Maggie's Farm

The notion that "the truth must lie somewhere in-between" is an appealing fallacy to the compulsively peaceful, because it seems to remove argument and strife. But it is torture for the truth-minded, because rarely does truth lie "in the middle:" there is usually a right and a wrong - somewhere. Or at least a "best or closer approximation of truth."

Compromise may be the bread and butter of politics, diplomacy, and law suits, but it doesn't work in the pursuit of truth and reality. You can't be half-pregnant. Can you be half-guilty? I think so, but the legal system isn't really constructed that way - it is constructed to settle a matter.

If you think Bush lied to the people to pursue a nefarious scheme, and I think he did not, then the reality isn't that he half-lied. If you think Buddha is the manifestation of God, and I believe that Jesus is the only way, then the "all religions are equal, and all gods are the same" silliness is nothing but a "truth-compromise" - a spineless cop-out in the disguise of "tolerance."

Sometimes truth compromises seem essential: I happen to believe that the Second Amendment is a basic right - the right to self-defence which transcends even the Constitution - derived from English Common Law and transplanted to the US. However, I do not care to have my neighbor messing with nukes in his back yard, nor do I care to have criminals going around with stolen machine guns. Nevertheless, "the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." seems unambiguous to me.

Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Reply: "But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge."
Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

In disputation, the No True Scotsman fallacy is most often used to try to discredit an expert opinion, or to silence an opponent. Remember, all a Fallacy is is a flawed premise, or a conclusion which is not supported by the premise(s). Otherwise known as tricks.

The reason politicians are the least-respected job category in America is because verbal tricks and rhetorical disingenuousness are their stock in trade. In other words, they are manipulators. It's a flaw of democracy, and a worse flaw of the alternatives.

Example: If an atmospheric scientist doubts that Global Warming is caused by man, then he must be a shill for Big Oil.

Example: If an atmospheric scientist believes that warming is caused by man, then he must be pursuing grant money by saying the PC thing to ingratiate himself with the grant committee.

It is a close relative of the Consensus Fallacy, ie, "if most people think it, then it must be so." Which is patently baloney, even though journalists often use polls as if they provided a guide to reality: more often, they serve as a reminder of human ignorance.

Science never has settled truths: it tries to find facts with which to build theories, which are subject to endless disputation until replaced, or until the arguments run out for a while. Pretty much all theories die, eventually, and enter history as quaint ideas of the past. It was only ten years ago that the NYT was warning about the coming Ice Age (which probably is coming, but not tomorrow). And not all that long ago when everyone believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Our theories are our illusions, constructed for our comfort, and to keep science guys off the unemployment lines.

Capital "T" Truth is a matter of religion, not science.

Joe over at Evangelical Outpost applies the No True Scotsman critique to the Warming issue and the embryonic stem cell issue, along with some good comments on how scientists work.

No true Scot wears anything under his kilt. That is a fact.

"Category error" is one of those terms that I use intuitively (AKA lazily), but never looked into.

The definition is ascribing a property to something whch cannot have that property, thus placing it in the wrong, inaccurate, or misleading category of things.

Example: "It's like comparing apples with oranges." (It's an odd expression, since they are both round fruit, etc, but we know what is meant by the analogy.)

Often category errors are simply cute ways of speaking or figures of speech, without intent to confuse, as in:

Example: "My car doesn't want to start." (attributing intentionality to a pile of metal)

Example: Socialist ideas marched through Europe.

Example: "My computer can't think fast today."

or humorous:

Ex: "My brain is trying to kill me" (Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes)

or colorful and poetic:

Ex: :"..while my guitar gently weeps."

When a psychiatrist says "The id is at war with the superego" (Dr. Bliss would never speak that way), that entails a sort of category error by attributing "thingness" and capacity for action to abstrations (also entails the fallacy of "reification" - closely related - eg. attributing "thingness" to abstract concepts). Thus while the statement basically says nothing, it's a useful if awkward kind of shorthand for something that is meaningful. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle, in his very readable mega-classic The Concept of Mind, represents the latest word on the ways we think of mental things - (and slays Descartes in the process).

How can category errors be used to trick people? It just takes a little sleight-of-hand.

One often used by medical malpractice plaintiff's lawyers and all kinds of trial lawyers is to attempt to conflate two distinct categories:  "accident" with "error."  Thus: "Ladies and gents of the jury, it is clear that if Mr. Jones had bothered to built a stronger fence around his pool, the thunderstorm that knocked down the tree would not have crushed his fence, thus permitting the neighbor, poor old widow Mrs. Smith's only friend, her cute little white Shitzu (show photo), to drown in the pool, leaving her bereft and traumatized, requiring years of costly psychiatric help and daily taxi rides to the Pet Cemetery. Ladies and gentlemen, this was no weather accident - this was negligence pure and simple with a catastrophic result."

Here's another:

"2900 children died from firearms in 2004. Handguns must be made illegal." What category errors are involved here? First, they define "children" as age 0-19, thus including gang warfare and criminal actions in the numbers. Second, they include suicides, which accounts for 33% of that number, and accidents, which are 6%. Third, they do not mention how many of those deaths were via illegal firearms - eg. already banned). Fourth, they do not mention how many of those deaths were by handgun. Thus by confusing and mixing categories, an effort is made to maximally dramatize the effect. 

A now-classic example is the famous "hockey stick" graph which is meant to demonstrate man's effect on climate. The hockey stick graph represents an insidious category error, because it uses tree-ring climate data for most of the graph, but the recent upswing is from entirely different data - surface temperature - so it is like counting bushels of oranges in this year's apple crop.

Editor: My apologies to The Barrister, but I did a bit of work on this one also, making it a bit too long.

Everyone is familiar with this very common fallacy, most often used in politics and informal debate  but rarely in formal disputation because it is so transparent.

When you use a straw man fallacy, you argue off the point, or with a distorted, exagggerated or extreme version of your adversary. Thus one creates an easy target to demolish. It is so quick and easy to do, it is often used on TV.

It is well to always bear in mind that fallacies are used to manipulate and to trick the minds of the listener or reader. As a rule of thumb, one can assume that they are rarely used out of ignorance or by mistake.

Example: "I am opposed to a border fence because America needs low-wage workers."  That is an example of arguing off the point, making it seem as if someone is opposed to access to unskilled labor.

Example: "We should let Iran develop nukes because other countries have them, like Israel and France, so why shouldn't they have them?" That is another off-the-point argument - it does not explain why Iran in particular should have nukes.

Example: "Bush wants to be a dictator because he wants to listen to my phone calls."  That is a classic straw man - that is a case of reacting to an invented position.

Example: "The NRA wants hundreds of children and teens to be killed annually." That's another classic straw man, akin to "The swimming pool companies want hundreds of kids to drown annually," or "The ladder manufacturers want hundreds of guys to break bones annually."

As in the last two examples, straw man fallacies often use demonization fallacies, a subset of straw man arguments. Demonization has some effectiveness in argument, since we all know that evil does exist in the world, and we are always happy to be able to locate evil outside of ourselves. Thus the typical election year theme: "The Republicans want to starve women and children, take away your Social Security, pollute your air, and ruin your life."

A basket of fallacies: false positioning, personal abuse, weasel words, impugning motives, unfounded generalization, and moving the goalpost.

All in just one article about raising babies.

We are outsourcing this edition of Fallacy of the Week, because someone else did a better job with this: Humbug.

A Slippery Slope fallacy is committed when there is no persuasive evidence or argument for things moving in the indicated direction.

That is bad writing, but blogging is hasty. Here's one example from Nizkor:

"We've got to stop them from banning pornography. Once they start banning one form of literature, they will never stop. Next thing you know, they will be burning all the books!"

or:

If we let Bush wiretap calls from Al Quaida, next thing you know he'll wiretap my calls to my secret grilfriend in Des Moines.

However, Slippery Slope arguments can be persuasive when there is reason to think that something will progress further:

"If you give that dog an inch, he'll take a mile."

When a slope is part of a political agenda, it is safe to assume that an issue may be in the process of being given a push down that slope, so it pays to be watchful. A strategery of "incrementalism" is often a clever political approach:

First we'll ban assault rifles, then handguns, then rifles, then shotguns, then, eventually, BB guns and finally squirt guns...and snowballs.

or

We'll focus on banning late-term abortions, which no-one likes, and move forward from there to making abortion a state issue again.

Like all of the logical fallacies we enjoy, Slippery Slope sometimes can be non-fallacious, which is from whence falllacies derive their power. Volokh recently posted an excellent example of the fallacy - with a good drawing.

Tu quoque. "You, too."

It's the old "So's your old lady" from the schoolyards of yore. It is a primitive and immature, but often effective, fallacy.

Like most fallacies, Tu Quoque subsumes aspects of other fallacies: Ad Hominem, Red Herring, etc. Tu Quoque appears to brings doubt upon a claim by pointing out a real or imaginary problem with the claimant rather than responding to the claim.

It is a perfect type of fallacious argumentation for relativists: "You Americans think you are virtuous, but you had slaves 150 years ago - so don't preach to us about virtue."

"You complain about civil liberties in China, but meanwhile you torture and abuse prisoners in Gitmo."

"How dare you criticize my American Express bill when in 1989 you went out and bought yourself a Corvette."

"Don't talk to me like you are so perfect."

Tu Quoque. Shut them up and put them on the defensive, while ignoring their point. Excellent for ignorant juries, and also perfect for marital disputes - keeps them going on merrily for years.

Please refer to our Reification -  Part One if you want to catch up. I needed two posts to just mention all of the ideas "reification" raises.

This is because taking a close look at abstract words can lead one into the deadly whirlpool abyss of meaning and lack of meaning, and the next thing you know, you wonder whether you yourself are alive and real...and then you wonder what "real" means...and then you go fishing.

Berger and Luckmann, authors of one of my favorite books of all time, The Social Construction of Reality, define reification as:

"the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms."

Example: I feel like breaking that jerk's nose. Therefore, I have an "angry feeling".  No, you don't. You can't "have" a "feeling." Sometimes the reification fallacy is simply turning verbs into nouns.

Abduction is the mechanism of reification. How so? There is a human need to integrate meaning, to find a coherent sense of things. The cognitive mechinism of reification is something called "abduction", which is one way in which the human brain links phenomena into something meaningful to the brain. C.S. Peirce and Bateson considered it a critical function of the brain.

What abduction does (there's the fallacy at work) is to impose what Berger and Luckmann would term a culturally-determined "logico-linguistic" framework on things, so that they will seem to make sense.

Example:

My friend died.

It must be because of God's will (or bad luck, or bad Karma, or whatever). There's the adbuction - the imposition of a prepared format on a phenomenon.

Thus God's Will, Bad Luck, or Bad Karma, or Whatever, act purposefully on the world and on life. There's the reification.

Thus it is difficult to talk about anything to talk about anything without committing some reification fallacy or another. Thus the limits of language and verbal thought. And here we stop, before descending deeper into this black hole from which the only rescue is spiritual and not verbal-logical.

The Wikipedia definition, with good links, here.

"Searchin' high, searchin' low,
Searchin' everywhere I know,
Askin' the cops wherever I go,
"Have you seen Dignity?""

Only Bob Dylan could create such a hard-rocking, clever, imagistic song about the hunt for an abstraction. (A rare piano version of Dignity: dignitypianoversion.mp3 - quick download. Official version of Dignity on Greatest Hits, Vol. 3)

Reification isn't on the usual lists of fallacies, but it deserves to be. I define it as the error of handling an abstraction, or a mental construct, as if it were a Real Thing with Real World Substance.

It comes to mind because The Professor, a corporate law professor, noted this week that a "corporation" is not a thing, but rather is a legal abstraction. He addresses the question of "Who owns a corporation?"

Often, it is almost impossible to speak about anything without slipping into reifying fallacies, because having a word for something almost makes it a "thing," and language is full of metaphor anyway. And what is a word? Roger Brown's classic pre-Chomsky linguistics text Words and Things - which I highly recommend - deals with such subjects beautifully and memorably.

What seems to happen with abstractions and mental constructs is that they accrue associations over time, lending them the appearance of substance without a substantial core.

Psychology is famous for such errors. "The id is at war with the superego." Well, that is a metaphor and a kind of professional shorthand, but there is no "id" and there is no "superego." They are theoretical constructs. Similarly, there is in fact no "Unconscious." There are such things as un-thought thoughts, and un-felt feelings and un-felt desires, but there is no thing "unconscious."

Thus the common Reification Fallacy is to to treat such constructs as if they were real things, objective things with real-world impact, rather than as lazy excuses for not saying what is really meant.

The good, but brief, Wikipedia entry offers a few good examples:

"Give peace a chance." Peace is not a thing, so it cannot do anything. It works as bad poetry, but it says nothing.

"Right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Huh? An abstraction like a "right" cannot act on the world. It is high-falutin', inspiring nonsense. As a mental construct, the word "right" can mean whatever anyone wants - including a "right to free car insurance" or a "right to a child" or a "right to 8 week's vacation" or a "right to a stress-free life." Whatever! Because it's all imaginary, you can fill in the blanks!

Got some of your own favorite reifications? Add 'em to Comments.

If you are new to Maggie's, check our category Fallacy of the Week. More on Reification Fallacies next week. This is getting too long for the average blog-reader's ADD, according to our ADD-disabled Editor.

We will try a dull fallacy today, to prove our seriousness - Tautological Fallacies

"Tautology" has a grammatical meaning (a redundancy, or stating the obvious), and a related logical meaning. Most logical syllogisms are tautologies, which means that the statement is true by a given definition, and thus advances little while appearing to say something new. That is the boring thing about syllogisms and, anyway, we rarely think syllogistically.  But it can distort, when the premiss or definition contains a definition error. You must be alert to error in the premiss, whether stated or, more commonly, implied, before bothering to think about the conclusion:

Simple example: All good girls should get baubles for Christmas, and Ginny is a good girl. Therefore Ginny must get baubles in her stocking. (That is a perfectly logical tautology.)

Example: Child molesters are chronic repeat offenders, therefore Billy Bob is probably guilty this time.

Example: All mammals bear live young, and milk to their babies, but the platypus lays eggs. Therefore, the platypus is not a mammal.

Example: Opponents of global warming measures are ignorant of science and oblivious to the looming climatological crisis. Clinton and Bush, therefore, refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty.

Example: Republicans want children to starve and go without education, and want to bomb innocent Iraqi children. Sen. Joe Lieberman is one of those latent Republicans, and therefore is comfortable with killing Iraqi children.

Example: It is no surprise that Republicans voted to continue killing and torturing innocent Iraqis (see the implied definition? Tautological Fallacies are more effective when the definition is covert, or implied, rather than stated. It is a specialty of The New York Times.), but the number of Democrats who voted with the majority was disconcerting to anti-war Democrats.

The Fallacy of Accident was one of Aristotle's orginal Fourteen. It is a simple fallacy: Confusing a generalization, or "rule of thumb", with a universal generality. The term "accident" refers to the formal logic definition of the term: "A circumstance or attribute that is not essential to the nature of something, " like the color of a cow. That is, an irrelevant or incidental detail.

All the cows around here seem to be brown. This animal is brown. This animal must be a cow.

These might seem easy to identify and to deal with, but sometimes they are subtle, and sometimes people get hung up on the words, instead of the sense of the thing. We live by Rules of Thumb, and they serve us well. That's the problem, on rare occasions. Sometimes, keeping the generalization unspoken (when many might object to the generalization if it were overt) adds to the effect:

"Katrina proved Bush wants to kill blacks."  This is a near-psychotic generalization  in which an implied (hostile, and a total lie) generalization - "Bush hates Blacks" - is put to partisan use to exploit bad weather, employing the Accident Fallacy to alienate black voters in the future.

"Books are meant to be read." True statement but an obnoxious, obesssional type might object to the fallacy in it. Art books are to be looked at, not read. In this simple case, the exceptions are overlooked. We call that "poetic license."

"This murder case has all of the earmarks of the Boston Strangler, so we must redouble our efforts to find this evil demon." More complex here, because the rule of thumb breaks down in the face of "copycat" criminals, a common phenomenon amongst the non-creative bad guys who no doubt were not permitted enough time to finger-paint in nursery school.

"Moslems seem sensitive to the cause of the Jihadists, because their silence communicates support." Here we have a generalizing assertion with a non-trivial fallacy embedded in it. What if a majority of Brit and US Moslems feel intimidated by the Mullahs? They may be cowardly, but not supportive, like many Germans during the Nazi era. Or they may be quietly supportive. Who knows?

Thus there are more subtle forms in which Accident can insinuate itself into writing, and into our brains, without alerting itself with a sign. Our own brains must provide the signs before we are lead down the primrose path to illogicality. Therefore always watch out for the unstated generalizations, or assumptions, which are concealed in an assertion.

The Volvo Fallacy, aka the Fallacy of Misleading Vividness, is committed when a rare but memorable occurance is given undue statistical weight and meaning because of its dramatic nature.

The "Volvo" comes from the guy who changed his mind about buying a Volvo, despite safety reports, after hearing someone tell him that he knew someone whose Volvo had the wheel fall off on the highway, and crashed and died.

This fallacy works because the vividness factor emotionally overpowers one's statistical sense and one's common sense, resulting in a superstitious-like reaction.

Fifteen years ago, I noticed a $100 bill half-hidden in a pile of leaves at the edge of a parking lot I frequent. I still cannot park there without a glance at that spot, even though I am a rational human. 

Another: I heard somebody choked to death on a steak at Bob's Angus Steak House, so I will never go there again.

Another: I will never take a flight out of Boston again, after 9-11.

Another: I will move from DC to northern Vermont if someone stops the govt from searching for nukes. This is a good one, because the statistical likelihood is an unknown, making it even more vivid in the imagination, and possibly rational.

How can this fallacy be exploited? Try this one: Don't try to convince me that hunting is safe. Four years ago, I heard that a deer hunter killed a game warden by mistake in the woods. (The statistical facts that driving to work, flying in a plane, living in Washington DC, or playing high school football, are more dangerous is ignored.)

"Reduction to the absurd," or "reduction to the impossible." This handy fallacious technique of disputation can be effective in making any logical argument appear ridiculous, when it may not be, by stretching it to an extreme which goes far beyond the body or intent or scope of the argument. 

It was a favorite bugaboo of Aristotle, and, in mathematics, Euclid was fond of its usefulness in that realm in which abstract consistency is expected, but unattainable thus far. It works well as a basis for satire, too and, like all fallacies, it works wonders with impressionable and uneducated juries in places like Alabama and Indiana: just try telling them that they have been subjected to a "reductio ad absurdum" argument and see how far that gets you.

Example:

A. The Civil War was wrong. The Federal government does not have the power to enforce, with arms, a union which was entered into voluntarily and which ought to be able to be undone voluntarily.

B. Oh, so you want to see slavery re-instituted in the US, you racist pig?

Example:

A. I believe that access to abortion should be decided by states or localities, and not imposed by an unelected Supreme Court on a whim with no legislative or voter input.

B. Oh, so you want thousands of 15 year-old innocent boy-crazy girls bleeding to death in back alleys from coat-hanger abortions?

Example:

A. The federal government ought to be able to wiretap Al Quaida phone and internet communications with people in America.

B. Oh, so it's OK with you for anonymous fed spooks to listen to your conversation with your wife saying "Dick, I know you're there at the Springfield Holiday Inn with that homewrecker bitch Sandy, but if you aren't home in 20 minutes I will cut your tiny balls off the next time you fall asleep in front of the TV and chop them up and serve them to you for breakfast in your scrambled eggs, you lousy bum."

Example:

A. In America, citizens have the right to bear arms.

B. Oh, so it's OK with you for hundreds of innocent kids to be killed each year with unregistered handguns?

Example:

A. Everyone in a free country ought to be able to live according to their own religious beliefs.

B. Oh, so it's OK for Wicca witches to dig up bodies to cut out gall bladders for ingredients for their magic potions?

See how easy it is? You can do this with any argument. It's a piece of cake to do, and it makes an impression. After a reductio ad absurdum has been dealt to you, it can be hard to scramble back to reason, because you have been put on the defensive and made to look ridiculous. A favorite of talk-show hosts, because it is quick and easy. As you can see, it is a close relative to the "Slippery Slope Fallacy," which we will address later on.

(Sorry if comments were blocked to this piece. Can't figure out how that occurred.)

Logical fallacies are the sins of the world of reason. Just as with sin in the world of morality, in the world of reason we all fall into fallaciousness sometimes - whether by accident or on purpose. And, like sin, logical fallacy can "work" in the interpersonal world, but it fails against harder realities every time.

The study of logical fallacy is the interesting, backdoor approach to thinking about logic and reasoning. It is difficult for us amateurs to define "logical" except to say that it exists where there is no illogicality - which is a Circular Fallacy. In a rational universe, none of us should be permitted to offer an opinion on anything without first making a study of logical fallacy.

Everyone seems to have their favorite bugaboo fallacies, and everyone also seems to have their favorite fallacies to use in debate, manipulation, persuasion, and discussion. (In politics, outright lying seems often to be the preferred mode of disputation, but we are dealing here with subtler matters: errors of which the user is often not aware, but also the deliberate abuse of logical errors to score points, to persuade, or to bamboozle.)

Here are some of my favorite bugaboos:

1. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: Named after the guy who shoots at the barn wall, then draws a target circle around the hole. A favorite of ambulance-chasers and of the statistically-ignorant. You first locate a random cluster, then seek a "cause" for it. The fact is that patterns can occur randomly, and often do. Known as "data-mining" when done by unscrupulous academic researchers: They throw a ton of data into the computer and ask it to find any correlations it can. That ain't science.

2. The Gambler's Fallacy: If you coin-toss four heads in a row, the odds are higher that the next toss will be a tails. Wrong: Lady Luck has no memory. Still waiting for my Tech stocks to bounce back...eventually they have to, right?

3. Retrospective Determinism: The fallacious notion that because something did happen, it was bound to happen. "9-11 was inevitable because..." Colloquially known as 20/20 hindsight.

4. Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Mistaking correlation for causation, or even for a direct relationship. Eg, broccoli-eaters have less cancer, therefore broccoli prevents cancer. Another one of my favorite examples was the government study of hospitals which revealed that the great teaching hospitals had some of the poorest outcomes for open heart surgery. The reason, of course, was that they took on the cases no-one else would or could deal with. Thus the best hospitals had the lowest grades, rendering the entire costly, multi-year project ridiculous.

5. The Fallacy of the Single Cause: The fantasy that events have simple or single  "causes." Eg, "What was the cause of World War One?"

6. Ipse Dixit: Argument from authority rather than from data. Eg, "The New York Times says..." Logically permissible only when God, George Orwell, or G. K. Chesterton is speaking.

All of the above, and many more, can be found in more detail on the links below. I often feel that the most effective fallacious arguments can be made by combining or sequencing two or more fallacies, thus overwhelming the logical capacities and scrambling the brains of your helpless victim. Indeed, they rarely occur in pure form anyway. Sad to say, sometimes one must use fallacies for persuasion - even when cogent logic is on your side - because fallacies can often be more persuasive than fact or logic to the uninitiated (such as jurors, voters, and newspaper readers). Hence the lowly reputations of politicians and lawyers.

Aristotle may have been the first (no surprise there - he was the first to organize everything - an obsessional genius) to list logical fallacies in his Sophistical Refutations, in which he listed thirteen. The delightful website The Fallacy Files is a fine source, and Wikipedia has an exhaustive list, with many pretty good definitions, here. 

"Was Mann Weiss, Mann Sieht." I find that identifying fallacies can be good fun and, once one learns their names, it can be as amusing as bird-watching to silently identify the ones you see and hear everyday. It is more fun to notice the ones others use, but the real trick is to to identify the ones we find ourselves using. Self-deception is a great sin.