- Any beliefs you may hold influence your actions some way or another. (pg. 7)
- Actions based on beliefs often cause harm or when trying to do good, is based off of bad reasons. (pg. 6)
- Therefore, It is unjustified (wrong) to believe anything that is not based upon solid evidence. (pg. 7)
This argument is valid considering that the conclusion is based on both of the premises. But I don’t believe that this is a sound argument. I do think that beliefs that you hold have an influence on your actions as that you should have evidence for most things in life, but not everything that you believe in causes harm and those that don’t cause harm are not based on bad reasons most of the time. One practical significance that Clifford’s thesis has is that you should have evidence to back your claims, otherwise what is the point. We have to conduct experiments and study the things we wish to believe. If we do not do this we could “sink back into savagery”(pg 6). I feel as though this argument has the all-or-nothing fallacy. You would either have to fully agree with Clifford or you don’t agree with him at all. Because Clifford states that you must support ALL your claims and they CAN’T be based on your beliefs, he isn’t giving you a choice on being in the middle, where you would believe some things without support but everything else must have support. It either has to be one extreme or the other according to Clifford. After looking at the arguments over multiple times, this fallacy is about the only fallacy I found among this argument. Overall, this article was interesting to read and learn about a different way of viewing Clifford’s ideas and thoughts on how people shouldn’t believe just anything, which is the main idea I agreed with in his argument.
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Barista's approach 