In one of the exercises I came across an example of an unsound argument that reminded me of the article I read for the Restorative Exercise course called "How sane is sane" and it helped me understand, why the article did not quite gel with me. So this is for Restorative Exercise fellows again.
In the article, the author questions if we are not all mentally ill as we have similar ways of reacting to the outside word, as people, who are being labelled mentally ill, but maybe we are better at hiding them or controlling our strange behaviours. The article goes through a list of people with severe to moderate mental problems and compares them to similar everyday behaviour. The article concluding that we should not look for the illness in anyone but health. I agree that finding the good bits in anyone is a great starting point for recovery/treatmnet and labeling patients with their illnesses may not be productive (I am absolutely no expert in this field and have no experience, by the way). I was a little worried about the fact why generally more accepted behaviour is suggested to be equal to very unusual behaviour, just because it is similar and but happens less often.
While working on the Think again! course, I was reading the following argument and we were asked to looked at why arguments go wrong or become unsound or invalid.
"Consider the following argument: “‘Mental illness’ is just a phrase that the medical establishment uses to label people who do very strange things frequently. But each one of us does very strange things at least some of the time. And there’s no important difference between someone who does very strange things some of the time and someone else who does very strange things just a little bit more of the time. So there is no important difference between mentally ill people and everyone else.”
The exercise asked us to find the reason why this argument is not sound and the answer is:
"The correct answer is “(a) conceptual slippery slope argument.”
A conceptual slippery slope argument is an unsound argument, which claims that, since a series of particular actions cannot change the quality of a certain thing, there is no real difference between cases that have that quality and cases that do not. Typically, the problem with a conceptual slippery slope argument is that its second premise claims that something is not a matter of degree, when in fact it is a matter of degree.
In this case, the second premise in the argument from (3) treats “mental illness” as an all-or-nothing matter. The argument assumes that either one is mentally ill, or else one is not.
Suppose, however, that mental illness admits of degrees. Suppose that one could be a little mentally ill, or more mentally ill, or extremely mentally ill. Suppose further that, depending on how often one does very strange things, one will be more or less mentally ill. If that is the case, the sentence, “there is no important difference between someone who does very strange things some of the time and someone else who does very strange things just a little bit more of the time” is false. It is false because, in fact, there is a difference between someone who does very strange things some of the time and someone who does them a bit more. That difference, furthermore, is important to being mentally ill. The difference is in the degree to which one is mentally ill, though, rather than whether one is mentally ill at all."
Now this may seem mind bending but this exercise is almost at the end of the course and a lot has gone before. But I hope this gives a little flavour, why the above argument is not sound.
There is so much instereting material in the Think again! course. There was also an example of an argument concerning evolution, which I though was very interesting and is relevant to the Restorative Exercise's perspective of evolution. I have written up my thoughts on it and am at five pages at the moment, so will have to shorten that a little before putting it on the blog.
Happy learning!
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