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Ad Hominem Abusive, Ad hominem circumstantial, General discussion, inconsistency, Robert Samuelson

Hobgoblin

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Too much of our critical political discourse depends on one single virtue: consistency.  This is why Pat Buchanan, a man who writes articles (I am not exaggerating) in praise of Hitler–is a kind of pundit saint.  Since consistency matters, and consistency depends on memory–or rather, detecting someone's inconsistency depends on remembering what she's said in the past, let's have some fun with our favorite son on an economist, Robert Samuelson.  Samuelson, is like the captain bringdown of the Post editorial page.  He's got a droopy mustache, a dour expression, and he poo-poos just about everyone who tries to do something about something–environmentalists are dumb and self-indulgent for buying Priuses!. 

For a while–for those who remember–Samuelson been poo-pooing Obama's "self-indulgence" on health insurance reform.  A more competent rhetorical analyst, by the way, might have fun with the way he always goes ad hominem on Obama–treating his own impoverished and uncharitable image of Obama rather than Obama's stated positions (he even admitted once that this was his own problem).  But it's worthwhile to poke fun at Samuelson's priorities.  Way back before we spent 700 plus billion dollars in Iraq, chasing what turned out to be an easily uncovered deception, here is what Samuelon wrote:

A possible war with Iraq raises many unknowns, but "can we afford it?" is not one of them. People inevitably ask that question, forgetting that the United States has become so wealthy it can wage war almost with pocket change. A war with Iraq would probably cost less than 1 percent of national income (gross domestic product). Americans have grown accustomed to fighting with little economic upset and sacrifice.

Pocket change.  In reflecting on this piece (called "A War We Can Afford") Samuelson wrote:

Yes, that column made big mistakes. The war has cost far more than I (or almost anyone) anticipated. Still, I defend the column's central thesis, which remains relevant today: Budget costs should not shape our Iraq policy. Frankly, I don't know what we should do now. But in considering the various proposals — President Bush's "surge," fewer troops or redeployment of those already there — the costs should be a footnote. We ought to focus mostly on what's best for America's security.

When it comes things that are actually real, on the other hand, Samuelson is skeptical:

When historians recount the momentous events of recent weeks, they will note a curious coincidence. On March 15, Moody's Investors Service — the bond rating agency — published a paper warning that the exploding U.S. government debt could cause a downgrade of Treasury bonds. Just six days later, the House of Representatives passed President Obama's health-care legislation costing $900 billion or so over a decade and worsening an already-bleak budget outlook.

900 billion?  That figure is almost exactly what we've spent in seven years of war.  Weird.  But this time cost is all that matters. 

General discussion

It’s not sporting

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Lately I've been in a kind of why-bother mood.  Has the world of political discourse been particularly foul lately?  It's hard to say.  It's certainly true that the imminent (maybe today!) health-care legislation has driven many around the bend.  For too many people who ought to know better, this corporate-friendly legislation is basically communism.  Pointing out that such people have constructed hollow men seems really ineffective.  Not because they don't get it, but rather because they know exactly what they're doing, and they know that our current discourse rules reward them for doing so.  Why's that?  

We'll all agree it's wrong to break the rules.  The rules in this circumstance (tv and print political discourse) include the following:

(1) being accurate and truthful;

(2) being decorous (not being a name calling arse);

(3) managing your facts well–i.e., drawing the appropriate connections, etc. (not blaming things on voodoo for instance);

(4) being consistent in your positions (goose and gandering).     

These are the ones I can think of at the moment.  Fallaciously reasoning or behaving covers all of these or some of these depending on the infraction.  Hollow-manning, for instance, is a failure of all four of these, but particularly the first two.  When one hollowmans, one isn't being accurate and one isn't be decorous. 

I think we all know that.  The problem, however, seems to be in pointing this out.  The hollow manner (and by extension the fallacy-employer) has an advantage.  He can break the rules, claim not to, and then claim, as they often do, that pointing out violations of the rules is a violation of the rules.  So therefore:

(5) accusing someone of a violation of the rules is a violation of the rules.

This makes the whole rule-bound enterprise very odd.  If I suggest someone has made sh*t up, I'm going to open myself to the accusation of not being decorous.  It's not sporting, in other words, to accuse people of cheating.  Or at least one–a devious one–will be allowed to make that accusation–so now you're the d**che for pointing out the dishonesty, and now the discussion regards your violation of the rules, rather than the initial one.   

I'd suggest that this is one reason at least we see so little explicit fallacy-identification in our political discourse.  Put another way, this is why people–such as those who frequently appear here–get away with arguing the way they do.  That's the way the rules of discourse have been allowed to work. 

Now if anyone has an explicit example of what I'm talking about here I'd appreciate it.  I've seen it a gazillion times, but it's Sunday morning, and though I've been gone for a week so, I'm now on vacation.

Ad hominem tu quoque, S.E.Cupp

Cornell, ever heard of it?

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Thankfully Cornell University's very excellent philosophy program is off the hook for the following travesty:

What follows is a series of ad hominem tu quoques.  For instance:

One could argue that, but one would be wrong.  Perhaps she should have taken a logic class as well.

Courtesy of the guys at Sadly, No!

Marc A. Thiessen, Weak Analogy

Can I finish?

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It's a been a while since I've rapped at ya', but things have been busy in my neighborhood. 

This–click here–Daily Show interview with Marc Thiessen, torture apologist, sophist, and for that reason Washington Post columnist is well worth watching.  Not only does this fellow advance a bunch of silly arguments (which Stewart shoots down) he whines relentlessly about not being able to talk.  He got to talk just fine, it's just that he got called on his silliness.

Stewart's case I think is an interesting one.  We might all agree that Thiessen's argument fail miserably on logic and facts.  For instance:

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would — and rightly so.

That analogy completely blows, to use a technical term.  For starters, the lawyers worked pro bono, unlike Tom Hagen.  Second, being someone's lawyer doesn't entail you endorse their alleged criminality.  Third, everyone is entitled to a lawyer.  Fourth, we have a nation of laws, allegedly.

But how one points this out most effectively is another matter.  Arguments, for too many people in our silly televised and printed discourses, are  just monologues: there is no common purpose, no shared goal, and no commonly agreed-upon rules to which we can refer to resolve our disagreements.  It's nice to see someone successfully knock one of these monologues off the tracks.

Update.  Media Matters beat me to the Tom Hagen reference.  Drats.

George Will, hollow man

Their reasoning is a non sequitur

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George Will should not use the phrase "non sequitur."  He writes:

Some liberals argue that the Constitution is unconstitutional. Their reasoning is a non sequitur: The Constitution empowers each chamber to "determine the rules of its proceedings." It requires five supermajorities (for ratifying treaties, endorsing constitutional amendments, overriding vetoes, expelling members and impeachment convictions). Therefore it does not permit requiring a sixth, to end filibusters.

No one I know of argues that–and Will doesn't try to cite anyone.  It's a dumb argument, after all.  So he's right about that.  He ought to know, of course, because that is precisly Will's argument against everything else about government he doesn't like.  Since the Constitution doesn't expressly provide for it, it doesn't exist.  There is no right to x, because the Constitution doesn't say so. 

Now since no one argues for this silly view (other than Will), it's a perfect example of the hollow man.  Note the use of "some."    

Thanks to Aaron at the Stopped Clock for the hat tip, the pointer, and for generally reading this blog. 

General discussion

Welcome to Washington

For anyone who has had the impression that the major news networks treat the goings on in Washington like items in the gossip column in a high school newspaper, consider the following from Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly:

QUOTE OF THE DAY…. ABC's "This Week" held its usual roundtable discussion this morning, with Elizabeth Vargas hosting a panel of Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, George Will, and Paul Krugman.

The last topic of conversation was introduced by Vargas this way:

"[O]f course, this weekend, we have a brand-new White House social secretary appointed to replace Desiree Rogers, a close friend of the Obamas who is exiting after a bumpy tenure, I would say. Cokie, you spoke with her. She — she was highly criticized after the Obamas' first state dinner in which she arrived, looking absolutely gorgeous, but in what some people later said was far too fancy a dress, but most importantly, that was the state dinner that was crashed by the Salahis, who walked in without an invitation when the social secretary's office didn't have people manning the security sites."

This led to a surprisingly long chat about Desiree Rogers.

Krugman sat silently while the discussion went on (and on), before eventually interjecting:

"Can I say that 20 million Americans unemployed, the fact that we're worrying about the status of the White House social secretary….

Donaldson responded, "Paul, welcome to Washington."

Stanley Fish

Public reason

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The New York Times' resident intellectual, Stanley Fish the question of "public reason" or "secular reason."  This is the classical liberal notion which underlies distinctions between church and state.  Whatever a public agent does, the distinction goes, it must be justified by secular–i.e., non-religious–reasons. 

As you might have guessed, Fish will have none of this.  His sole reason (at least his sole intelligible reason) is that the notion of "secular value" is some kind of contradiction.  All values are religious.  And since all morality (and hence all moral action) has to do with values, ergo ipso fatso.  He writes:

Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By “smuggling,” Smith answers.

. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway — but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.

The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include “notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or a providential design,” all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction — to even get started — “we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations — to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.”

And how do we do that? Well, one way is to invoke secular concepts like freedom and equality — concepts sufficiently general to escape the taint of partisan or religious affiliation — and claim that your argument follows from them. But, Smith points out (following Peter Westen and others), freedom and equality — and we might add justice, fairness and impartiality — are empty abstractions. Nothing follows from them until we have answered questions like “fairness in relation to what standard?” or “equality with respect to what measures?” — for only then will they have content enough to guide deliberation.

That content, however, will always come from the suspect realm of contested substantive values. Is fairness to be extended to everyone or only to those with certain credentials (of citizenship, education, longevity, etc.)? Is it equality of opportunity or equality of results (the distinction on which affirmative action debates turn)? Only when these matters have been settled can the abstractions do any work, and the abstractions, in and of themselves, cannot settle them. Indeed, concepts like fairness and equality are normatively useless, except as rhetorical ornaments, until they are filled in by some partisan or ideological or theological perspective, precisely the perspectives secular reason has forsworn. Therefore, Smith concludes, “conversations in the secular cage could not proceed very far without smuggling.”

The move there between the last two paragraphs is the suspect one.  Unless there is a definitional necessity to the "always" there, I think there there is ample evidence that it need not be the case.  Perhaps one might, to cite the obvious objection, claim that only an entirely abstract conception of justice can be the only satisfactory one–precisely because it is emptied of partisan perspective. 

Underlying this move is the notion that "normative" means "partisan, ideological, i.e., religious."  I think that's hardly the case.  Those things are instances of normativity, but they're not the only ones.

General discussion

Blinded by expertise

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I asked my house guest, a real philosopher and therefore likely some kind of liberal, which major or even minor scientific view, endorsed by a majority of competent scientists working in their specific field of expertise, he doubted.  He said that he couldn't think of one.  Nor really can I.  For in the first place, I don't think my judgement in those matters so acute that it outweigh the work of all of those people working independently across time and space.  Secondly, I wonder why I would be so acute as to notice the faults of one particular view, without at the same time suspecting the every similar scientific activity be subject to the same kinds of failures.  But that's just me, and perhaps my house guest.

Now comes George Will, noted global warming denier.  His scientific acumen is so sharp–on the subject of global warming–that the Post continually allows readers to consider his judgement to stand alone, often without fact checking and usually without rebuttal.  And who says arguments are dialogues.

Today's global-warming-advocates-are-eating-crow provides yet another example of our newly discovered fallacy, argumentum ad imperfectionem–the argument from imperfection.  For more on that, see here.  Briefly again, the argument from imperfection, operates in the following way.  A person finds completely normal relatively minor errors (or inconsistencies, etc.) in a particular view, such as climate change, and alleges that those errors (consistencies, etc.) justify a kind of disproportionate skepticism.  So, for instance, the disagreement among scientists (which is what they do!) on the contours of this or that matter do not open the door to global skepticism. 

First here's Will in the only section of his op-ed that makes reference to evidence:

Global warming skeptics, too, have erred. They have said there has been no statistically significant warming for 10 years. Phil Jones, former director of Britain's Climatic Research Unit, source of the leaked documents, admits it has been 15 years. Small wonder that support for radical remedial action, sacrificing wealth and freedom to combat warming, is melting faster than the Himalayan glaciers that an IPCC report asserted, without serious scientific support, could disappear by 2035.

Jones also says that if during what is called the Medieval Warm Period (circa 800-1300) global temperatures may have been warmer than today's, that would change the debate. Indeed it would. It would complicate the task of indicting contemporary civilization for today's supposedly unprecedented temperatures.

Last week, Todd Stern, America's special envoy for climate change — yes, there is one; and people wonder where to begin cutting government — warned that those interested in "undermining action on climate change" will seize on "whatever tidbit they can find." Tidbits like specious science, and the absence of warming?

If you follow the links, you'll learn that Phil Jones has been grossly misrepresented (that reference to 2035 was a typo, by the way, and not integral to the case for anthropogenic climate change).  Here is Jones (read the entire thing):

G – There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.

We know from the instrumental temperature record that the two hemispheres do not always follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the northern hemisphere.

H – If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing – see my answer to your question D.

I – Would it be reasonable looking at the same scientific evidence to take the view that recent warming is not predominantly manmade?

No – see again my answer to D

Now of course if you read only those portions of the discussion that confirm your pseudo-skepticism, you might take Jones to be dismantling his entire case.  But it ought to be obvious that the disagreements about the data, to Jones and the rest of actual scientists, are well known and do not constitute grounds for doubting the entire thesis, as non-expert skeptics such as WIll maintain.  Perhaps, however, Jones is blinded by his own expertise. 

But of course Jones is fully aware of the disagreements around the edges of the science.  That's what science is for those who don't know.

General discussion

Comments

Dear all–

There's something messed up with our comment system.  Almost everyone gets considered spam.  Just comment once.  I post every non-spam comment.  Just keep trying. 

Thanks

jc

General discussion

Refinements

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I think I might refine the definition of the argumentum ad imperfectionem somewhat today.  As I alleged the other day, ad imperfectionem fallacy occurs when one asserts that the minor errors in someone's argument may be justifiably exaggerated by opponents of that argument.  So, for instance, minor errors in a legal filing undermine one's entire case, not just those particular claims relevant to those errors.  For, after all, if there are a couple of typos, who knows what other kinds of serious errors there could be.  This, of course, is the response of a crazy person.  But not all crazy is the same, so it's worth it to take a closer look at the crazy.   

On this description, the imperfectionem is a variation of the ignoratio elenchi (IE).  The ignoratio elenchi, sometimes called "missing the point" or–get this–"non sequitur", is a kind of a catch-all category of fallacy: any other basic failure of informal entailment gets thrown in here.  Here, for instance, is the way Patrick Hurley puts it in A Concise Introduction to Logic:

Missing the point illustrates a special form of irrelevance.  This fallacy occurs when the premises of an argument support one particular conclusion, but then a different conclusion, often vaguely related to the correct conclusion, is drawn.

….

but in some ways it serves as a catchall for arguments that are not clear instances of one or more of the other fallacies.

Textbooks will often use examples of IEs with outrageous conclusions where more moderate ones are available.  So, for instance, given the inevitable shortcomings in weather forecasts, one ought not to listen to them at all.  That's dumb, as weather forecasts are predictions, and predictions can be wrong.  Again, the conclusion of a crazy person.  This conclusion, in that particular example, is driven by the idea that any imperfection, however minor, in the assertions of one party are sufficient to create doubt about that party's entire case. 

I think the argumentum ad imperfectionem is focused on the inference from the relatively minor shortcomings of one side to either (a) the truth of the opposite side (in which case it looks like a false dichotomy) or (b) to the conclusion that no one can really claim to know one's conclusion is true (in which case it looks like an appeal to ignorance) or finally (c) to the conclusion that the opposite side is relatively more justified. 

I can think of examples of all three of these.  But for today, here's an example of (a):

(a) in the minds of many, the various quibbles and revisions involved in the science of global warming justify skepticism of the entire thesis.  Here's an example of that from the Washington Post:

"What's happened here is that there's an industry of climate-change denialists who are trying to make it seem as though you can't trust anything that is between the covers" of the panel's report, said Jeffrey Kargel, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies glaciers. "It's really heartbreaking to see this happen, and to see that the IPCC left themselves open" to being attacked.

That's not an example of an actual argument, as it is a report of someone else's argument.  But people really do make that allegation, unfortunately.

Maybe if I'm motivated I'll find examples of the others later.