CosmicSpiral said:
I don't see how they are arguments anymore than just really simple positions.
Right - I meant 'argument' in the logical sense of premise/conclusion, but essentially yes they are positions that aren't expanded upon (and I think even the people using them often don't reflect on/expand on them even in their own minds - or if they do they never seem able to clearly expand when I ask them about it).
Then why bother to incorrectly localize it to a specific group of people in a specific time period? In the Middle Ages the social system was attributed to divine authority; general Roman bias held that people had the same personality for their entire lives. Generalized statements about human nature aren't something new, but to present it as such is dishonest.
Again, I never said these were new fallacies - the only reason I mentioned recent generations is because I was looking for fallacies that were having the most notable impact on the popular philosophies and perhaps political positions of the generations who are in the process of having the torch passed to them so-to-speak. I drew attention to this because it will help decide the immediate course of society in our lifetimes. I also acknowledged that there are other fallacies besides these two (hence "greatest" in the title), and that there may be other perhaps more important ones that I may have neglected to mention (so hopefully someone else would bring them up).
Fallacy #2 technically counts as a hasty generalization, but it is so utterly vague that any criticism is bound to be equally weak. "By nature" doesn't mean anything without some sort of context, so why bother to complain about a lack of specifics? The WWII generation was just as guilty when they labeled all the Japanese as buck-toothed savages.
Maybe the most recent generations are more self-aware than their predecessors, who knows. But to attribute the "destruction and stagnation upon the philosophical fabric of this generation" (the last six words are pretty contradictory) to two ideas seems to invite the same oversimplification you despise.
The ambiguity of nature statements is part of my point. Few reflect on the meanings of such statements and terms as they use them - and it's often assumed that they are using one sense when they might well be using another. These sort of statements ought to be met with caution and inquiry ("what exactly did you mean by that?") - but they hardly ever are. Sometimes it's merely for expediency of communication, but it cannot be assumed that such is always the case.
With my last words, I was attempting to point out that the lack of reflection upon our worldviews lead to fallacies like the ones I mentioned, inconsistency in our actions, and ultimately intellectual stagnation (because we aren't asking the important questions and probing as far or as often as we should when faced with these sorts of statements).
I should clarify that in no way did I mean to insinuate that these recent generations are somehow worse off intellectually than those who came before them. Not at all - every generation has problems like this, and they are often different each time. I just want draw attention to the ones which are likely to make these particular generations stumble, so we can mitigate the damage.
Ultimately, the real issue isn't these particular fallacies, but a lack of reflection upon our worldviews in general (which leads to these fallacies among others).
