Even when, without warning, the German boat U-30 sank the British liner Athenia, killing 112 people, including 28 Americans, Hitler personally ordered (Nuremberg documents show) a radio broadcast and newspaper article that said that Churchill, the first lord admiral of the British navy, sank the Athenia by placing a time bomb in the ship’s hold! Churchill did that to make Germany look bad!
After you finish reading this book, it will be an interesting experience for you to work out on the history of Nazi Germany as detailed in Shirer’s scholarly work. As you do so, you might pay attention to the multiple errors in thinking that allowed Hitler to gain power. Pay attention to Hitler’s war on drugs, then his war on drug addicts and the reasons for it. That war was followed by war on private ownership of guns. Pay attention to Hitler’s arguments against private possession of weapons. We hear the same and similar antigun arguments today. After that, work out what was behind Hitler’s castration of child pornographers. And then, consider the Hitlerian target “the degenerate homosexuals.” The gypsies were next, followed by the communists, socialists, artists, writers, and, of course, the Jews. In each case, the attack on the segment of the German population seemed to make sense. It seemed to make sense unless you thought about it for a few minutes. After you thought about what Hitler did and why he did it, it still made sense but with a darker significance. See if you don’t agree that a little thinking would easily have disclosed the grim plan that Hitler and the Nazis had p. 172 in mind. As Bunsby says in Dickens’s Dombey and Son, “The bearings of this observation lays in the application on it.”[2]
Review
By now you know the drill. Review the chapter as you did the previous ones. On the other hand, if you feel you don’t need a review, pass on to the next chapter. If you are not sure whether you need the drill, answer the twelve questions below. If you get 70 percent correct or better, you’re OK. If you get less than 70 percent, better reread all the italicized sections not only in this chapter but in all the previous chapters.
1. Consider the statement: “Logic is like a fine-edged sword; the more you use it, the sharper it gets.” Which of the following is truest?
A. The statement is correct.
B. The statement is a false analogy.
C. The statement is a false analogy because a fine-edged sword becomes blunt when used, whereas the use of logic does tend to improve performance.
D. Logic is an exact science, so sword analogies do not apply to it.
2. Consider the statement: “Coke is it.”
A. The statement is vague.
B. Both Coke and it remain undefined.
C. The statement is an advertising slogan designed to have the widest possible application to sell, despite its lack of intelligent reference to reason or evidence, Coca-Cola to the widest possible audience. Cynical advertising men have made the statement vague on purpose.
D. A, B, and C are true.
3. After the September 11 attacks, President Bush announced, ”Those who did this were cowards.” Considering the dictionary definition of coward, “someone who out of fear fails to act,” what can be said of the president’s statement?
A. The statement is not true.
B. The statement is an example of broadcast definition wrong.
C. The president should have said that the terrorists were dasp. 173tards, because the word dastard, a sneaky evildoer, is much closer to what the terrorists really were. D. A, B, and C are correct.
4. Consider the statement: “The brain is a computer.”
A. No way, José.
B. The statement is true because both the brain and a computer can add numbers.
C. The statement is true because learning about the brain teaches us about computers.
D. The statement is true because the brain and computers are made of similar materials and work in the same way in the same environment.
5. Consider the statement: “History repeats itself.”
A. Historical analogies are exceedingly common and frequently fallacious.
B. History seldom repeats itself exactly, despite the maxim to the contrary, because present and historical situations are seldom exactly the same.
C. The statement contains no grounds beyond mere assertion for the suggestion that history repeats itself.
D. A, B, and C are true.
6. A cold-calling broker from New York tells you that the investment tip he is about to give you is perfect. He says that if you follow his tip, you cannot possibly lose. What can you conclude from the man’s statement?
A. He is lying. Nothing is perfect. The future performance of an investment can never be predicted with absolute confidence.
B. He might be on to something.
C. It’s a long shot but worth sending him some money to see what happens.
D. A, B, and C are correct.
7. The war on drugs
A. begs the question by assuming the war on drugs is a good thing.
B. begs the question by assuming the war on drugs can be won.
C. begs the question by assuming the drug problem is solvable and that the solution, or part of the solution, is a war on drugs.
D. A, B, and C are correct.
p. 174 8. Consider the statement: “Another politician sent to prison. It shows that politicians can never be trusted.”
A. The statement is a generalization.
B. The statement is true.
C. The statement is founded on complete and adequate evidence that supports it entirely.
D. The conduct of a few members of a group is a good indication of the conduct of the group in general.
9. Consider the statement made by a reporter for PBS: “Everyone in this little town of 20,000 people knows that the al-Qaida are now fighting to the death on the hillside just nineteen kilometers from here.”
A. The statement can’t be entirely true unless everyone in the town was interviewed and agreed that al-Qaida was fighting to the death on the hillside nineteen kilometers from where the reporter was standing.
B. The statement is an example of exaggeration by the reporter.
C. The statement can be proven wrong by finding one person in the village who does not agree with the statement.
D. A, B, and C are correct.
10. Consider these headlines that were taken from the Washington Post, December 23, 1988: “Drexel Settlement Is Taken in Stride by Wall Street”; “Drexel Case Likely to Have Serious Impact on Wall Street.”
A. One or both headlines must be wrong because two opposite things cannot be simultaneously true. If both are wrong, they are contraries. If one is wrong and the other is right, they are either contradictions or contraries.
B. The headlines are a fine example of fine journalism using a technique called “doublethink” in which contrary ideas are held to be true as discussed in the novel 1984.
C. The headlines taken together are a self-contradiction in which their conjunction has a truth value of zero.
D. A and C are correct.
11. Consider the following:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
p. 175 A. The three statements are slogans.
B. The three statements are bizarre contradictions and examples of “doublethink.”
C. The statements are the leaden motto of Ingsoc, the government of Oceania in the novel 1984.
D. A, B, and C are correct.
12. “These are the best sultanas,” says the grocer, who then adds in one breath: “How can you expect the best sultanas at that price?”
A. The two statements contradict each other because statement two implies that statement one is not true.
B. We can’t figure out whether the statements are true without knowing what sultanas are.
C. The grocer’s statements may reflect a flaw common to the business mind.
D. A and C are correct.
Answers:
1. C is correct because it is the answe
r that is the most true. D is wrong because logic is not an exact science. Who said it was? Whether logic is a science depends on the definitions of science and logic. Under ordinary definitions of those words, logic is neither a science nor is it exact. In fact, in the introduction I did not call logic a science. I called logic an art. Logic is an art in the sense that it is an immediate, personal, creative, and imaginative craft requiring adroitness and cunning for successful performance.
2. D
3. D
4. A
5. D
6. A
7. D
8. A
9. D
10. D
11. D
12. D
Notes
p. 176 1. Quoted in Eric Fromm, afterword to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1950), p. 263.
2. Bunsby in Dombey and Son quotes Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Paradox 3,” in Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, 13th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), p. 34, column a.
5 – Partial Selection of the Evidence
p. 177 This chapter covers a common error in thinking known as partial selection of the evidence, which leads away from the truth and toward blunder. To arrive at the truth, we must consider all the evidence, not just part of it. If we exclude reasonable evidence from consideration, our view of reality dims and the chance of error increases.
In a way, partial selection of evidence is the root error in false analogy, overgeneralization, and simplification. Those errors extract elements from an argument while ignoring other elements that are just as important. Hence, the partial selection. Partial selection is also the root error in a particularly pernicious form of error known as prejudice.
Prejudice damages not only the victim, the person who is prejudiced against, but also the perpetrator, the person being prejudiced. At times, prejudice leads us to a form of self-serving bias called special pleading wherein we adopt arguments favorable to ourselves while neglecting those favorable to our opponents.
Any opinion based on inadequate evidence, incomplete evidence, or erroneous evidence is, to that extent, a partial selection and therefore unreasonable. Thus, evaluating evidence becomes key, but it is quadruplely difficult: (1) We must include in our considerations all the relevant available evidence. (2) We must decide whether that evidence is adequate and sufficient—that is, whether we have enough evidence to reach a reasonable conclusion and whether the evidence justifies the conclusion. (3) We must decide whether all the evidence is reasonable. (4) If not all the evidence is reasonable, we must decide which part of the evidence is reasonable and which part is not.
p. 178 Sifting evidence to make sure it is true is not an easy task, especially in modern times, when deliberate efforts have been made to deceive us. Aside from overt fraud, the irrational feature that interferes with our correct evaluation of evidence, aside from mental laziness and stupidity, is our emotions. Emotional factors derail our thinking because fundamentally we are not entirely rational beings.
A delusion is a false belief not part of a religious system that is not amenable to logical persuasion. One of the most remarkable delusions that most of us hold is that we are purely rational by nature. Multiple lines of evidence point to a rather large role for emotion in the human scheme of things. (That, perhaps, is why we need a little book like this one to teach us how to be more rational.)
Some psychologists even say that the majority of our species are governed by brute passion, greed, and prejudice. Our most confident judgments and received opinions owe more to instinct than to serious thinking. In fact, reason, like virtue, is something of which we are capable, but it requires effort, often great effort, to achieve.
We are under the delusion that we are purely rational because it is more comfortable for our bruised egos to believe that idea than to accept the reverse. We tend to operate in a way that protects our egos. We do this unconsciously through the operation of our unconscious mind.
Yes, unconscious mind. Considerable psychological and psychiatric evidence indicates that our mental lives consist of two parts: the conscious part, with thoughts and feelings of which we are immediately aware, and the unconscious part, which shelters our primitive instincts, our automatic responses, our emotional drives (like the drives toward sex and food), as well as our memories not at present in the consciousness, including some important memories that are not immediately recallable because they are, for emotional reasons, suppressed.
When someone tried to kiss my wife at a party, I was furious. Momentarily, I wanted to kill the guy. That that thought crossed my mind need not surprise us. Five thousand years of civilization could scarcely abolish instincts based on two hundred thousand years of savagery. Instead of hitting the guy, my drink “accidentally” spilled on his crotch. He had to leave the room to wash up. Thus, discretion prevailed. My drive to kill a rival man became suppressed. But it mutated, changed into a different form, and surfaced again in (thin) disguise as a milder p. 179 form of aggression directed (significantly) at the anatomical area with which my unconscious mind was most concerned.
Mental mechanisms conceal emotional truths.
Was my reaction entirely irrational? Probably not. Substantial work shows that emotions can have (at times) epistemic content. The instinctive distrust of strangers, for example, puts us on guard against a clever con man. Sensing danger to my domestic tranquility and happiness, my behavior appears more understandable.
The mental mechanisms by which our conscious mind conceals the unconscious emotional truths from us are well known to psychiatrists. They include things like suppression, repression, projection, isolation of affect, derealization, depersonalization, displacement, déjà vu, and so forth. They are more germane to a psychiatry textbook than they are to a handbook on thinking. But knowing them will help you understand your emotional life better and lead to emotional truth. These mental mechanisms, though not directly related to thinking or logic, are important enough for you to look them up in a textbook of psychiatry. One of them, rationalization, the assertion of a false reason for our opinions or action, is discussed more fully later in this chapter. At present, our task is to try to understand the fact that unconscious drives do interfere with clear thinking.
Having worked with the mentally ill as a physician, I know that lunatics are quite human. Their delusions, hallucinations, and abnormal thought processes have counterparts in everyday thinking. Only a matter of degree and certain qualitative differences separate a psychotic patient who thinks he is Bill Gates, the billionaire, and the normal daydreamer who imagines what he would do with Gates’s money if he had it. Imagining that you will win the Texas lottery is only one step removed from daydreaming that you are rich. No one plays the lottery without wishing to win. No one plays the lottery without thinking how to use the money.
Consider the following patient. She is a woman, thirty-two, dressed in sloppy army fatigues. When asked if she wanted to tell me anything, she said, “I am really very beautiful. But I am disguised as something ugly.”
“Why are you disguised?” I asked.
“Because I came to Earth in a spaceship and found that the people here like to kill the beautiful. Why is that, doctor?”
“Why is what?”
“Why do Earth people like to kill the beautiful?”
p. 180 “What I think is not important. What do you think about that?” I asked.
“Don’t give me that psychiatry shit!”
This woman was dressed for battle, so I expected a fight. Notice she knows that she is not beautiful but wants to live with the false idea that she is beautiful. To make that idea fit with the contrary evidence seen in the mirror, she has constructed an elaborate fantasy that she came to this planet in a spaceship. The elaboration of the fantasy is that she discovered on arrival here that Earth people kill the beautiful. Her ego finds this false idea more consoling than facing the truth and doing something constructive to improve her looks. Notice when she invited me into he
r fantasy, I could not support it. To support or agree with a delusion would have been unprofessional. Instead, I asked her for her opinion. She had seen enough psychiatrists to know that that was a ploy. She replied in anger. Her mind cannot endure the idea that she is wrong on this important issue. To maintain her inner harmony, she must attack others who threaten her delusional system. In fact, she was in the hospital for acting out her anger by stabbing another woman (who was beautiful).
Is there much difference between this patient and a woman who wants to be told that she is beautiful even though she knows in her heart of hearts that she isn’t? Is there much difference between this patient and a woman who reacts in anger when her doctor advises her that she is too fat and needs to lose fifteen pounds? Is there a difference between this woman and a small boy who is unlikely to become an astronaut, pretending that he is flying a spaceship to Mars? Is there much difference when we go to a play or film or read a novel and use those things to (in part) fulfill in our imagination what we cannot enjoy in reality?
Principle: Deep-seated emotional needs may prevent perception of the truth.
From which follows:
Lesson: Whenever the response exceeds the stimulus or weird, unjustified, and unjustifiable reasons are given, look for emotional factors at work.
Yep, it’s really too bad that the human mind works that way. But that is the reality—we like to delude ourselves into thinking that we are p. 181 important or famous or that we know more than we do or that we will be rich someday. What’s wrong with that?
Such delusions prevent reality-based actions that might actually improve the situation by leading to a correction.
The human mind cannot usually endure conflict and is prepared to go to any length in the pursuit of a certain false harmony. The policy is appeasement. In the process of repelling thoughts and ideas that threaten to disturb its composure, the mind is most recklessly irrational. Scientists know this and try to prevent it by conscious action.
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 21
