(09-10-2015, 08:34 PM)Aaron Wrote: A fallacy is a failure in reasoning that renders an argument invalid..
So, to put it as simple as I can. In order for "everyone is too skilled so no one is skilled" to be a true factual statement, everyone on the planet would have to be an exact copy of one singular entity.
There's like how many extremely skilled artists in existence for example, yet how many actually get turned into legendary artists? Very few, because even though yeah there's plenty of skilled artists past and present, those that were made Legends had a particular skillset that set them above the rest.
So if everyone is special no one is special is true, what makes Leonardo da Vinci more skilled than any other artist on this forum? What makes Drake get crowds bumping that another equally apparently skilled rapper can't do?
This is also irrelevant because the statement is one of logic, not of fact.
Logical statements do not have to be true when compared to a real-world situation, they merely have to be true within the confines of their stated parameter. "If everyone is <X>, no one is" does not claim to be true in a real-world situation, hence the 'if' at the beginning of the statement.
It is not saying that "this is how things work in the real world at this given time." It is saying, "assuming that everyone in the world were to be equally <Comparison-Based Parameter>, regardless of whether or not it is true, it would logically follow that <Comparison-Based Parameter> would cease to exist due to a lack of a comparison."
If logical statements had to be True when compared to the current observable state of reality, not only would the logic-based scientific speculation that got us to our point of technological advancement be "wrong," but market and political analysts, theoretical physicists, speculative mathematicians, artists and philosophers, Astro- and Xenobiologists, and just about anyone in any field that does not deal solely with what's immediately demonstrable in reality itself, would be absolutely worthless and always wrong according to that frame of thinking.
