SCEPTICAL JAYDON

  A dog chasing its own tail. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Circular reasoning is a well-known informal fallacy that takes the form "A is true because B, which is true because A." It assumes to be true that which ought to be demonstrated to be true by the argument. It is bad reasoning because it's not very good reasoning. (See what I did there?) It is a shortcut hack that can be very appealing to people who have a deeply ingrained commitment to the truth of the belief they are expressing. One of the commonest examples of circular logic in pop conversations is when religious people claim the Bible is true (or is the inerrant, infallible word of God) because the Bible itself says so, thus assuming that the Bible is true upfront. This is not very good reasoning because it assumes to be true (that the Bible is true) that which ought to be demonstrated to be true (that the Bible is true).  A recent  thread on Twitter aimed to show that this well-acclaimed logical fallacy is,...

It's January 1st of 2021. And I'm almost sure you read that with a sigh. Of course, the sigh itself would be based upon an illusion. One of my former mentors said, back in 2010, that "time is a continuum." It was the first time I had come across that quote, and it has stuck with me ever since.  The concept of years is a useful fiction. Yet, there is a sense in which a sigh of relief is warranted at the thought of 2020 being over. As everyone knows all too well, 2020 was a very crazy year indeed. More people died last year than in the previous one , and the COVID-19 pandemic plunged the entire world into recession . And notably in Nigeria, there were the #EndSARS protests, climaxing in that tragic night when our own government, who swore to protect us, opened fire on unarmed and unaggressive citizens demanding change in the country. "Chaotic" doesn't begin to capture the year.  Due to this, there is probably not so much optimism for a lot of people going...