Why bad ideas are bad?
First of all, let me tell you that I am not doing a moral
judgment when I write about bad ideas. I’m concerned here with logically bad
ideas. Bad ideas here means unclear, confuse, contradictory ideas.
So, let’s define the opposite: good ideas. This is easy
because good ideas are those who match with facts.
Let us consider the idea of a tree. In the real world
there are trees, right? So trees are the referent. And we have the idea of a
tree, the signified, and we have also the word tree, that is the signifier.
Word and idea are clear and sound, because there are
trees.
Ideas are clear and sound to the extent that
they reflect objective realities.
The question here is this one: how are bad, unclear,
unsound ideas possible? Any idea is logically bad when it’s distanced with the
originating source. An idea is bad when the correspondence between the idea and
the objective, factual world is unclear and unsound.
So, to detect a bad idea we must be mindful of the source
of it.
Is that source a real fact or a real event? Can we see
these?
If we cannot find the referent of some idea in the real
world, the idea is unclear and unsound. By the way this is also true in
abstract sciences like mathematics because numbers exist and help us to measure
and understand our world. Energy, space and time exist. Belong to the real
world.
That’s why when someone comes to us with ideas that have
nothing to do with real facts and events; we truly don’t know what he/she is talking
about, because his ideas have nothing to do with the real world.
