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acceptability
acceptability

Acceptability of premises requires them to be logically sound. They might be relevant, and therefore we can't dismiss them as off-topic, but there could still be something wrong with accepting them.

One example is that they may be meaningless. For example, they could be vague, like "you should always take appropriate action". Meaningless.

Another example is that there may be something seriously wrong with the logic. Two types come to mind: false dichotomies (my favourite family of these is "there are two kinds of people..."), or sweeping generalizations, such as "all [category of people] are [description]". An example would be "all blacks are lazy" or "all Scots are cheap". We can reject these because they don't really hold, since there are always exceptions.



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|r 2009.09.12@07:25 | GTK
url: http://www.bcskeptics.info/resources/criticalthinking/ppf.html [Δ]