
Oh hell, maybe everyone is just on vacation and / or I'm simply bored.
Hey - I commented plenty! Just look at all these anon posts!
I like the third, not shown option of "New York is the new School," i.e., living/paying your rent/getting by in a major city is an education in itself, analgous (probably superior)to going to school.
But that would be an ad for, I guess, New York, and not whatever the hell the New School is.
Is said school a scientology owned organization?
New York is (arguably) smart.
The New School is (located in) New York
NYU and Columbia are also located in New York and are much better schools...(from what I understand, NYU's philosphy department has been rated number one)
Granted New School University technically includes Parson's School of Design and Mannes College of Music, but in my experience students from these institutions (which are considered top notch in their respective fields) tend to lament this fact, especially when they get grouped with true New Schoolers on Facebook.
I'm smaht! Can't nobody say I'm not smaht, see!
And anonymous 2: you can put your rhetorical device right here!!!
Logic lesson for copyranter:
The "is's " in this ad are not the is's of identity, so the formalization that copyranter uses is all fucked up (it is pretty uncharitable to read 'NY is smart' as 'NY is the very same thing as smart,' as you do when you translate it to A=B).
The first "is" is predication, the second "is" is mereological... and nothing really interesting follows from those two premises.
It is the fallacy of composition to infer that a property that belongs to a whole, also belongs to all of its parts, as one would if one concluded that the New School is smart because it is a part of something that is itself smart.
Perhaps they are making this informal fallacy in the ad, but that is not an objection to the transitivity of identity.
thank you, matthew. I will never again post a truth statement/tree/thingie ever again.
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