by Antony Flew
4.40 The closest actual analogue to a witch-hunt in the twentieth century would seem to have been the great terror launched by J. V. Stalin in the mid-1930s. But in that terror the most prominent victims were tortured into confessing to have committed offenses that were at least physically possible for human beings to have committed. In that case, on the other hand, those who ordered the torturing, and probably many of the torturers themselves, knew that those prominent victims had not in truth committed the offenses to which they were required to confess. (For the most comprehensive account of this great terror, revised in the light of evidence which has become available only since the collapse of the USSR, see Conquest 1992.)
5.1 The Fallacy of Pseudorefuting Description is essentially obscurantist. For the effect, and too often the object, of committing this fallacy is to dismiss blindly and with no evidencing reasons given whatever is so described. Today this fallacy is perhaps most commonly committed by describing someone’s beliefs about what is or is not the case as racist, and dismissing those beliefs from further consideration on that account alone. Here, as has been suggested earlier (see paragraphs 1.44–1.47), the crucial and too often unmade distinction is the one between, on the one hand, beliefs about what is or is not the case and, on the other hand, a kind of behavior, or, in the present case, misbehavior. When someone’s behavior is truly described as racist, it is inasmuch as the person has discriminated either in favor of or against individual members of some particular racially defined set for no other or better reason (on no other or better ground) than that those fortunate or, as the case may be, unfortunate individuals were members of that particular racially defined set. Such behavior is obviously unfair and on that account deplorable.
5.2 But suppose someone is condemned as a racist not for any such deplorable behavior but for his or her beliefs about what actually is or is not the case. For example, suppose that he or she has found evidencing reason to doubt, and has expressed their disbelief in, some of the implications of a remarkably comprehensive and categorical pronouncement issued in 1965 by the U.S. Department of Labor, a pronouncement issued on its own sheer authority and without the citation of any supporting evidence. This read: “Intelligence potential is distributed among Negro infants in the same proportion and pattern as among Icelanders or Chinese, or any other group. . . . There is absolutely no question of any genetic differential.”
5.3 But anyone who is condemned as a racist for no other or better reason than that he or she does not accept and has expressed disbelief concerning some of the implications of this departmental pronouncement is in effect being condemned as a heretic; a person, that is to say, who rejects some of the established and approved beliefs of a society of which he or she is a member. But the liberal and civilized way to deal with the propounders of heresies is not to make them outcasts but to try to refute their heresies (see paragraphs 1.57–1.58). Providing only and always that the heretical beliefs were the outcomes of open-minded and sincerely truth-seeking inquiry, heretics surely cannot be blamed for holding their no doubt erroneous beliefs?
5.4 In the three previous paragraphs I was taking it for granted that the allegedly racist beliefs are beliefs not about all members of particular racial sets but only about averages across those sets. All the allegedly racist beliefs that various psychologists, biologists, and social scientists have in recent years been denounced and hounded for holding and expressing have been of this statistical kind. These beliefs, therefore, provided no rational basis for discrimination either in favor of or against any particular individual member of any of the racial sets in question. For example, as stated earlier, from a proposition stating the average height of all the members of some set one cannot validly infer the height of any individual member of that set. The situation would be different if anyone claimed that members of some racial set either all possessed or all lacked some characteristic needed in many sorts of employment and achievement. But such a manifestly false belief could scarcely be the outcome of open-minded and sincerely truth-seeking inquiry.
5.5 Committing the Fallacy of Pseudorefuting Description is one way of disposing of disfavored assertions without undertaking the perhaps unachievable labor of refutation. Another more comprehensive way is to develop a systematic vocabulary on the lines of the “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s last appalling nightmare 1984 (1949). This once very widely known novel is probably little read since the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the emancipation of its satellite “People’s Democracies,” and the consequent end of the Cold War. For 1984 was written in 1948. It presents the author’s vision of life thirty-six years later in an England that has become a part of one of three global empires: Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceana.
5.6 Oceana, the largest of these empires, is ruled in a manner which Orwell saw as similar to J. V. Stalin’s rule in and over the USSR. In the book Oceana is developing a new artificial language in hopes that this will finally replace “Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050” (p. 305). The aim, as Orwell went on to explain in his appendix on the principles of Newspeak, was “to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. . . . Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. . . . Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum” (pp. 305–306). Orwell quotes the well-known passage from the American Declaration of Independence beginning: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . .” (pp. 317–18). The whole passage could in Newspeak be rendered only as “doubleplus ungood crimethink” (p. 318)—an impoverishing misrepresentation that carries with it a simultaneous and wholly prejudicial shudder of rejection (see paragraph 1.59).
5.7 Orwell’s concern with language as the main vehicle of thought and his commitment to struggle against all the tendencies that the inventors of Newspeak labored to promote can also be seen in his splendid essay on “Politics and the English Language” (in Orwell 1968). In it he picks out and pillories empty phrases and dead metaphors which do not so much express as conceal thought—or the lack of it. Above all he assails such euphemistic abstractions as “the elimination of unreliable elements,” abstractions that are both introduced and employed in order to distract attention from the cruelties and the injustices to which they refer.
5.8 Orwell’s concern in that essay is not the same as concern for and commitment to euphony and literary elegance. Both concerns are often found together—in Orwell himself, for instance. But any preference that any conservative English person may have for the Old World monosyllable “lift,” as opposed to its less terse transatlantic equivalent “elevator” is, when we are thinking about thinking, neither here nor there. What by contrast has to be relevant is any usage or abusage that tends either to reduce the stock of concepts available or to conceal the meaning of what is supposed to be being said.
5.9 I suppose in a philistine moment we might dismiss issues of the former kind as merely or trivially verbal. But if these are to be our paradigms of the merely verbal, then it becomes preposterous to condemn upon the same grounds questions of the second kind, too. For the nub of the distinction between these two different sorts of issue about words precisely is that the one refers only to possible forms of expression and not to the content of what might be said, whereas the other is concerned essentially with the meanings that are or might be expressed. The question of whether we should say “He got in touch with her” rather than “He contacted her” is indeed trivially verbal. But the question of whether we should say “He did kill him” rather than “He did not kill him” is, notwithstanding that it can be represented as a matter of whether or not to insert one particular three-letter word, a matter of substance. In the most literal se
nse it happens to be a question of life and death.
5.10 Therefore, although witty, it was unfair of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), the author of the famous history of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to ridicule the Christian world for splitting over an iota. For the fact that the dispute between those contending that the Son is of like substance (in Greek, homoiousios) and those maintaining that He is of the same substance (in Greek, homoousios) as the Father can be represented as a dispute over the insertion or excision of one Greek letter is a wretched reason for suggesting that any difference so symbolized must be correspondingly insignificant. It is none of our present business to decide whether this particular conclusion happens to be true or whether the great conflict centered on a distinction without a difference or whether it all was in some other way misguided or gratuitous. For us, the point is simply that Gibbon’s witticism provides no support whatever for any such conclusion.
5.11 From the beginning of chapter 1 I have been pointing out that and why, if we want to think better and straighter, we have to school ourselves to follow stricter and perhaps less common usages of certain crucial terms: “valid” and “invalid,” for instance, as well as “true” and “false,” “know” and “refute,” and “prejudice.” Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” extends this concern about language to include style and syntax as well as vocabulary: “People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck, or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called ‘elimination of unreliable elements’. . . . The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink” (Vol. IV, pp. 166–67).
5.12 Fuller development of the theme that some improvements of our style are necessary to the improvement of our thought I must leave to others, above all to Orwell himself. It is enough here to have said that this is so and to have insisted that this kind of concern about language is not to be dismissed as trivially verbal, whereas another kind of concern might be considered to be so. Orwell also suggests that the call for clear, brief, careful, concrete, and down-to-earth expression is a call for integrity, a call for honesty both to oneself and to other people. So let us note two of the maxims of that great French aphorist, the Marquis de Vauvenargues: “Obscurity is the kingdom of error” and “For the philosopher clarity is a matter of good faith.”
5.13 Vagueness, too, can be a fault. The first thing to notice about vagueness is that it ought not to be, although it often is, equated with ambiguity. To say of some word or expression or of some whole statement that it is ambiguous is to say that it can be construed in at least two different ways. (See, for instance, paragraphs 1.14–1.15 and 4.4–4.12.) Anyone who says this asks for, and should be ready to meet, the challenge: What two interpretations do you want to distinguish?
5.14 To complain of vagueness is to complain that what has been said is unacceptably indeterminate in some relevant dimension. To promise to stop by during the afternoon is to make a less precise commitment than to promise to arrive between four and six o’clock. Neither the more vague nor the more precise of these alternative promises is in any obvious way ambiguous. Equally a person may call something ambiguous without either of its alternative interpretations being such as to expose that person to the charge of imprecision. Suppose, however, that you ask me: “How did you expect them to behave?” Then your question will be importantly ambiguous. For it might reasonably be construed as an inquiry: either about what I had believed that they would in fact do; or about what I had considered that they ought to have done. Yet in neither of these different interpretations would your question have been in any obvious way vague or imprecise. Since this ambiguity of the word “expect” is one we need to keep in mind, I must follow some of my own advice (see paragraph 4.9). Let the first of the two senses just distinguished be labeled descriptive and the second prescriptive.
5.15 The second thing to notice about vagueness is that it is not a fault in a language that it provides, or provides for, some words and expressions that are more vague than others. It is reasonable to complain only when and insofar as “what has been said is unacceptably indeterminate in some relevant dimension.” Suppose that I am in no position to say more about my time of arrival than that it will be during the afternoon. Then it must be unjust to condemn me for not specifying closer limits, and it would be an awkward defect, not a merit, in my language if it rendered me unable to say the only thing I was entitled to assert. The traditional stock example of a vague term is the word “bald.” No doubt we could so redefine this word that in its future correct usage it implied some specific density of, or some specific total, hair population. But this would be a silly move. For we should be exchanging a humbly serviceable tool, which we often have occasion to employ, for a shiny new piece of futile equipment, which in our normal everyday life we never should be in a position to use correctly.
5.16 Vagueness, insofar as it is a matter of “what has been said” being unacceptably indeterminate “in some relevant dimension,” must be a bad thing. But whether or not some particular measure of indeterminacy is in some particular context culpable, we have to notice a third general point. It is that any indeterminacy in the premises of an argument is bound to infect whatever conclusions can be validly deduced from these premises with a precisely corresponding indeterminacy. Given appropriate alterations, exactly the same applies when it is a question of unreliability in the premises. That these things must be so follows from the essential nature of a valid deductive argument (see paragraph 1.10). Since to deny the conclusions of such an argument while nevertheless affirming its premises would be to contradict oneself, these conclusions must be implicitly or explicitly contained in those premises. It is therefore impossible to get more or better than you put in at the outset. The situation is the same as that epitomized in slogans once popular among hard-bitten computer buffs: “Garbage produces garbage!” or, better, “Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO)!”
5.17 The fourth point to be made about vagueness is that if you choose to redefine some vague term in such a way that it becomes in the usage thus stipulated more precise, then you will have given another and different meaning to that word: “To remove vagueness is to outline the penumbra of a shadow. The line is there after we have drawn it, but not before.”
5.18 Ambiguity may be innocuous. Surely little harm has ever come from the ambiguity of the word “bank”? In one sense a bank is that whereon, if both passersby and various public authorities permit, Shakespeare’s wild thyme blows. In the other a bank is what looks after your money and may or not be eager to lend you some of its own. Sometimes too ambiguities may be exploited in a way which is useful and perfectly straightforward.
5.19 Consider, for instance, an ambiguous term like “expect,” in which the two meanings, though different, are not logically incompatible. It therefore becomes possible for the leaders of organizations to announce in a single sentence not including any conjunction their expectations both that something ought to happen and that it will happen. By that very announcement they may hope to make it more likely that their expectation that the thing will happen will in the event not be disappointed. For English people the best-known example of such a deliberately and pointedly ambiguous announcement was the signal the charismatic English commanding Admiral Horatio Nelson ordered to be hoisted as his ships began to engage in the great decisive naval battle of the Napoleonic wars: “England expects every man to do his duty.”
5.20 Ambiguity becomes seriously confusing only where both interpretations of the ambiguous word or expression are relevant in the same context and where those two interpretations are in that context in some way in conflict. For example, consider the expression “religious knowle
dge.” It is employed in both weak and strong senses. In the former sense it refers to knowledge about the religious beliefs people actually hold and the religious practices those beliefs require and support, but without any implications either about the truth or falsity of these religious beliefs or about the propriety of the practices they support. In the latter sense the expression “religious knowledge” carries the implications that the religious beliefs in question constitute items of knowledge and that the associated practices are properly imperative.
5.21 There are two frequently realized dangers here. One is that those who have failed to observe this crucial distinction will mistake it that considerations sufficient to justify the teaching of religious knowledge in the weak sense must also, by the same token, be sufficient to justify its teaching in the strong sense. The other danger is that those who believe that there is no such thing as religious knowledge (strong sense) may fail to recognize the possibility of religious knowledge (weak sense) and hence fail to appreciate that there may nevertheless be a strong case for teaching children some items of that knowledge in their schools.
5.22 For another example of an important and often overlooked ambiguity consider An Approach to Social Policy (1975), an official document of the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) of the Republic of Ireland published by the Stationery Office in Dublin. From this document we discover that the NESC is by its terms of reference required to “promote social justice.” Such promotion apparently either involves or simply is “the fair and equitable distribution of the income and wealth of the nation.”
