Logic, Essay Example

The global economic crisis in which we all live now and which began in 2007 and reached its full effect in 2008 is explained in various terms. First of all, it is important to remember that everything started with the financial systems of the most influential and prosperous countries collapsing and seizing to function properly. The reason for the crisis Shah (2009) sees is the way economies have been functioning within the past few years before the crisis – in a non-unified, individual and non-coherent way. The author states that the countries were too impudent about their autonomous financial decisions and manner of conduct in the world market, by which they caused the serious disruption of the interconnected global financial system.

Besides, Shah (2009) believes that the way governments and private institutions behaved in response to the crisis also presupposes the fact that the crisis could have been deliberately arranged with the purpose of getting more power and profit from the organizations that failed to stand the pressure of the financial downfall and collapsed thus allowing raiders to buy them for ridiculous sums of money. One more interesting observation – he states that the crisis could have been avoided and sets outs an array of reasons and ways for doing so.

Personally I believe that such thoughts and opinions of that kind really make sense because there is a reason for everything happening in the world. Besides, the world crisis from which practically everyone on the globe suffers cannot be neglected, so it clearly becomes the object of intense attention and discussion. However, there are still many doubts about why the situation turned out that way and how it could have been changed, which is obviously not an easy problem to solve. The only thing people can do is to make guesses and suppositions – nobody knows for sure, even the most powerful people of the world cannot give a clear answer to the question. And if they know who is guilty and can explain the whole situation, they will still never confess in this. For this reason the global crisis remains the matter of agile interest, and will still disturb the minds of outstanding thinkers for a long time even after its end – the same has been happening in the history for many years, and there is no reason to break the tradition. Nobody will ever find the reason for the crisis and the ways it could have been avoided because it is the natural flow of events in the global scale, so ordinary people are surely not in the list of the informed.

I guess I am right in voicing my opinion like that because the same situation has been witnessed in the world for many centuries and nothing has changed since then. Ordinary people, representatives of the middle and lower classes have always been the tools in hands of rulers who planned strategic actions that involved some cities, districts and even towns in the process of their achieving individual goals. It was found out by many historians that people who lived from ancient times till the beginning of the last century suffered from famine, war and diseases being ignorant of the fact that these events were planned by the government; people patriotically died for their motherland while the leaders of those countries were only trying to satisfy their ego and gain more power. Only now people find out what revolutions and wars were actually caused by and how people were deceived by imposing false values and motives on them. The same situation must have happened with the global crisis. The uncertain situation in which millions of people lose their savings, jobs and hope for the better every day still cannot help bringing profit to other people who are in office and who know what will happen tomorrow, while others sleep calmly and do not know that tomorrow they will be destroyed.

Fallacies

Turning to the issue of the global crisis once more and stating that it was caused by deliberate attempts of powerful people, it becomes obvious that there could have been nothing reasonable in saying that there were natural preconditions for the crisis. Even if some elements of the economic system broke down and provided for a decline, still human intrusion existed and it played the main role. In general, it is stupid to try to find the reasons for the crisis that took place because it is a large-scale event that could have had many factors and many influences that finally resulted in the zero effect being detected in the whole scope of analysis. Speaking about the crisis and realizing that it is a result of human activities it becomes clear that people are too desperate and disturbed by the crisis to see the true reasons for it, so they pick up every upcoming gossip and start to discuss the new people in fault every day and every minute – only to find what to do and not to sit and think about why they have got into such a situation and what they should have done to avoid it.

Explanation of Fallacies

The first fallacy is called affirming a disjunct – it means that one assumption is taken for granted and is stated to be true, thus eliminating the possibility of another alternative to be true as well. This is true about the first statement that in case human interaction in the emergence of the world crisis is proven, there is no chance for natural conditions of the world market and economy to be effective in the initiation of the crisis. It is true that the crisis may be the result of complex effect of different human and natural actions, this is why it is completely illogical to state that in case one statement is true another one does not have the right for existence.

Another fallacy applied in the previous paragraph is appeal to probability – it is the case of assuming that powerful people who reign the main global events and are knowledgeable about all issues connected with the world financial crisis even if they refuse to accept that fact. The key essence of this fallacy is that the probability is assumed to be the truth, without providing any substantial proofs for that and grounding the point. This should be the truth because it has always been so. Why has it been so? Who can prove that it has always been so? Nobody. But people are still accustomed to assuming that somebody is in fault for everything taking place in their lives; this is the easier way to live through the disaster – there is always a topic to discuss and some distant person to blame.

The next one is a naturalistic fallacy – the solution to the problem is wrong because it does not sound proper or good. This situation is again witnessed in the case with blaming powerful people and state leaders in the situation that resulted from the effects of the crisis. People are more eager to blame others and say that they are miserable because their government did not take care of them than to agree that the crisis was a result of complex actions and events in the field of economy, finance, politics, currency rates etc. It is not good to say that no-one is guilty: in other way the situation will not look natural even if it looks like that in reality.

The next fallacy applied in the course of discussing the world crisis is the Red Herring – the way to state some fact by leading the topic away and distracting the reader’s or listener’s attention, however stating the point firmly at the end of discussion and producing the needed effect that way. In the present context this fallacy was applied in the discussion of world wars and revolutions – there is no direct connection between those events and the crisis; however, drawing some fake analogies may produce an unexpected emphatic effect.

Ignoratio elenchi is the last fallacy used in the present assignment – it uses irrelevant conclusions or irrelevant thesis and does not correlate them in an appropriate way. This fallacy concerns the last assumptions of the previous part – the way people see the reasons for the crisis and the way they react to it does not correlate in a logic way.