Dave introduces himself and the major themes of the podcast series.
Dave: Welcome to Rationally Minded Podcast. Irrational or poor patterns of reasoning are called fallacies. Each week, we invite an EFL (English as a Foreign language) educator and expert critical thinker to discuss fallacies that come up in our everyday lives. We also discuss how you can learn to recognize fallacies and respond to other people’s fallacious statements and arguments with common and useful English expressions. I’m David Gann and this is Rationally Minded Podcast. If you’re listening to this now, it’s probably because you have some interest in critical thinking. It may also be because you’re studying English as a second or foreign language.
Rationally Minded Podcast, the podcast you’re listening to now, is the most challenging podcast series in the Critically Minded network. If you find these episodes too difficult, it’s probably because . . . it’s too difficult for you! If that is the case, I encourage you to STOP listening to this series and go back and listen to my other podcast series, Critically Minded, instead. After that you could listen to Dialogically Minded, which is a little more challenging, and then, after that, come back to this program and I think it will all make a lot more sense to you. For those of you who find it challenging but decide to stick with it, you’ll find that the rationallyminded.com blog will include support resources for each episode. If you are a native English speaker, I encourage you to keep listening anyway.
Our goal is to become better equipped to think more rationally, to identify fallacies in other people’s arguments and to be able to respond to those errors with useful English phrases that will empower you as an intelligent and rational conversationalist. Now, I think it’s worth noting here that people who make an effort to find fault in other people’s arguments and opinions are often not the most popular persons at a party. In fact, they may not even be invited to parties. This is especially true if you are arrogant and mean-spirited when pointing out fallacies. Some people use their knowledge to knock down other people so that they can feel that they are of higher intelligence than others. We hope that no one who learns from this podcast will use their new knowledge to shoot down other less rational thinkers with their fallacy hunting laser-gun, although, I will admit when speaking to some people, it is a temptation. But, in becoming rationally minded, we also want to be able to point out errors in a friendly, or polite and constructive way.
By listening to this podcast, you will learn to recognise and respond to about thirty different kinds of fallacies with common and useful English expressions. Each fallacy has a name that helps to remember and understand what the problem in the reasoning is. By learning the names of fallacies, you will build a bank of knowledge that you will find becomes easier and easier to access as you gain experience in noticing and identifying fallacies.
We can say there are two main types of fallacies – the formal and the informal fallacy. Errors in the structure or logic of an argument are formal fallacies.
Each episode, a different EFL educator and experienced critical thinker will visit to discuss his or her favorite fallacy. We’ll listen to recorded dialogues illustrating fallacious reasoning and there will be a matching game at the end of each episode as we challenge you the listener to Name that Fallacy! After the first three or four episodes we move onto informal fallacies. These are more well-known with names that some of you may have heard of and I think you will find them easier to understand than the fallacies in the first five episodes. Once you’ve got the basics it becomes second nature. And this is the best part, once you begin to recognise fallacies and the language that identifies them you can spot a bogus argument in a heartbeat, and not only is that satisfying – it’s fun too. So if you think you’re ready for this series, I look forward to meeting you each episode. I hope that you will enjoy this podcast and the others too. And I look forward to taking this fun and enriching journey through critical thinking together.
And this has been Rationally Minded Podcast.