Carl Sagan’ speech “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection” bears a strong resemblance to Anne Causey’s “Is Hunting Ethical?” Both authors chose to invoke their audience’s emotional strings by first relaying a personal story before continuing on. While Causey delves into whether or not it is morally right to allow hunting for sport. Sagan choses to question our ability to detect the truth. Sagan said “more than a third of American adults believe that on some level they’ve made contact with the dead” (151). This figure is not hard to believe when one thinks about our need to believe in something greater than ourselves. People believe in superstitions and horoscopes because they want to believe in that something that is greater than themselves is
responsible for their actions.
Along with the belief in a Higher Power comes the belief in the continued existence of the soul after physical death. Many Root-Workers start out working with spirits of the dead in the form of the Ancestors, the spirits of the dead connected to them by blood. It is believed that the dead don’t die, but rather ascend to another level of being, from which they can look on and assist us. From this higher level, the Ancestors can guide us in our daily lives, intercede with the Godhead on our behalf and protect us in times of
In today’s world there are always people trying to come up with a new way to explain something. There will always be people trying to pedal a new product or story about an innovative new way to look at things. Some of these ideas will really be ground-breaking, but many of these will be false ideas. Many of them will just be honest mistakes, but just as many will be ideas from people trying to trick other people. Carl Sagan recognizes this and writes about it in his article The Fine Art of Baloney Detection. Within it he describes how he has been vulnerable himself wanting to believe things that people have told him that didn’t seem true, but was what he wanted to hear. He then goes on to talk about how people need to be skeptical about what they are told/read. He has developed a system using the scientific which he calls “Tools for Skeptical Thinking.” These are things that people can do when evaluating a situation or idea to check for “baloney.” I have picked six of these tools to explain in further detail.
According to Carl Sagan, there is baloney everywhere and we must be able to spot the truths among the lies, cons, and exaggerations if we are to protect ourselves from false information, and being conned. Sagan’s essay The Fine Art of Baloney Detection provides a set of rules to follow that can help determine baloney from truth and facts. Sagan provides nine rules to help in skeptical thinking and determining lies from truths, some being more useful than others.
The books Brave New World by Aldus Huxley and Anthem by Ayn Rand are both valuable twentieth-century contributions to literature. Both books explore the presence of natural law in man and propose a warning for what could happen when man's sense of right and wrong is taken from him. In this essay, I hope to show how these seemingly unrelated novels both expound upon a single, very profound, idea.
In the article “A change of heart about animals” author Jeremy Rifkin uses rhetorical appeals such as ethos, logos, and pathos to persuade humanity in a desperate attempt to at the very least have empathy for “our fellow creatures” on account of the numerous research done in pursuit of animal rights. Rifkin explains here that animals are more like us than we imagined, that we are not the only creatures that experience complex emotions, and that we are not the only ones who deserve empathy.
Critical thinking skills in daily life can be the difference between a good decision and a bad decision. Skeptical thinking, likewise, is an important tool that many people use in order to discern between these decisions, and to make educated choices about their lives and the things that they choose to believe. As a consumer of science, I believe that it is important for people to have a repertoire of skeptical thinking skills, or tools, in order to make decisions deriving from the barrage of information (both false and true) that we absorb on a daily basis. I’ve chosen six skepticism tools from Carl Sagan’s article, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, that I think are the most important for scientific purposes and for everyday life. These skills include discussing the matter at hand, ignoring position of power, personal detachment from the subject, a sound argument, an understanding of Occam’s Razor, and the ability to test the subject for falsities.
“ Some Close Encounters of a Mental Kind ” by Stephen Jay Gould is about the tendency for our minds to ‘lie’ to ourselves because of a certain key phrase that can cause people to believe certain events happened. This can be done by altering the types of question you want the victim to hear. It can be a certain modified questions or the way the question are presented to us that can cause our answers to be slightly false.
Johnannesen, R. L. (1990). Ethics in human communication (3rd ed.) Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Christopher McCandless, a young American who was found dead in summer of 1992 in wild land in Alaska, wrote in his diary about his moral struggle regarding killing a moose for survival. According to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Chris had to abandon most of the meat since he lacked the knowledge of how to dismantle and preserve it (166-168). Not only did he have a moral dilemma to kill a moose, but also had a deep regret that a life he had taken was wasted because of his own fault. He then started recognizing what he ate as a precious gift from the nature and called it “Holy Food” (Krakauer 168). Exploring relationships between human beings and other animals arouses many difficult questions: Which animals are humans allowed to eat and which ones are not? To which extent can humans govern other animals? For what purposes and on which principles can we kill other animals? Above all, what does it mean for humans to eat other animals? The answer may lie in its context. Since meat-eating has been included and remained in almost every food culture in the world throughout history and is more likely to increase in the future due to the mass production of meat, there is a very small chance for vegetarianism to become a mainstream food choice and it will remain that way.
Our perception of moral judgments sometimes affects the ways in which knowledge is produced. In these two areas of knowledge, the natural sciences and the arts, the ways of knowing are different as is the nature of the knowledge produced. Likewise, ethical judgments may or may not limit knowledge in these areas but in different ways. Ethical judgments may lead to questioning the means by which some scientific knowledge is produced. Significant, meaningful works of art are produced only when the artist is able to transmit an emotion to the spectator, reader or listener effectively. This is why powerful emotional reactions to a work of art sometimes produce strong and often opposing ethical judgements which can limit the artist’s opportunities to produce knowledge.
In her essay “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard reflects on an encounter she had with a weasel at a pond near her home. This encounter was brief but nevertheless important as it sparked the question “Who knows what [the weasel] thinks”? As Annie ponders this question, we are presented with a comparison between the complex life of human beings and the simple life of weasels. We can find examples of contrast throughout this essay. For instance, Annie describes the pond she visits by the “55 mph highway at one end, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other.” Annie describes the landscape further in the fifth paragraph when she says, “Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can”. This contrast between human decision making and
This week, we look at articles made by Peter Singer and Tom Regan, both of which concentrate on each living creature's sound judgment capability. Singers's debate is enclosed through an utilitarian view, while Regan's is Kantian. However exceptional, the two debate showed credible support for each living creature's sound judgment capability and affected them to falter between my emotions on the point. Shockingly, I found a couple of imperfections with each contention and in this way, my position on each living creature's good judgment capability continues as some time as of late. In "The Animal Liberation Movement," Peter Singer clears up that creatures legitimize measure up to thought of interests, which gathers that they legitimize a relative
“Our inclination to disregard the moral worth of other animals must be examined in light
Thank you for smoking is a satirical comedy about a lobbyist whose job is to promote tobacco use at a time when the disease burden secondary to smoking threatens to cripple the nation. The film presents how industries, media and the government interact to influence the consumers’ decision. While the use of rhetoric, such as fallacies and twisted truths, is evident throughout the film, it is most evident midway when the chief spokesman, Nick Naylor, assists his son with his assignment. The son, Joey Naylor, enquires why the American government is the best and in response, the father argues it is because of America’s ‘endless appeals system’ (Thank you for smoking). His response seamlessly captures the tone of the movie as much as it represents the extensive use of a combination of fallacious arguments and twisted truths. This essay attempts to analyse the use of fallacies and twisted truths to appeal to the emotion of the
Though many individuals claim they are not ethical subjectivists, their statements and conduct often prove otherwise. For instance, consider the following, relatively common conversation between two students when one is heard saying, “History is the most interesting subject.” Indeed, their statement can be rephrased to say, “I find history to be the most interesting subject.” When the second student states, “History is boring. Astronomy is truly the most interesting of subjects,” their asser...