I don't believe in skeptics, page 3

Date: 8 Apr 1998 01:19:29 GMT
From: DOwens6683
Newsgroups: alt.paranormal
Subject: Stupid Skeptic Tricks

Ever get into an argument with a skeptic only to end up
exasperated and feeling you've been bamboozled? Skeptics are
often highly skilled at tying up opponents in clever verbal
knots. Most skeptics are, of course, ordinary, more-or-less
honest people who, like the rest of us, are just trying to make
the best sense they can of a complicated and often confusing
world. Others, however, are merely glib sophists who use
specious reasoning to defend their prejudices or attack the ideas
and beliefs of others, and even an honest skeptic can innocently
fall into the mistake of employing bad reasoning.

In reading, listening to and sometimes debating skeptics over the
years, I've found certain tricks, ploys and gimmicks which they
tend to use over and over again. Here are some of 'em. Perhaps
if you keep them in mind when arguing with a skeptic, you'll feel
better when the debate is over. Shucks, you might even score a
point or two.

www.discord.org...

************************************************************************
SYMPTOMS OF PATHOLOGICAL SKEPTICISM (c)1996 William J. Beaty
************************************************************************
THIS PAGE: amasci.com...
MAIN PAGE: amasci.com...

Many members of the mainstream scientific community react with extreme
hostility when presented with certain claims. This can be seen in their
emotional responses to current controversies such as UFO abductions, Cold
Fusion, cryptozoology, psi, and numerous others. The scientists react
not with pragmatism and a wish to get to the bottom of things, but
instea with the same tactics religious groups use to suppress heretics:
hostile emotional attacks, circular reasoning, dehumanizing of the
'enemy', extreme closed-mindedness, intellectually dishonest reasoning,
underhanded debating tactics, negative gossip, and all manner of
name-calling and character assassination.

Two can play at that game! Therefore, I call their behavior
"Pathological Skepticism," a term I base upon skeptics' assertion that
various unacceptable ideas are "Pathological Science." Below is a list
of the symptoms of pathological skepticism I have encountered, and
examples of the irrational reasoning they tend to produce.

amasci.com...

The One-Sidedness Fallacy
Peter Suber, Philosophy Department, Earlham College

This is one of the most common and most misleading fallacies. It really ought to have a name. Some writers call it special pleading, but most writers use that term for a slightly different fallacy. Some call it confirmation bias, which is an accurate but little-used term. I like "one-sidedness fallacy" because we are accustomed to calling arguments "one-sided" if they suffer from the limitations we'll describe here.

The fallacy consists of giving reasons for your thesis without considering reasons against it, or giving reasons against an opposing view without considering reasons for it.

It's easy to say something for virtually any thesis, or to say something against it. So to hear something for or against a thesis doesn't take us very far. To be in a good position to decide the truth of a thesis, we'd like to hear (1) the best that can be said (2) on each side. We'll worry about "the best" elsewhere. This hand-out is about reaching two-sidedness.

Note that there may be far more than two sides to a complex issue. So the true alternative to one-sidedness is many-sidedness. But I will refer to the alternative as "two-sidedness" for convenience.
The one-sidedness fallacy does not make an argument invalid. It may not even make the argument unsound. The fallacy consists in persuading readers, and perhaps ourselves, that we have said enough to tilt the scale of evidence and therefore enough to justify a judgment. If we have been one-sided, though, then we haven't yet said enough to justify a judgment. The arguments on the other side may be stronger than our own. We won't know until we examine them.

So the one-sidedness fallacy doesn't mean that your premises are false or irrelevant, only that they are incomplete. You may have appealed only to relevant considerations, but you haven't yet appealed to all relevant considerations.

www.earlham.edu...

THEY LAUGHED AT GALILEO:
Three common examples of Straw Man arguments
widely used by skeptics - W.Beaty 1997

www.amasci.com...

Debunking Common Skeptical Arguments Against
Paranormal and Psychic Phenomena
Revised October 7, 2001

By Winston Wu