Scott Adams and Philosophy

Description

As cartoonist, author, public speaker, blogger, and periscoper, Scott Adams has had best-sellers in several different fields: his Dilbert cartoons, his meditations on the philosophy of Dilbert, his works on how to achieve success in business and all other areas of life, his two remarkable books on religion, and now his controversial work on political persuasion. Adams's two most recent best-sellers are How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (2014) and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter (2017). Adams predicted Donald Trump's election victory (on August 13th 2016) and has explained then and more recently how Trump operates as a Master Persuader, using "weapons-grade" persuasive techniques to defeat his opponents and often to stay several moves ahead of them. Adams has provocative ideas in many areas, for example his outrageous claim that 30 percent of the population have absolutely no sense of humor, and take their cue from conventional opinion in deciding whether something is a joke, since they have no way of deciding this for themselves. In Scott Adams and Philosophy, an elite cadre of people who think for a living put Scott Adams's ideas under scrutiny. Every aspect of Adams's fascinating and infuriating system of ideas is explained and tested. Among the key topics: Does humor inform us about reality? Do religious extremists know something the rest of us don't? What are facts and how can they not matter? What happens when confirmation bias meets cognitive dissonance? How can we tell whether President Trump is a genius or just dumb-lucky? Does the Dilbert philosophy discourage the struggle for better workplace conditions? How sound is Adams's claim that "systems" thinking beats goal-directed thinking? Does Dilbert exhibit a Nietzschean or a Kierkegaardian sense of life? Or is it Sisyphian in Camus's sense? Can truth be over-rated? "The political side that is out of power is the side that hallucinates the most." If there's a serious chance we're living in a Matrix-type simulation, how should we change our behavior? Are most public policy issues just too complex and technical for most people to have an opinion about? In politics, says Adams, it's as if different people watch the same movie at the same time, some thinking it's a romantic comedy and others thinking it's a horror picture. How is that possible? Does logic play any part in persuasion?

Daniel Yim is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at Bethel College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in early modern philosophy, the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, the philosophy of popular culture, and the epistemology of self-deception. Galen Foresman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina A&T State University. He is the co-author of The Critical Thinking Toolkit (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) and the editor of Supernatural and Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003). Robert Arp is author of Scenario Visualization: An Evolutionary Account of Creative Problem Solving (2008) and co-author of Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Reasoning Well (2011) and What's Good on TV: Teaching Ethics through Television (2011). He is editor of The Devil and Philosophy: The Nature of His Game (2014) and co-editor of The Ultimate Game of Thrones and Philosophy: You Think or Die (2017) and Breaking Bad and Philosophy: Badder Living through Chemistry (2012).