An assessment of Alec Rawls’s
نویسندگان
چکیده
I am unconvinced that the logical reasoning or the mathematical arguments put forth by Mr. Rawls have much merit. Perhaps he should heed his own advice: “The only real question is whether the assumptions that they rely on are correct” (p. 23). He seems to overlook geometric constraints placed on memorial designs that wish to focus on the line of the Flight 93 flight path (e.g., see p. 14). Many of his arguments involve fallacious reasoning. Logic is the study of reasoning. Reasoning aims to answer a question. Logic tests the correctness of that answer. Meanwhile, formal fallacies are deductively invalid arguments that typically commit an easily recognizable logical error. A number of those fallacies are noted in this report; this list is not exhaustive. Meanwhile, although Mr. Rawls’s arithmetic calculations appear to be correct, much of his mathematics ignores salient plane and spherical geometry properties; just because calculations are correct does not make the resulting numbers meaningful. He repeatedly fails to use scientific methodology [e.g., “maybe two or three tenths of a degree” (p. 10) is not a scientific measurement of error]. Rawls claims that “Murdoch has been VERY imaginative” (p. 29); my conclusion is that this statement better describes Rawls.
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