Flat Earth Reflection

In the course of researching for this paper, I found it extremely encouraging how difficult it was to find sources in favor of this idea. With this falsehood permeating all levels of our society, and especially with the support of popular athletes like Kyrie Irving endorsing the idea, I was worried that the information would be extremely easy to access and people who may be vulnerable to this idea will be convinced. This, however, was not my experience. Pretty much no matter what search terms I inputted, the first ten results were all articles in opposition to flat earth theory. The fact that people trying to research the validity of this theory have to scroll past ten pages telling them: “please don’t start believing this ridiculous crap” was extremely encouraging for our society. In terms of the actual paper, I had to violate numerous rules of research and argument, not only because it was a requirement for the course, but because it is nearly impossible in practice not to violate these rules when you are defending a claim which is clearly false.

The first rule which I violated in my paper is the “Starting Point Rule.” This rule states that “No party may falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point, or deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.” I violated this rule in my opening when I stated that simply because the information in favor of the Earth being a globe comes from the government, it cannot be trusted. Clearly using the claim that an entire agent is producing only false knowledge is an issue with starting point as I doubt many people would just concede to this point from the outset.

The next rule which I violated was the “Argument Scheme Rule.” This rule states that “A standpoint may not be regarded as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argument scheme that is correctly applied.” This was violated in almost every section of my paper, but for simplicities sake we can use the same example as above. I did not in any way argue why the government is an untrustworthy source of information and therefore it should not be taken as a valid point.

The last rule which I will discuss here that I violated was the “Validity Rule.” This rule states that “The reasoning in the argumentation must be logically valid or must be capable of being made valid by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.” The largest violation of this rule is the argument made that centrifugal force of the earth would hurl us all off of it. Clearly there are premises in play here, such as gravitational force and atmospheric pressure, which must be ignored in order for this argument to make sense. I just did not address these concerns in any way in order to avoid questioning of my argument and that is a horrible practice.

Lowe, Charles, and Pavel Zemliansky, editors. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Volume 1. Parlor Press, 2010.