by Propaganda
Africa is being overrun by Communists.” One value judgment involves the definition
of the term “Communist,” if it is not intended here to be limited to card-carrying
Communist Party members. A second value judgment enters with the verb “overrun,”
which signifies that the speaker thinks there are too many of the designated group in
the area. We need to attend to what the verb connotes—implies in addition to its literal
meaning—and to what the nouns denote—their literal meaning.24 The description of a
certain country as “overpopulated” may conceal the problem of food shortages caused
by market manipulations and corruption, or it may reflect negative racial attitudes
towards people in that country. Likewise, the statement that there is a “problem” with
some ethnic group may reflect a bias. Hitler’s “Jewish problem” was a “Nazi problem”
to Jews and many others.
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Logical Fallacies
Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have had an interest in taking note
of common fal acies in reasoning. A reason for doing so is to avoid making such mis-
takes. But these fal acies can also be exploited by the unscrupulous to deceive an audi-
ence. What follows is a list of language-linked fallacies, many of which date back to
Aristotle and earlier. Sometimes an alleged “fal acy” has legitimate use; it is important
to sort this out from the illegitimate.
1. The Ad Hominem Argument. This Latin expression literally means “to the person.”
It is a fal acy to reject what a person says or supports merely because the person can be
shown to have a bad character. A good policy does not become bad merely because a
bad person advocates it. The supposition that it does is sometimes called the genetic
fallacy. Likewise, a good person may advocate a bad policy. To avoid fal acious reasoning, we need to examine the case for or against a policy on its own merits, not on the
character of the person supporting it.
Attention to the character of the speaker is not always fallacious, for instance,
when the issue is one of trust. Indeed, as we have already seen, the establishment of
one’s credibility and the undermining of an opponent’s is a vital component of suc-
cessful rhetoric.
It is also not fal acious, when attacking a person’s support for a given measure, to
point out that the same person had presented diametrically opposed arguments on a
previous occasion where a similar measure affected his interests negatively. It is reason-
able to ask for sincerity and consistency in a person, at least to the point of cal ing for
reasons explaining sudden reversals. To advance only those arguments that suit one’s
interests, with no genuine concern for the general welfare, is called special pleading, and, when exposed, it tends to discredit the person making the argument. Still, even a
special pleader may have a good case, and the matter should not end with the exposure
of inconsistency in the person making the case.
2. False Cause. It is a fallacy to think that merely because one occurrence follows
another, the first causes the second. The real cause of hard times following upon the
election of a new governing party may lie with the financial mess left behind by the
previous government. The attribution of causality cannot be established merely by
the temporal sequence. It is sometimes called the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“after the thing, therefore because of the thing”). It comes into play when an action
appears to have a causal connection to a result; for instance, a politician takes credit
for prosperity, which resulted from no policy or action of his or her own but because
good weather caused a bumper harvest or because a major trading partner has an espe-
cially strong economy. An apocryphal medical story concerns the cure for warts: the
latest and least-tried cure turns out to be the most successful because it is tried last
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of all the remedies, by which time the wart has dropped off spontaneously. Once the cure gets a reputation for success and is tried first of all the remedies, it rapidly loses
its reputation.
In making statistical correlations, we need to be on our guard against assuming a
causal connection between two statistically correlated happenings because the connec-
tion may reflect a more fundamental cause. Suppose we find that, among octogenarians,
fewer smokers have Alzheimer’s disease than non-smokers. We cannot assume without
more evidence that cigarette smoking helps prevent Alzheimer’s merely because, among
the population of people in their 80s, there are proportionately fewer smokers with
Alzheimer’s than non-smokers with Alzheimer’s. The reason could be, given the many
years the disease exists before causing death, that smokers with Alzheimer’s die earlier
than non-smokers with Alzheimer’s because of the lethal effects of smoking; in other
words, there are fewer of them around to be counted. A possible alternative hypothesis is
that those who have the genetic constitution to resist death from lung cancer might also
have a superior constitution for resisting Alzheimer’s or other diseases. (Here my aim is
to call attention to the complexity of the issue, not to decide it one way or the other.)
3. Hasty Generalization. The prejudiced mind requires little evidence to draw conclu-
sions about how a whole class of people behave on the basis of having seen a very small
sample. A person has a bad experience with a lawyer and makes the blanket accusation
that all lawyers are crooked.
4. Ignoring the Question. It is a time-honoured device, used by officials pursued by
the media with some damaging accusation, to deflect the questioning by giving the
answer to some different issue, thus ignoring the actual question altogether. Canadian
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, when asked about the use of pepper spray by the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in British Columbia against a crowd protesting
the visit of Indonesian head of state General Suharto, responded that he, Chrétien,
used pepper on his plate.25
5. Ignoring the Logical Force and Direction of an Argument. It is possible, such is the nature of human irrationality, to sway people by producing excellent premises for an
argument, developing fine lines of argument based on those premises, and then pro-
ducing a totally irrelevant conclusion. An argument to the effect that a given crime
is heinous and needs to be punished does not answer the question whether a given
accused in fact committed such a crime. Building up emotional indignation can result
in easier bridging of this logical gap. It has been well said that just as iron is more mal-
leable at white heat, so people are more manipulable when their passions are aroused.
There is also an element of appeal to authority. If a person displays clever reason-
ing abilities through most of the argument, it builds confidence in what the person
says and lowers the level of alertness for possible slips in logic.
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6. Begging the Question. Fanatics especially are prone to this form of fal acy. They are so imbued with their own set of beliefs that they have difficulty putting themselves
in the mindset of someone who does not accept them. Thus, they will argue against
an opponent in a way that presupposes what is at issue between them. A frequently
used example of question-begging is that of the theist arguing against the atheist that
God must exist because the Bible asserts that God exists, and the Bible must be true
because it is divinely inspired. The belief that it is divinely inspired presupposes what
is contested, namely, that God exists. The example can be turned around. It is no less
circular for the atheist to reject the possibility of the Bible being divinely inspired
because God does not exist when that is the very point at issue. It is important to be
clear that circularity is not necessarily fal acious in itself. There is a question-begging
circularity only when a link in the circle is advanced in a way that purports to ground
some contested item while all along presupposing what is contested.
7. False Analogy. Our learning is constantly a matter of drawing analogies between
various events, circumstances, or things. Likewise, when we try to convince others
that some course of action is good or bad, we commonly appeal to similarities and
dissimilarities with other courses of action that have already been experienced. If it is
a matter of going to war or not going to war, arguments will be advanced linking the
situation to other experiences in the past by analogy. “Munich” has become symbolic
of any attempt at peace that involves appeasement of a dictator bent on conquest.
“Vietnam” for North Americans has become a symbol for getting involved in a costly
war in a faraway territory where guerilla warfare makes advanced weaponry largely
ineffective. Much debate on such questions is taken up with the extent to which a new
challenge resembles the circumstances of older challenges and whether the same or a
different policy would be better in the light of past experience.
It is always possible to find some kind of similarity between two different events,
sets of circumstances, or things. False analogy is the fallacy of placing undue weight
on some similarity or set of similarities while ignoring more important differences.
The argument that because more horses would have won the battle in a previous
war, therefore more horses are needed for a new war, is a false analogy, because in the
meantime machine guns and tanks may have made the horses useless.
There are important rhetorical pitfalls attending the use of analogy. The persuader
who wants to press an analogy for one purpose must take care that the same analogy
will not lend itself to even better use for an opposite purpose. A noted demographer
once tried to argue that the French language was not at risk in Quebec because the
language was surviving very well as things were. However, he took an analogy that
backfired in a most unpleasant way. He argued that in science, if you want to test for
some effect, you test under conditions where that effect is most likely to be found;
if the effect is not there, you have some assurance that it’s not likely to be anywhere
else either. So, if you are testing for pollution, you “give all possible chances to the
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pollutant element to exert its undesirable influence.” Therefore, in testing for the diminishing use of the French language, you should test it in a place close to where a
lot of English is spoken to see if there is an effect from this proximity. The demogra-
pher’s argument favoured federalism, since he noted that French in the Hull area (now
renamed Gatineau), across the river from English-speaking Ottawa was surviving well.
However, the media seized indignantly on the comparison between English and pol-
lution, either choosing not to see, or simply missing, the more abstract point he was
trying to make.26
8. Amphiboly. Language is full of sentence constructions that can be parsed differ-
ently to get different meanings. The word “amphiboly” applies to cases of ambiguity
stemming from the construction of a whole phrase or sentence rather than an indi-
vidual term. Headlines often provide amusing ambiguity in this way, as the following
examples taken from the Internet indicate: “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim,” “Miners
Refuse to Work after Death,” “Deer Kill 17,000,” “Include Your Children when Baking
Cookies,” “Enraged Cow Injures Farmer With Ax,” “Juvenile Court to Try Shooting
Defendant,” “Kids Make Nutritious Snacks,” and so on. A constant source of jokes is
the amphiboly in “Drink Canada Dry.” Propaganda enters the picture when amphib-
oly is deliberately exploited to induce people to understand the meaning in one (false)
way while answering the charge of lying by pointing to another (true) meaning.
9. Accident. The fal acy of accident, noted by Aristotle, involves taking something that is nonessential and treating it as essential. If a person is insulted by not being invited to a dinner, it is fal acious to think that the particular insult can be removed by the person buying herself an equivalently delicious meal somewhere else. The insult is tied to
the fact of not being invited, not to the contents of the dinner. Gun control opponents
sometimes argue that murder is not essentially connected with guns because people
who want to kill can do so with knives or other methods. It is chance, they say, that
someone chooses a gun for the purpose, so that limiting the availability of guns will
not stop such murders. If they are right, the view that guns are responsible for murders
is an example of the fallacy of accident. However, as long as at least a proportion of
people who kill by guns in fact would not have done so if guns were less freely avail-
able, with the result that fewer people overall would be murdered, there is no fal acy
of accident. Instead, there is a material connection between the availability of guns
and the number of murders.
Misleading Imputations of Intention
One major opportunity for misleading a public arises from the ambiguity and impre-
cision in our language as it relates to action descriptions, in particular to the mental
state accompanying actions. To take one example, the verb “to kill” and cognates such
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as “killing” can be used in the case of an intentional killing (murder, with some possible exceptions) and for an accidental killing. To say nothing more than “A killed B”
when the killing was accidental will leave open, in the mind of the hearer, the pos-
sibility that the killing was intentional. Particularly if the accidental killing was not
associated with negligence, the failure to modify “killed” with the word “accidentally”
is likely to create a false impression. The propagandist may want to discredit some
enemy, and one way of doing this is to exploit this kind of ambiguity.
Let us first look at some actual examples. Once again, it is worth repeating the
cautionary remark that false or misleading impre
ssions are not always conveyed wit-
tingly. One example comes from the Globe and Mail of January 26, 1984; the front-
page headline stated, “Nazis fled after war with help of Vatican, U.S. document
reveals.” The headline suggests, without clearly asserting, that the Vatican knowingly
helped Nazis escape, even though there was no good evidence in the story itself that
the relevant knowledge was present. On the contrary, the story quoted Reverend
Antonio Weber, who headed Opera San Rafaele, the Vatican’s organization for emi-
gration aid during World War II, as saying that his office helped many people, includ-
ing about 20,000 Jews fleeing Hitler, without knowing their real identities in many
cases. “We didn’t know if they were or weren’t war criminals,” Father Weber is quoted
as saying. “Even if these war criminals came with their real names, who knew at the
time they were war criminals?” Now common sense tells us that under the circum-
stances it is very likely the Vatican would have assisted some Nazis without knowing
they were Nazis. The important question is that of knowledge, and the story provided
no good evidence on that point. So the headline creates an unfavourable impression
of the Vatican that the story itself does not warrant.27
On May 24, 1984, the same newspaper boxed a headline on the summary col-
umn of page one: “Pope Fouls Up Bar Mitzvah.” The story concerned the change of
plans for a bar mitzvah necessitated by the large crowds anticipated because of the
pope’s visit in the area of the synagogue where it was to be held. Obviously, the pope
intended no such problem by his visit, even though it was a foreseeable outcome that
many changes in plans would have to be made in the light of anticipated crowds. To fix
on one such plan, treating it in isolation from the general set of problems, and describ-
ing the pope’s relation to it by the somewhat intention-imputing verb “to foul up,”
encourages the belief that the pope is disposed malevolently towards bar mitzvahs—if
not in general, then this one in particular. Stated explicitly, the idea is absurd, but the
essence of a very effective way of affecting beliefs and attitudes is that this be done by
suggestion rather than statement.28
A further example of dubious imputation of intention was made by Canadian
