LMD Async Tutoring

[LMD]

@Elliot

I reviewed your discussion at Introduction to Critical Rationalism

Overall, your posts look good to me. I think you’re making progress, not stuck. I think more practice at that kind of discussion would benefit you. Did you enjoy writing those posts?

Thanks! I was going to ask if you would look over that discussion. I appreciate that.

Cool that’s encouraging. I think I did better than I would’ve guessed I would. I really enjoyed myself. I think it was actually the most fun I have had doing philosophy.

What did you think of how many questions I asked? I was worried I was asking too many and that it may have been pressuring. Like I’ve heard that something debaters can do to control discussions is to ask way more questions that their debate parter. I don’t think my questions were like, big topic changing questions or questions to put someone on the spot. I thought they were almost entirely questions to help me understand what actually_thinking meant.

@Elliot

One area where I noticed room for improvement is (sub-)topic selection. But I doubt that’s what you should focus attention on right now.

I suspected that this might be an issue for me too. Figuring out what topic would be the most effective thing to focus on in a discussion seems really important. I can see how TOC has relevant ideas here.

I didn’t worry too much about it this time because I had some ideas and comments and questions and I wanted to focus on just exercising those more local skills. But I’d like to improve at topic selection.

@Elliot

One issue you might like to think about is whether omissions, incompleteness or something better being possible implies any errors. Just because there’s the possibility for improvement doesn’t necessarily obviously mean something is mistaken. There’s room for nuanced consideration there.

Sure, I will. I think that I agree that they don’t imply errors. Someone having a bad argument for a conclusion doesn’t imply the conclusion is false, for example? Did you notice any specific places where I was making this mistake? Or was I doing something in the ballpark of this somewhere? It could be helpful to reflect on my thinking process at the time of writing the posts now while it’s fresh.

I suppose one place this could come up is if I’m asking questions that someone can’t answer well, that doesn’t imply that they’re wrong.

@Elliot

I don’t think you dropped the context there.

Yeah I suspected I hadn’t. But I was fuzzy on what that would mean, and it seems we used quite different ways to think. I didn’t want to assume I hadn’t. Do you think my response was appropriate?

@Elliot

I think they’re all different. Bringing up truth, identity or certainty is different than not doing that.

That makes sense. They’re mean different things because they bring up different things.

@Elliot

@LMD

Well I think truth is the commonsense concept of a statement’s correspondence with reality. Statement X is true if and only if X is the case in reality. This is an objective relationship.

What about abstract statements?

Hmm. Well I had to think about this for a second. How can my concept of truth account for abstract things? I didn’t have an answer already. But if consider abstractions part of reality, which I think makes sense, then I think that works?