As 320 would say, false dichotomy.
I don't understand how it's supposed to be a dichotomy, I had to look it up, and it means opposites.
Working with your back, and legs and arms and hands, is different than working with your brain.
Mowing a yard is much different than selling a car like a salesman, they are not opposites, just a different kind of job.
And in that lies my question. So are you wiling to answer it, or not?
I'm not sure where you looked it up, but I applaud you for doing so. You may want to read the discussion of it
here.
The thing that makes your options -- thinker or laborer -- a
false dichotomy is that you've presented them as though they are the only two options.
After checking the content at the link I provided, you may want to peruse the list of fallacies found on the left side of that webpage. Doing so, you'll find all sorts of them -- I believe that site focuses mostly on informal fallacies, but it may also have formal ones, I don't recall. The site linked above, Logically Fallacious, is among the best one's I've found for not only does it identify the nature of the fallacies, but also it identifies exceptions to them when there are some and it explains the nuanced similarities and differences between those that seem identical. The latter two bits are rare to find.
If you are interested in understanding fallacies, I suggest you first explore informal ones because overwhelmingly the arguments one encounters re: politics and religion are
inductive. To begin your inquiry, I suggest using a site like
this to identify the most common informal fallacies and then examine the discussion of them found on Logically Fallacious to get a full understanding of them.
Note:
Most of the education I have is from
real world living, not books or reading. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but there are a lot of us, who are high school dropouts, who paid our dues in the real world, and just don't understand words with more than a few syllables. And
if it wasn't for spellcheck on computers, I couldn't spell syllables.
Red:
If by "real world living" you mean making observations obtained in the course of going about one's daily life, there's nothing wrong with that; it's a fine way to learn.
For example, people like Galileo, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe used exactly that approach to figure out that the Earth revolves around the sun, contrary to conventional wisdom at the time. Isaac Newton discovered gravity by observing the behavior of falling objects, namely the mere fact that they were falling with no apparent "thing" making them do so. LOL In retrospect, one has to wonder why took humanity literally tens of thousands of years to figure out that there must be some force making things fall; it's not as though falling was an unfamiliar or previously unobserved behavior. LOL
The Newton example illustrates the thing that distinguishes experiential learning from scholastic learning. The former requires one to observe objects and events and then go about figuring out what makes them be as they are observed, whether that which one observes is the norm or the exception, etc., and in doing so, one will fail and be wrong until one figures it out. The latter allows one to learn from the experiential learning of others, thus eliminating the need to fail in the same places others have; however, when one gets to the point of discovering and analyzing new things/ideas, one will, just as pure experiential learners, fail and be wrong until one figures it out.
The discoveries and ideas in all disciplines work that way. The only real drawback to relying extensively on experiential learning is that it requires, to the extent one doesn't share/publish one's findings, that each person essentially "reinvent the wheel." It also usually requires one be innately smarter than average in order to accurately "make sense of" (validly and accurately analyze and conclude about the causes and effects of that which one observes) what one has observed and put it in the proper perspective. That's asking quite a lot, IMO, for most folks aren't smarter than average, yet being of average "smarts" is amply adequate for simply going about the business of just living.
(Note: in saying the preceding, I am, in part, highlighting one of the differences between knowledge and intelligence....one need not be particularly intelligent to know a lot. Intelligence is like talent, one has so much of it by dint of one's birth. Knowledge is like learning to type; one can acquire it provided one is of average intelligence, which most folks are.)
For example, as a student from kindergarten to the master's level, one has little inherent reason for ever being wrong, other than simply not remembering or knowing something, about things that have been discovered by others provided one has been taught and has attempted to learn that which was taught. On the other hand, at the PhD level of learning, one is looking to discover things which, though they may have been suspected, haven't been credibly confirmed or denied (be it inductively or deductively). Therefore one may posit a hypothesis of what one thinks is the "reason" for X or Y being or being as it is and upon testing to find out if one's supposition is correct, one may find it is not. That testing one performs is experiential learning and it is learning regardless of whether one's hypothesis is found right or wrong, or some share of each.
Getting back to your point, I find it ironic that many people who claim to place a high value on learning via "real world" experiences and observations are often the very same people who decry the value of scholastic learning. I find it ironic because the people who are paid to learn things experientially are the very people who have, in their chosen field, the greatest quantities of academic learning. Our society, indeed humanity overall, doesn't encourage, empower and entrust people to engage in experiential learning until they've shown they have learned enough from those who came before them so as to not "reinvent the wheel" as they pursue new learnings.
Blue:
Strangely, my spelling accuracy has deteriorated over the years. I blame it on the advent and prevalence in my life of email which doesn't often lend itself to more than expressing simple thoughts with other people who understand the full context of what I'm writing about, thereby not necessitating the degrees of linguistic precision that were expected of me when I was in school. I have noticed that since I began writing on this site for an audience comprised entirely of strangers, my recollection of the correct spelling of words that for years I've spoken, but not routinely written, has returned gradually.
