College of Political Knowledge

If you we around and interested in the recent meeting of the GOP, the CPAC, you got an hear full of “Obama Sucks” rhetoric….but there was one speech that caught my attention…..it was from the “frontrunner” he made a 26 minute speech and used the word “conservative” 26 times….to me it was a bit over kill but there is a precedent for this type of speech……

Mitt was employing an old logic technique….ad argumentum populum……

In Logic, a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it; it alleges, “If many believe so, it is so.“

The argumentum ad populum is a “Red herring (fallacy)”. It appeals on probabilistic terms; given that 75% of a population answer A to a question where the answer is unknown, the argument states that it is reasonable to assume that the answer is indeed A. In cases where the answer can be known but is not known by a questioned entity, the appeal to majority provides a possible answer with a relatively high probability of correctness.

It is logically fallacious because the mere fact that a belief is widely held is not necessarily a guarantee that the belief is correct; if the belief of any individual can be wrong, then the belief held by multiple persons can also be wrong. The argument that because 75% of people polled think the answer is A implies that the answer is A fails, for if opinion did determine truth, there be no way to deal with the discrepancy between the 75% of the sample population that believe the answer is A and 25% who are of the opinion that the answer is not A. However small the percentage of those polled is distributed among any remaining answers, this discrepancy by definition disproves any guarantee of the correctness of the majority. In addition, this would be true even if the answer given by those polled were unanimous, as the sample size may be insufficient, or some fact may be unknown to those polled that, if known, would result in a different distribution of answers.

Thanx to wiki for the above definition.

The Mitt-ster seems to believe that if he calls himself a conservative that the base will sooner or later believe he is on of them….I think after looking at the most recent polls…..that he has got to try harder…..NO one is buy the crap he is shoveling.

But he does have one thing going in his favor…….the American people……they have fallen pray to bullsh*t in the past…..