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Not if they've already been diagnosed with a mental illness, which is the situation at hand.
by westoncb 8y ago
Not if they've already been diagnosed with a mental illness, which is the situation at hand.
- DanBC 8y agook, so this is more like the Linda Problem. It is more likely that a person is a shitty person than a person is a shitty person and has a mental illness.
- westoncb 8y agoHmm, there's an element you've left out of the situation that makes it different from a straight Linda Problem though. In logical terms, it looks like this. mental_illness -> shittiness being_a_naturally_shitty_person -> shittiness And we know know two things: 1) the person in question is exhibiting shittiness 2) the person in question has been diagnosed with a mental illness. So: mental_illness = true shittiness = true Whether being_a_naturally_shitty_person is true or false is something we have no information on. So, from that starting point, we already have an account for the shittiness being exhibited since: mental_illness -> shittiness and mental_ilness = true So if we want to go ahead and make the additional claim that being_a_naturally_shitty_person = true —you're violating Occam's Razor by introducing an unnecessary second cause when we already had a sufficient first one.