Over at WWA, Talisse and I have a short note on the difference between taking formal and dialectical perspectives on argument-assessment. For the NS readers, it’s a familiar distinction, but motivating it can be tricky. I’ve taken to using the intuitive notion of begging the question as a way of showing how an argument can be unquestionably valid but argumentatively out of bounds. (If the conclusion is one of the premises, the premises will of course guarantee the truth of the conclusion, by the PNC.) The consequence is that the development of a robust dialectical program for argument assessment is necessary — and, hey, that’s what’s been going down over here at the NS for years!
All posts by Scott Aikin
Ad Fuhrer-em
We’ve been doing a lot of Ad Hitlerem–spotting these days at the NS, but, hey, it’s the season of the Godwin. Check out the statement from Brenda Barton (R) from Arizona on Facebook:
Someone is paying the National Park Service thugs overtime for their efforts to carry out the order of De Fuhrer… where are our Constitutional Sheriffs who can revoke the Park Service Rangers authority to arrest??? Do we have any Sheriffs with a pair?
I object for a few reasons. First is just linguistic. It’s der Fuhrer. Second is analogical – how in any way is using the force charged with protecting the parks to close the parks like Hitler’s abuse of power in Germany? And park service rangers are given police force training.
Here’s the rich part. Barton’s responded to criticism of her post, and she’s issued the following clarification.
What I did suggest, rather directly, was that the National Park Service enforcement personnel (referring to them as ‘thugs’ for their reported behavior) were simply following orders of ‘their leader’ – and I used the German phrase for emphasis, Der Fuhrer. . . .I am referencing the Presidents behavior as indicated by his actions. The Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary defines ‘Fuhrer’ as ‘(2) a leader exercising tyrannical authority. . . . As many are aware, some recent comments of mine on Facebook have touched a sensitive nerve with many people. Additionally, many have simply taken my posting out of its contextual environment. . . Had I chosen my words differently, or had the President offered to use the power of his office to lessen or mute the public impacts of this impasse in Washington, we might not be having this discussion.
OK, so the defense is as follows:
1. When I use ‘De Fuhrer’ I just mean ‘tyrant’
2. When I used the term it was for emphasis, and to take it as more is to take it out of context.
3. It’s the president’s fault that I had to compare him to Hitler.
Point-for-point, silly. In fact, to use 1 and 2 together is inconsistent. The term ‘Fuhrer’ has the emphasis it does not because its usage as leader, or even tyrant, but as THAT tyrant named Adolph. The context of using ‘Fuhrer’ is the context of exemplifying Godwin’s Law. 3 is amazing. In effect – it’s not my fault that I can’t think of another apt analogy… I mean the guy’s literally like Hitler when he does this!  (This is, really, a case of instead of backing away from the Ad Hitlerem, but embracing it!)
I’m already plenty good at logic
Charles S. Peirce opens the “Fixation of Belief” with the observation:
Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already.
Many of the NS readers are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect. In short, it’s that the less you know, the less likely you’ll recognize that you don’t know. Poor performers regularly overestimate their abilities. This is borne out in Dunning and Kruger’s case in grammar tests, logic tests, humor-recognition tests and in a variety of other areas (e.g., tests taken by medical students, engineers, and so on).  The trouble is that self-monitoring can’t give reliable feedback when you don’t have the proper criteria for evaluation.
So the question is: how do people perform when, after having done badly and evaluated themselves well, we give them clear criteria for evaluation? How do they do, and how do they rate their performances? For sure, without this intervention, the D-K Effect becomes the D-K Cycle. But can intervention as education work?
So after having bombed the last logic test, the subjects are brought back in and given a mini-lecture on how to solve the logic problems they were tested on last time. They, then, had the criteria for discriminating good from bad performances. The result? They judged their prior performances quite harshly and came to see that they had a long way to go before they were good at the tasks. That’s pretty great news to logic teachers.
Ah, but an interesting wrinkle about the need for this intervention. Dunning and Kreuger gave the same test to two different groups, but told one group it was a logic test and the other group that it was a computer-test. Here’s the big difference: people who took the logic test systematically more confident (and thereby overrated themselves in poor performances) than those who took the computer test. Same test, but different name. Why is this? The thought is that it’s because we all think we’re already pretty good at reasoning. We do it every day, so we must have some skills. And it’s right there that logic teachers cringe.
Judged by your fans
Pope Francis I has criticized corporate greed and capitalism’s systematic failure to ensure that people are not exploited. Despite the fact that the communists have a longstanding critical attitude toward the Catholic Church, Mark Gruenberg at The People’s World, has applauded the new pope’s statements. (More on the pope’s views regarding the church’s “worldliness” here.)
When communists agree with the Pope, it’s time for conservatives to get antsy. Especially conservative Catholics. Cue Paul Kegnor at AmSpec. Kegnor is careful to note first that:
The article quoted the pontiff several times. To be sure, few of us would disagree with any of the quotes.
So not it’s that the communists agree with what the Pope says that’s the problem. It’s that communists agree with pope says. That’s the problem.
Communists, of all people, finally believe they have a pope who agrees with them, that they like, that they can embrace, that they can encourage. I knew that Francis’ controversial interview on abortion, contraception, and gay marriage had thrilled liberals, liberal Catholics, dissident Catholics, secular progressives, agnostics, atheists, and socialists. You can read their websites. They love this guy. But communists?
Oh, yeah, I hear you. When I find out that I endorse views held by a group I hold in contempt, I never take that as evidence that I may not have an accurate representation of that group. I always take it that their agreement with me (or with the things said by another person that I agree with) is either strategic or based on their misunderstandings. Never ever should, say, a Catholic think that Luke’s social justice doctrines have any resonance with concerns about capitalism. Kegnor’s clear about it:
It seems to me that this is not the kind of praise that the pope should want.
Of course, the problem is that if Kegnor thinks that few people would disagree with what Pope Francis said, then aren’t there many, many others who’d be trouble, too? For sure, politics makes strange bedfellows. But why is one’s credibility in question when there are many who take you as credible?
Popular Science positively starves the trolls
Popular Science has completely shut off comments for their articles, citing trolling at their number one reason. Given our interest here at the NS in the don’t feed the trolls maxim and our fixation on the Iron Man Fallacy, it’s worth a shot thinking this through. I’ve got a defense of the decision over at WWA, especially against the Will Oremus charge that it’s a form of scientific dogmatism (or as he says: “Lazy and Wrong“).
See my post at WWA. HERE.
Why We Argue Blog
My new book with Robert Talisse is Why We Argue (And How We Should). It’s got a lot of the discussions you’ve seen here at the NS. Our agreement with the publisher is that we keep a blog with substantive entries on argumentation and politics up and running for a few years. So here’s my plan. I’ll still do short blogging here at the NS, but longer essay-type entries will be over at the WWA site. I’ll have pointers here for the WWA articles and I’ll have pointers there for the NS articles. For fans of the NS, the book will be some familiar territory, but some other new stuff – especially the requirements of good reasoning to keep Plato’s worries about democracy at bay. You can find the WWA blog here. And you can buy a copy of WWA here.
My Godwin-Sense was tingling
In Godwin’s Law news (and another instantiation of the Ad Tyrranem –Ad Hitlerem), Ted Cruz’s recent Senate speech has a classic:
I suspect those same pundits who say [defunding Obamacare] can’t be done, if it had been in the 1940s we would have been listening to them. . . .They would have been saying, ‘You cannot defeat the Germans
In this case, it’s not an argument that what’s being opposed is wrong, but that not actively opposing the thing is wrong. I think, then we have two different forms of the ad Hitlerem.
Direct Ad Hitlerem:
You do X or propose X
Hitler did X or proposed X
Therefore, you’re like Hitler and X is wrong.
Here, I think Cruz is making an indirect form of Ad Hitlerem. It runs roughly:
He does X (and X is wrong)
We can stop him from doing X
His doing X is like Hitler’s doing Y
Therefore, he’s not only wrong to do X, but we’re wrong (read: appeasers) to not actively oppose and stop his doing X.
My view about Ad Hitlerem is that it’s a weak analogy, and that’s the case for both direct and indirect. A further thing about the indirect form is that it depends on the direct form. Essentially: This guy is like Hitler , so this guy is bad (Direct form); If you can stop a guy who’s bad like Hitler, you should as to fail to do so is appeasement (Indirect form).
Some beaches are illicit conversions
OK, so I’ve been watching football. And there are occasions to think about logic. During the beer commercials. First, though, a quick tutorial on deductive semantic fallacies. An argument is fallacious on deductive semantic grounds when the truth of the argument’s premise does not guarantee the truth of the argument’s conclusion (provided the proper analysis of the terms of the logic). A classic fallacious move to make inferences between two forms of statements in categorical A-Form.
All S are P, so All P are S
The pattern is conversion – you switch the subject and predicate term in the proposition form. It’s valid for E- and I-Forms, so it’s fine for these:
No S are P, so No P are S
No cats are lizards, so No lizards are cats
Some S are P, so Some P are S
Some Texans are Republicans, so Some Republicans are Texans
The trouble is that with A-form propositions, conversion is fallacious. So we can intuitively see the fallacy with the following conversion forms:
All triangles are polygons, so All polygons are triangles
All cats are mammals, so All mammals are cats
That’s fallacious, and since it’s a bad way to convert, we call it illicit conversion. Now, to the commercials. See the following Corona commercial, effectively playing during every timeout for every NFL game this weekend. HERE. Here’s the free association that stands in for reasoning:
Some beaches have sand; Some beaches are backyards; Some beaches inspire ideas; Some beaches have beats; Some beaches are better after sunset; Every beach is different, but All beaches have Corona
The commercial has scenes of beaches, bars, mixing rooms, back yards, concerts, campgrounds and so on. Each is some poignant scene, but not all have beers in them. The inductive evidence presented is that, given their special definition of beach (effectively meaning ‘special place’), it’s not the presence of Corona that makes them that. Rather, it, at best, is that the presence of Corona can contribute to a place being a beach. Consequently, it isn’t that All beaches have Corona that they’ve shown. It only takes the first scene (the sandy beach with no beers) to be a counter-example. Instead, the best that the evidence could show is that All places where there are Coronas are beaches in the relevant sense. Trouble is, they conclude with All beaches have Corona. Illicit conversion off weak evidence for enumerative induction.
Two sides of my mouth
Sometimes, when you say something, you mean something else. Given the inconsistencies from Rand Paul on the Syria issue, I think there’s a likely key to interpretation:
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky, said President Barack Obama “didn’t quite convince me” on the need to launch a military strike on Syria in his Tuesday night speech.
But, Paul said, Obama did make a compelling case that Syrian President Bashar Assad is guilty of killing almost 1,500 civilians with poison gas last month.
“If Assad is responsible he deserves death for this,” Paul told Fox News Channel after the Tuesday night speech. “But the president’s plan is to leave Assad alone,” Paul said on a later CNN appearance.
Here’s the charitable interpretation. Assad (or whoever is responsible) deserves death, but it’s not in America’s interest to serve that up to him. Here’s the less charitable (but probably more accurate) interpretation. I’ll oppose the President on whatever he tries to do and act very principled about American interests and be very, very non-inteventionist. And when the President doesn’t do something interventionist, I’ll call him weak for leaving someone like Assad in power. See the game? If President calls for military action, say he’s a saber-rattler. If the President tries diplomacy, shout appeasement. (See Salon for a list of others playing the game.)
Ad tyrannem
OK, the old Godwin’s Law observation with Ad Hitlerem is standard. And we’ve here noted the Ad Stalinem. But Glenn Beck just used, in his NYT interview, an analogy with Mao Tse-Tung with similar effect.
 I think these guys (progressives) are the biggest danger in the world. It’s the people like Mao, people that believe that big government is the answer, it always leads to millions dead — always.
For sure, Hitler analogies deserve their own name, but they are of a specific class of arguments by analogy roughly captured as the argument by analogy with some tyrant, so I’ve proposed Ad Tyrannem as the general class.
Oh, another irony is that not but a paragraph up from the implication that progressives will be putting people to death, Beck wishes that the American people could just get along.