Thursday, July 12, 2007

John Stossel and a primer on the "smuggled premise"

Here is an excellent example of how false arguments should be analyzed to reveal their dominant constructs and the implications of their ideology. In this instance, it is the always excellent John Stossel revealing some of the hidden meanings and implicit assumptions behind Michael Moore's latest "documentary".
Axiomatic ideas are those taken to be so self-evident that no proof is required to support them. Moralists like to package their ideas as axiomatic as it obviates them from explaining their rationale and the import of their ideas -- much easier to just repeat the dominant construct as a"consensus" and something everyone accepts as true, than engage in meaningful dialogue.