Like this person: “Let’s get married. We like to fish together. We share the same tastes in food and movies, and I love your cat.” The reasons given might support a proposal to marry your sister or your best friend and live in a kind of platonic relationship. The reasons do not touch on whether there is sufficient love to warrant spending the rest of p. 278 their lives together, an item of some importance to some people considering marriage and of major importance to most.
Impossible precision is impossible.
When precision is guessed at, when approximate times are treated as if they were precise, or when one uses data that cannot be known or obtained with the degree or precision claimed, the evidence is insufficient and therefore the argument is faulty.
For example, “Humans use only 10 percent of their brain power.” Such a scientific-sounding statement must be wrong, though most of us are impressed by it because it seems to indicate that we all are much smarter than we appear. However, it is doubtful that information about such a vaguely described possibility (what the hell is brain power, anyway?) could be available or even precisely calculable. A more reasonable statement that would make a similar claim would be, “Each of us has some brain power that we don’t use.”
What about the person who says, “His whole life was ruined by the one mistake he made in high school.” How many people do you know who made only one mistake in high school? I made plenty of mistakes in high school. In fact, I was expelled from my first high school. Chances are that the guy made plenty of mistakes, as I did, including the one that caused his ruin. That statement was phrased the way it was because the speaker, a lawyer, was trying to get sympathy from the jury. After all, his client made only one mistake and got ruined. Is that fair? Wouldn’t you want to do something nice to help correct that unfortunate situation?
What about this? “This table is not perfectly clean. Clean it again.” Equally absurd is strict adherence to impossible standards and then blaming someone for not following the standard strictly. That the table is not perfectly clean is probably true. But that may not be relevant in context if the table is a picnic table in the backyard. On the other hand, the close-to-perfect standard should be applied to operating room tables or to tables on which microchips for computers are being assembled.
Or this? “General Patton, your plan for the invasion of Germany is not perfect.” To that congressional criticism, Patton replied, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” After that, he got authorization to take the third army across France and invade Germany.
Or this? “Your book on logic is good, but not perfect. Please revise and resubmit.” A more constructive editorial criticism would have been a discussion of the specific areas that need improvement and specific examples on how those improvements might be accomplished.
p. 279 Or this? “Jimmy, you failed algebra again.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” said Jimmy.
True, nobody is perfect. But that is irrelevant to the issue under discussion. It certainly is not adequate evidence to explain why Jimmy failed algebra.
Out-of-context evidence is a partial selection and, to that extent, is inadequate.
When I was interviewed by Frontline, I felt I did a fair job of defending my research on breast implants. My research over the course of fifteen years indicated that the breast implant did not deliver beautiful breasts. Instead, in many cases the breasts were deformed due to rupture of the implant, local spread of the silicone that had been in the implant, and a strong inflammatory reaction to the silicone that in most cases formed a thick, hard capsule of scar tissue that encircled the breast.
When the program about my research was aired, no one was more surprised than I was at the result. By skillful editing and rearrangement of the film clips and my statements, I was made to look like a jerk. In fact, according to the program, I didn’t even believe my own research. Of course, that was not true. I believed it all right, perhaps too much.
Example: “Dr. Patten, the president of the International Society of Plastic Surgeons has called you a junk scientist. How do you respond to that?”
“I am a junk scientist.”
That’s what it looked like I said. But actually I said, “I am a junk scientist because I have been studying a piece of junk. That’s what the breast implant is and was and probably will always be—a piece of junk.”
By taking my remark out of context and leaving out my spin on the “junk scientist” appellation, the program misled the audience into thinking that I made a terrible admission, which I did not. The audience thought I considered myself a junk scientist. People were not permitted to get the rest of the statement, which would have thrown a different meaning on what I said.
Out-of-context quotations are a favorite trick of TV people. Don’t be fooled by TV’s out-of-context deceptions, which frequently take the form of sound bites. Please take my advice. Don’t watch TV at all. TV is just junk food for the mind.
Principle: Most TV and all sound bites are simplistic partial selections.
p. 280 From which follows:
Lesson: Never fall for or believe a sound bite for a sound bite is the simplest reduction of a simplistic argument
* * *
Determine truth by evaluating all the available evidence for relevance and adequacy. Evidence must relate directly to the conclusion and must be sufficient in number, kind, and weight to support the conclusion.
Before you work on something, make sure it is important. First ask yourself, “So what?” or “Who cares?” If your answer is that you don’t care and that the information doesn’t concern or apply to you (this will include 99 percent of the filler on TV), forget it. Go have some fun. If the answer is that you do care, then work on the information using the summary charts below. Test the evidence for relevance and adequacy.
REVIEW
1. All emotional appeals are irrelevant, including appeals
• to pity
• to force
• to threat
• to special or personal interest
• by bribe, extortion, honor lists, or underhanded coercive activities
• to strong feelings including charity, love, shame, guilt
• for, to, or by use of flattery
All name calling, innuendo, obloquy, or implications of wrongdoing—including ad hominem arguments, tu quoque, and the like—are irrelevant because they are emotionally based and cannot relate to the truth of any conclusion.
2. All appeals to authority per se are irrelevant, including appeals
• to common sense
• to popular opinion
• on the basis of age (or youth)
• to ignorance (closely related to popular opinion and still wrong)
• to reasons that are not reasons but rationales
• to tradition, culture, custom, individuals, and groups—all of which are not immune to error
p. 281 Appeals to “experts” are frequently irrelevant; this includes textbook writers, teachers, lawyers, politicians, doctors, movie stars, journalists, and especially TV commentators. Who they are doesn’t count. Their evidence, if true, does count if and only if that evidence is relevant and adequate to support the conclusion.
3. All linguistic confusions are irrelevant, including
• vague definitions
• ambiguity (including syntactic ambiguity or amphiboly)
• broadcast definition wrong
4. All circular arguments are irrelevant, including
• tautology
• pleonasm
• begging the question
• leading questions
• double talk
Closely related but different is supererogation, which tends to raise the question of why the speaker needed to apply more proofs, assertions, or statements than were needed. Another name for this fallacy is “The lady doth protest too much.”
5. Unwarranted assumptions are irrelevant, including
• assertions not supported by evidence
• (so-called) self-evident truths
• continuum arguments (including the is-ought mistake—because a thing exists doesn’t mean it ought to or should continue to exist)
• the fallacy of novelty (opposite of the continuum but still wrong)
• the fallacy of composition
• the fallacy of division
• the fallacy of wishful (or optative) thinking
• the fallacy of the mean
• false analogy
• neglect of a common cause
• the less the better fallacy
• the more the better fallacy
6. Attempts to divert attention from real issues are irrelevant, including
p. 282 • trivial objections
• red herrings
• diversionary humor or ridicule
• extension, distortion, or misstatement of opposing evidence or arguments
• distinction without a difference
• all gimmicky distractions, double talk, chit-chat, patter, and empty talk
If evidence passes muster for relevance, it must then be examined for adequacy.
7. Causal fallacies create insufficient evidence that is inadequate, including
• confusion of necessary with sufficient
• oversimplification
• post hoc
• confusion of cause and effect
• domino theory
• gambler’s fallacy
• psychological fallacy (explaining what happened doesn’t justify it)
8. Missing evidence is never adequate, including
• contradiction
• inconsistency (including oxymoron)
• insufficient evidence
• unrepresentative evidence
• future fact presented as if it were certain and not contingent
• contrary-to-fact assertions
• impossible precision
• special pleading
• omission of key evidence
• denying the counter-evidence
• ignoring the counter-evidence
• taking evidence out of context
QUESTIONS
Here are some questions you might ask to try to get at the truth value about situations and statements that come your way.
p. 283 1. What’s the topic? What’s the issue or controversy? What’s the main conclusion? Does it seem right? If it doesn’t seem right, what seems wrong about it?
2. What evidence supports the conclusion? Is the evidence relevant? (If the evidence is not relevant, the conclusion is dubious.)
3. Are there any inconsistencies, contradictions, or tautologies? Is the information from a self-interested or biased source? (If so, the conclusion is dubious.)
4. If the evidence is relevant, is the evidence sufficient in number, kind, and weight to support the conclusion? (If not, the evidence is inadequate, and the conclusion is not reasonable.)
5. Is there a doubt about the meaning of terms or the general significance of what is stated? (All vagueness must be clarified before the conclusion can be understood, much less justified.)
6. What reasons are against the conclusion? (Negative reasons must be shown to be either false or irrelevant to the matter at hand. Otherwise, they must be given their due weight in the net overall justification of the conclusion.)
Notes
1. The full text of the Declaration of Sentiments is available in June Sochen, Herstory: A Woman’s View of American History (New York: Alfred, 1974), pp. 415-25.
2. Robert H. Rimmer, The Harrad Experiment (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990).
3. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1950), p. 69.
4. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illust. John Tenniel and colored by Fritz Kredel (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 132. All references to Alice are to this edition.
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Mindlin, “Boy Killer’s Fate Up to the Jury,” Long Island Press, June 24, 1958, p. 1.
10 – The Logic of Alice
p. 285 This parting chapter is fun. In it, you will practice what you have learned. The examples below, some new and some by way of review, come from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, henceforth known as AAW.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a shy, eccentric bachelor who taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. He had a great fondness for playing with mathematics, logic, and words; for writing nonsense; and for the company of little girls, especially one named Alice Liddell (rhymes with fiddle), the daughter of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford.
Dodgson’s passions somehow fused into two great masterpieces of English literature, the Alice books, immortal fantasies whose fame surpassed that of all Carroll’s colleagues at Oxford put together.
If the Alice books had any “porpoise” besides entertaining little girls, it is to send you, the reader, to the pleasures of logic and philosophy and, as Carroll says in the Introduction to Learners (1897) “to give a chance of adding a very large item to your stock of mental delights.”[1]
Carroll’s special genius lies in his ability to disguise charmingly the seriousness of his concerns and to make the most playful quality of his work at the same time its didactic crux. In the case of Alice, we are dealing with a very curious, complicated kind of nonsense, which explores the possibilities of the use and abuse of language and is actually based on a profound knowledge of the rules of clear thinking, informal and formal logic, symbolic logic, and human nature. In fact, most of Carroll’s aperçus and jokes are inversions or distortions of the p. 286 rules of logic or demonstrations of the ambiguities of language. Reason is in service here to imagination, not vice versa.
Oh, yes, those oddball characters. What about them? I like to think that the characters Alice meets are Oxford dons that the real Alice knew well. They certainly sound like dons with their fine mastery of Socratic logic, their crushing repartee, and the disconcerting and totally unselfconscious eccentricity of their conduct.
The wealth of material that Carroll presents for the illumination of philosophy is almost without end. The more I read it and the more I think about it, the more I find. In fact, I have reached the conclusion that AAW is, in actual fact, a story so deep as to yield results in exegesis almost beyond belief.
I urge you to read all of it yourself. Read it at your leisure while sober, and read it at your leisure while drunk, so that both your left and right hemispheres can fully participate in the fun. Along the way, try to capture some of the full wit and wisdom of Lewis Carroll as I try to capture them in the examples that follow.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”[2]
Alice is a child lost in a world not fully understood. Her situation reflects in the microcosm what we (adults and children) experience, more or less, in our everyday lives. That is one of Carroll’s main points, of course. But this point aside, let’s look at Alice’s thinking.
When we assume the point in dispute and take for granted the truth of something that requires proof, we are begging the question. Alice assumes a book without pictures is bad. Thus, Alice begs the question. Assumptions (including those begged) not supported by evidence are irrelevant. Therefore, a conclusion based on them is likely to be wrong.
In her assumption, Alice overgeneralizes because she takes for granted that because she doesn’t like books without pictures, others would not like such books, either. Egocentric views of the world are not restricted to little girls in picture books, as we all know.
To prove Alice’s generalized statement wrong, we need find only one exception, one book that has no conversations or pictur
es but is p. 287 still useful. Since there are literally hundreds of thousands of books without conversations and pictures, it would be highly unlikely that at least one of them wouldn’t be useful to someone.
By singling out two of the many criteria that can be used to judge a book, Alice partially selects evidence (trivial evidence at that), constructs a straw man for defeat, and reaches a conclusion that is not justified by the data: She has not read the book. Therefore, she is in no position to make an intelligent judgment about its usefulness or uselessness.
Furthermore, Alice is overlooking factual evidence: Her sister is interested in the book. In fact, her sister is deeply engrossed in reading it. Therefore, the book is already of some use to someone—her sister. So Alice is actually denying the evidence at hand. Denying or ignoring any available relevant evidence is an error in thinking and goes against the principles of correct reasoning.
Alice is being simple and simplistic. Often a book is a complex thing. Writers work long and hard trying to get their books right, fashioning out of chaos, in the torment of their souls, something intricate, intelligent, interesting, and occasionally beautiful. A critic of books should exercise the same due diligence in evaluating books as was exercised in creating them. Without a complex analysis, a reasonable conclusion cannot be reached about a book’s usefulness.
Poor Alice! She is using weak-sense thinking. She should be using strong-sense thinking to evaluate all evidence, claims, and beliefs, including her own biased opinions about what constitutes a useful book.
In a certain sense, there is also a linguistic confusion in her conclusion because she is using the word use idiosyncratically. Vague definitions preclude logical conclusions. Until we know what she means by a useful book, we can only guess at her definition. I sense that by use she means “entertaining and easy to look at and read.” Others, myself included, might consider such a book pretty much useless. Regardless, all vagueness must be clarified before the conclusion can be understood, much less justified.
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 34
