Lists

Christopher Matthew Cavanaugh

Published October 30th 2019

This page contains lists that I consider important, for a variety of reasons.

Each relates to moral philosophy in a number of ways.

Initially there will only be a few lists here, but later this page may be among the most lengthy and useful.

It will be updated very frequently.

Terms and Conditions. Exclusively written, edited (when that happens), and maintained by Christopher Matthew Cavanaugh. All Rights Reserved.

Wednesday, October 30th, 2019

Edited Wednesday, October 31st, 2019

Edited Saturday, November 16th, 2019

Words likely to falsify sentences.

The first and primary objective of a teacher of logic is to rid the world of obvious falsities, in order to move forward to find truths.

People are stuck forever in obvious falsities that they can easily be freed from.

Instantly nearly.

Well, they can see the extent of the issue nearly instantly.

There is a life-long process of trying to fully rid oneself from superstitions and errors.

But the most obvious errors can be cancelled from your life very quickly.

I can’t pretend to have practiced myself out of this issue completely, but I am continually improving. The best improvement I ever made was to stop paying any attention to the superstitions and falsities that plague humanity.

The goal of the list below is to help others see what may be rejected without much thought or effort. More importantly, you can reject these ideas and never give any credit to them ever again as potentially true concepts.

I can’t list everything I want to include here. The best I can do is add items as they come to mind. If you know others that can be added to this list, simply reject them instantly yourself and add to your own mental-list.

Some readers may disagree with some items listed below. Don’t forget that the key point in the lists below is to confidently exclude things from consideration that are almost certainly going to lead you to falsity.

If you have solid grounds for retaining some of the items below (very few), then you can do that and still benefit from the lists.

However, I would suggest you adopt all of the items in each list as terms that would lead you to falsity.

Take a look at the diagram below I wrote on my whiteboard (I highly recommend having a whiteboard to sort things out). This might give some additional clarification of what it is I’m trying to achieve with this basic list.

Words and Phrases Likely to Falsify Sentences

Falsification due to inconclusiveness

[Aside: “The ThoughtStream unto truth will continue.”

-Mattanaw]

Interestingly, many of these things come from literature or film.

In other words, we once knew they were false and then later came to believe in them.

Falsification due to superstition, arbitrariness, lack of purported meanings

Exaggeration, improper placement on a spectrum.

These are the words I like to correct by telling myself “Est-est”.

Bigestest, Tallestest, Largestest, etc… to make it sound ridiculous or to otherwise make the exaggeration clear.

Overgeneralization

These are directly related to the concepts above, because they involve failure to properly measure on a spectrum.

Precision Failure

Catastrophism without catastrophe

False triumphs

Excess certainty, definiteness, definitiveness.

Also related to inability to place on a spectrum (notice the trend concerning the spectrum?).

Excess enthusiasm, or estimation of aesthetic quality, or lack of quality

These may feel harsh, but if you look at what you’re saying carefully, you’ll discover you go straight to these words when the feeling just doesn’t justify it.

I feel better departing from using the terms below, than the ones above.

Unity, Oneness, and Singularity

This is an error to be watchful for. There are no concepts to completely reject in this list. Instead, there is a tendency to guard against, of creating false oneness in collections of things, or a preference for holistic perspectives such that reductionistic non-holistic perspectives are ignored.

All of the items below are common when rhetoric and persuasion is being used. We tend to enjoy the simplicity of these terms, and we react more emotionally when they are used, versus when we are more specific and accurate.

Common Linguistic Issues that Lead to Error

Confusions relating to time

Fiction list.

We cannot have reality-similar elaborate truths concerning fictions, in the same way that we can have them about reality.

Truths about reality expand. The story gets larger. The stories of fictions tend to be stuck in history. They do not grow, unless the author expands upon it, using a mind, that itself holds much less information, than reality itself.

Thus Harry Potter is clearly a fiction, since once the author has completed the work, it is “locked up” in the books.

A new writer could elect to expand on the story, but it is no longer the story. In any case, the same issue occurs. It is locked up in the book after the second author has died, and there are still only two brains involved, which cannot store more information (nowhere close to as much) as reality itself.

Science on the other hand grows and grows because it is simply recording from reality.

We can know that works of fiction are indeed fictional, or that parts are fictional, because they have characteristics more similar to works of fiction, than to works about reality.

We can add items to our list of things we can instantly reject on this basis.

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