All posts by Scott Aikin

Scott Aikin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
General discussion, Straw Man, Weak Analogy

Good Lord

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I admit that for me, it's galling to see Christians playing the game of claiming discrimination when challenged on their own discriminatory policies.  It's usually about sex, whether about insurance covering contraception or gays in the military, but its always a confusion about whether they have a right for their bigotry to ground policy.  When bigotry isn't the law of the land, they say they're being discriminated against, because their religious views aren't applied to all.  But George Neumayr over at the American Spectator takes it to a new level. He rehearses all the usual pieties about how Christianity is under fire in a secularist state, and it looks to be the AmSpec boilerplate.  But then when he moves to the contraceptive issue, he's got a surprising twist to his argument.

The sheer idiocy of the HHS mandate was illustrated recently by Senator Tom Harkin, who, in a comically desperate attempt to cast the absence of free contraceptives and abortifacients as a form of corporate oppression, said, "There are many women who take birth control pills, for example, because they have terrible menstrual cramps once a month, some of them almost incapacitated, can't work. I know of young women myself who, because of this, aren't able to work and be productive, and it's prescribed by their doctor." Harkin, apparently, can't rest until these women are back working on Obama's animal farm, having received, under the gaze of government, all the suitable injections to guarantee their productivity for years to come. Harkin's paternalism is so touching: What would women do without his monitoring of their ailments?

Holy cow.  I mean, is Neumayer trying  to miss the point?  Just for the sake of making the whole thing clear, here's Harkin's argument:  The point of the mandate is to ensure that people can live their lives even when they face health care challenges, and some health care challenges take the form of menstrual cramps.  If we don't make medicine to address this part of the mandate, we leave these women out.  We shouldn't leave them out, so we need to cover their medicine — which is a contraceptive.  Now, for sure, having contraceptives covered by the mandate is also part of a larger human right to control your own destiny (by having control over when one has children), but Harkin's not making that argument.  He's just talking about how people have debilitating problems, and resistance to covering contraceptives leaves them out.  Simple, right?

Well, apparently not.  Here's how I see the Neumayr reply.  1) He's claiming that the government is giving these people injections and thereby controlling (or monitoring) their reproductive lives, and 2) He's claiming that it's just about putting people to work.  But this entirely misses the point.  For sure, if government helps you get the care, there is a measure of control and monitoring in that, but that's more control for you, too, assuming that without the help, you won't have the meds at all!  And the point about work is just silly, really.  Harkin's using work as merely an example of productive life.  He could just as well have said: read the Bible closely, or be a stay-at-home mother, or write for NRO.  You can't do any of those things, either, if you've got debilitating cramps. 

And animal farm?  Sheesh. First off, how many readers at AmSpec got the Orwell reference?  And second, of those who did, how many were only because they saw the movie?

specious comparisons, Weak Analogy

Lead with the Godwin!

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Thomas Sowell opens his article over at the American Spectator with a sentence that would make any fan of Godwin proud (see the know your meme bit on it!):

It was either Adolf Hitler or his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who said that the people will believe any lie, if it is big enough and told often enough, loud enough. Although the Nazis were defeated in World War II, this part of their philosophy survives triumphantly to this day among politicians, and nowhere more so than during election years.

What Sowell points out as the lie is that the gap between rich and poor has widened (because the rich are getting richer, not that the poor are that much poorer).  Whether it's a lie or not isn't the issue, but rather the analogy employed to describe the dialectical and political situation.  Or, perhaps, I was just reading a parody site of Thomas Sowell's essays (think Poe).

Hasty Generalization, Lack of Evidence

Just how to show you’re an intellectual

George Leef at NRO makes the case that liberals are confused about who the party of stupid is.  Here's his main argument:

If conservatives are anti-intellectual, why did so many read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom after Glenn Beck mentioned it last year?

It's not clear what the rhetorical question is supposed to show. Is it that conservatives, generally, are intellectuals — so they read books plugged by folks on Fox News — or is it that there are genuine conservative intellectuals (like Hayek), and the proof that they're intellectuals is that they get read, and others don't?  If the first, is the fact of reading proof of being intellectuals?  Not yet, and moreover, it's not that clear that all those copies of The Road to Serfdom got read — they just got bought.  If the latter, just how is it that being widely read is proof of being an intellectual?  It proves that you write stuff that people like, but that's not yet being intellectual.  And conservatives should know that, as they are so regularly bucking the stream of what they see as popular thought.  I assume that Leef is taking the former line of thought, as he follows with the second rhetorical question,

Why would Forbes publish intellectual-rich content like this piece by Professor Art Carden?

I suppose the thought is that because Forbes publishes intellectually-rich content, there must be a market for it in its readership, which is conservative.  And so conservatives are intellectuals.  First question: how many conservatives read Forbes instead of The Weekly Standard or Human Events?  That's nut-picking for your evidence — like if I wanted to make the case that Liberals are really intellectuals, I'd only look at The New Republic.   Second question: how does the fact that your magazine has intellectually rich content prove you're an intellectual?  I know lots of folks who read, on the liberal side, The New Yorker, and they've got very little going on in their heads.  It's the thing to have in your book bag. 

I know a better way to tell someone is an intellectual: not to ask whether they've read the best minds of their own side, but whether they've read and understood the best minds of the other side. 

Red Herring, specious comparisons, Weak Analogy

Well, if they didn’t have the guns…

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Just as predictable as the question about whether we need stronger gun controls follows after a public shooting spree, there is the predictable response from conservatives that guns don't kill people, evil/crazy/bad people kill people, so stop with gun control. (See John's earlier link to the Onion article on this point).  Here's Thomas Sowell, over at National Review Online:

Do countries with strong gun-control laws have lower murder rates? Only if you cherry-pick the data…. Britain is a country with stronger gun-control laws and lower murder rates than the United States. But Mexico, Russia, and Brazil are also countries with stronger gun-control laws than the United States — and their murder rates are much higher than ours….

This is the old bait-and-switch, isn't it?  (Otherwise known as red herring)  The question about gun control laws, at least under these circumstances, is whether it's a good idea to have assault weapons available, as with them, public shooting sprees are very, very destructive.  It's not about whether the murder rate will go down.  If you want to murder someone, you'll likely do it with a gun or without.  But if you want to go on a spree of violence, you'll do that with a gun or without, too.  The point of the question is that with the latter, the with the gun option, the public spree of violence kills more people.  Sowell's point about homicide is just beside the point.  Well, at least he's not running the if there were more people with guns, this wouldn't happen line (see, John Lott for that one).

Bad Explanations, category mistake, False equivalences, Specious allegations of fallacy

Politics and bullshit

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Daniel Foster at National Review Online has a well-timed piece on political culture and bullshit.  For the most part, it's a quick essay glossing Harry Frankfurt's views in his classic "On Bullshit".  He's got a few examples that aren't quite right, as his Marylin Monroe case is just one of lying, not bullshitting.  What's interesting, though, is Foster's extension of the bullshit point to what he calls "the politics of identity."  Now, this itself isn't new, as Frankfurt even ends his essay with the observation that "authenticity is bullshit."  But Foster's examples are worth a look. 

The first is Elizabeth Warren and her claims to be a Native American.  What Foster objects to is not the politics from the identity but the case made for her identity. 

Exhibit A is Elizabeth Warren, who has been able to withstand a barrage of documentary evidence casting doubt on her claim to be part American Indian by anchoring that claim not in genealogical fact but in family lore — in other words, by answering the charge that her Cherokee identification is probably false with the tacit admission that it is definitely bulls**t.

In this case, what's weird is not that this is identity politics, but the evidential conditions for claiming identity.  I think he's right about the fact that the Warren case is pretty pathetic, but I'd hardly call it identity politics.  Next up is the President himself:

Exhibit B is President Obama, who did us the favor of admitting up front that his 1995 autobiography is, at least in part, bulls**t, but who has managed to escape focused interrogation on this point eight years into his public life and three-plus years into his tenure as leader of the free world.

Again, this is likely right — that the book is trumped up. But how's that identity politics?  Is this a dogwhistle for the right? Sometimes, I feel, when reading stuff at NRO or on Newsmax, that there are words that mean more than I think they mean.  You know… welfare=brown people, crime=brown people, poverty=brown people, undereducated=brown people. Is this another case of conservatives using a normal word as code for something else?  Does it mean something different from what most people think that it means, roughly, people mobilizing political power for the interest of preserving or promoting an identity they share (racial, cultural, sexual, religious, or other)?  Now Foster is right when he says that

That identity politics is as festooned with bulls**t as a cow pasture in the full ardor of spring wouldn’t be so bad if identity politics weren’t also a powerful currency.

But I'm at a loss as to what he's saying to the readers at NRO, given his examples.  Is calling bullshit in some cases another case of bullshit?  Really, that's my sense of it here.  The "bullshit" charge was so powerfully wielded against the Bushies earlier in the 2000's, and the conservatives are looking to co-opt the charge as a weapon. But this looks exactly like a cooption, not a lesson. 

Other problems, specious comparisons

Implicature by comparison

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We can find implicature all around us, from how we use sarcasm, to how we use innuendo.  I think that some comparisons can communicate something else, too.  So, say, for example, that I say:

Today's as hot as hell.

We take the second comparator as a given (exceedingly and unrelentlingly hot) and use that given to determine something about the first (that it is very, very hot).  The implicature of this is that you know that hell is very, very hot, and that then gives us information about today.  This works with lots of them:

She is as hot as Georgia asphalt

As strong as a bull

Drunk as a lord

I'm not as drunk as you think I am

So the lesson: our defaults are to take the second comparator as the given. You have to be committed to the obviousness of the heat of GA asphalt and the strength of bulls.  Lords are drunk, and it's clear you must think I am very, very drunk. The second comparator can't be even in question for the analogy to be successfully communicative.  (Or, at least, it is communicated as being taken as beyond question.) Notice how one of the two following comparisons is the funnier 'your momma' joke than the other:

Your momma is as fat as Jupiter

Jupiter is as fat as your momma

The second, because your momma's fatness is taken as the base comparator for Jupiter, not the other way around.  That's funny… in a 'your momma' joke sort of way. Here's where the interpretive lesson gets weird.  I bought some bargain basement cat litter at the corner market, and it had the following comparison on the back:

It reads:

For those of you who are as passionate about your pets as you are about price.

Isn't the implicature of this comparison that whoever buys this cat litter is someone who is passionate about price?  Isn't this an overstatement?  Shouldn't it be realistic about price? Moreover, isn't this a questionable thought?  I'm not passionate about price at all, but I love my cats.  So shouldn't the comparators be switched?  I think it's a more obvious commitment that we're passionate about the pets. I don't buy cheap cat litter because I have a passion for saving money, but rather, I have a passion for beer, travel, nice things, cats, and so on.  So I buy cheap cat litter to fit the budget.  That's not price-passion.  That's other-stuff-passion. Or, perhaps, I'm not the target market — I had no idea Ebenezer Scrooge was a cat-owner. 

Hasty Generalization, Narrativism

Anecdotal evidence of global warming

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Will Oremus has reported at Slate that more people nowadays are believing in global warming, because more people have experienced extreme weather recently.   

What accounts for the rebound? It isn’t the economy, which has thawed only a little. And it doesn’t seem to be science: The percentage of respondents to the Yale survey who believe “most scientists think global warming is happening” is stuck at 35 percent, still way down from 48 percent four years ago. . . .  No, our resurgent belief in global warming seems to be a function of the weather.  A separate Yale survey this spring found that 82 percent of Americans had personally experienced extreme weather or natural disasters in the past year.

Pat Robertson changed his mind about global warming, too, because he reported a few years back that his back yard was noticeably hotter. (Note: Robertson more recently said he's not a "disciple of global warming" because there are no SUV's on Mars, so there's that… if you hold your views on weak evidence, it's easy for other weird thoughts to influence you.)  And, do you remember how the warming denialists went crazy when D.C. had that big snowstorm?

And so we see the problem with anecdotal evidence: it is certainly relevant, but it is not systematic, often not representative, regularly selective, and too often framed by how the question was asked or by the intensity of the event reported.

General discussion, Jonah Goldberg, Straw Man, weak man

An interesting weak man argument

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Jonah Goldberg has a nice piece over at National Review Online about the way the recently upheld Affordable Care Act has been received at National Public Radio.  He picks out Julie Rovner's question about whether there are really any losers in the decision.  She eventually concludes that there aren't any.  Goldberg can't hold himself back:

It is an interesting perspective given that this is arguably the most controversial law in our lifetimes. It nearly sparked a constitutional crisis, helped cause the Democrats to lose their majority in the House, and, despite herculean efforts by the president to “sell” the law . . .  And yet, according to Rovner, the law creates only winners if properly implemented. Why on earth are its opponents so stupid?  For the record, there are losers under Obamacare. Here’s a short list: ….

He then goes on with your expected list (taxpayers…it's a tax, you see, Catholics who see part of the law as subsidizing condom use, and people at the bottom of the slippery slope of medication rationing).  This, so far, isn't what's good about Goldberg's column.  In fact, so far, it's just his usual schlocky version of what a dumb person would think a smart person would say about the issue and about the opposition.  But then he surprises:

Obamacare defenders have responses to these objections, and critics have responses to those responses. Still: Serious people do believe that the law creates — or just might create — losers, a fact Rovner might have mentioned.

I don’t mean to pick on Rovner. Her views on Obamacare don’t strike me as exceptional so much as typical — typical of a liberal Washington establishment that still seems incapable of grasping what the fuss is about.

This is nice, except for his saying that he doesn't mean to 'pick on' Rovner.  That, of course, is ridiculous — he's making an example of her. That's not wrong, nor is it worth making a big deal about not doing it.   Rather, what's nice is that Goldberg sees that this isn't the best the other side can do in the debate, but that it's typical of what the other side does in the debate.  That's a good observation, one that shows some real self-awareness and also dialectical sensitivity.  You have to disabuse your audience of the bad but widely made arguments before you can get to the good but infrequently given arguments. 

 

 

 
 
Barack Obama, Complex Question, Equivocation, False Dichotomy

Adventures in false dilemmas

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Here's the title of Howard Rich's post at American Spectator.

Barack Obama: Socialist or Nouveau Fascist?

Rich argues that Socialism isn't quite right about Obama's policies, as he does let many who have done well keep their spoils.  So it's fascism.  But the fascism label, Rich concedes, "isn't perfect".  That's why he calls it Nouveau Fascism. You see… when the term doesn't work, just call it a new version of that! 

General discussion

And now an analogy from a classicist

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Victor Davis Hanson is an accomplished classicist, and he regularly makes analogies between today's politics and that reported in Herodotus and Thucydides.  It's cool, but he's often wrong.  Here's he new analogy: recent college graduates are an indentured underclass in American society, just like the Helots of Spartan society. 

Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs — half free, half slave. The resulting Helot underclass produced the food of the Spartan state, freeing Sparta’s elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship.

Over the last few decades, we’ve created our modern version of these Helots — millions of indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts, or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations.

Analogies are fine, so long as they are clear about where the analogues are, well, analogues and where they aren't.  And where there might be better analogues.  Here's where Hanson's analogy starts to fall apart.  First, how are recent college grads NOT like Helots?  Well, Helots were forced into that life.  They can't ever get out.  And the exploitation that comes their way is entirely determined by what state you were born into.  Not so for any of the American college grads.  Second, are there better analogues in America to the Helots than folks going to college?  Yes.  The poor — they bear huge burdens of debt, and it's not debt incurred for improving their lives, but just for living them within the standard of living.  Being poor isn't what you choose, it's what happens to you.  And you rarely escape.  The class of people upon whom the American economy and the rich make their lives isn't the recent college grad, but the poor sap working two jobs at minimum wage.  Those are today's Helots.  Or, at least, better candidates for it.  Here's Hanson selling the view:

Strip away the fancy degrees, the trendy fluff classes, the internships with prestigious employers, and the personal gadgets, and a new generation of indebted and jobless students has about as much opportunity as the ancient indentured Helots.

Yeah, take away their phones and their education, and, sure, you can make them seem a lot closer to slaves… but couldn't that be said of anyone?  If I take away Hanson's degree, his connection to NRO, and all his gagetry, but leave him with debt, he'd look a lot like a Helot, too.