Category Archives: General discussion

Anything else.

General discussion

Cheating, at logic

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Ouch

I like cycling and it’s Tour de France season, so here’s a cycling related post.  Ted King, a rider for the Cannondale squad, found himself eliminated from the entire race by seven seconds yesterday.  The rule goes like this: all riders must complete the race within 25 percent of the winning time.  King’s time fell outside of that, so he was disqualified.

This certainly sucks for him.  Now perhaps relevant to this story is the fact that King was the victim of a serious crash and was riding on a separated shoulder.  I say “perhaps” because here we have a genuine puzzle of the non fallacious ad misericordiam argument.  It goes like this: surely King, who was riding on an injured shoulder, deserves some leniency.

Questions such as these are very difficult.  The time cut off exists for a reason (though I don’t know what it is).  Regardless, appealing to extenuating circumstances in this case seems reasonable.

What is not reasonable, however, is the following tweet by Garmin Team Director Jonathan Vaughters:

My reasoning was that if we wish to encourage clean cycling, we can’t impose very high minimum speeds. But “c’est le ciclisme!” wins over logic

Sadly, this reminds me of the student who says high standards made him cheat.  Should cheating occur, it’s not the result of the rules.  It’s a result of people failing to deal with the rules fairly.  Raising the prospect of cheating as a consequence of rules you don’t agree with is cheating.  Only it’s cheating at logic.  Besides, the Tour directors, as far as I know, didn’t set the minimum speed, but rather the percentage of the cut off.  The riders set the speed.

General discussion

Never argue with a Sicilian when homosexual sodomy is on the line

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That’s Sicilian

It’s slippery slope week.

Here’s a snippet from Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent on yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage:

When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” Id., at  578. Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,” ante, at 23—with an accompanying citation of Lawrence. It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here—when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with. 

Justice Scalia may indeed be correct about the alleged inconsistency; The court may have previously held that Lawrence v Texas wouldn’t entail gay marriage, but then in Windsor they use the legality of “homosexual sodomy” to justify not discriminating against gay marriages.  This, he maintains, shows the slippery slope from “homosexual sodomy” to gay marriage.

A few points.  First, since I’m not a legal scholar, I don’t know if the court has to maintain its promises–or whether the court can make promises like this.  The gay marriage case wasn’t before the court at the time, and, as far as I know, the court decides only the cases it has before it.  It would seem completely wrong for them to adjudicate such things in advance.

Second, inconsistencies are not ipso facto signs of dishonesty.  I like to think my current correct views are inconsistent with my past incorrect ones.  I also sincerely hope that my future correct views are inconsistent with my current incorrect ones.

Third, not all slippery slopes are fallacious.  The court has recognized a right to “homosexual sodomy.”  This means that homosexual relationships are not inherently inferior to heterosexual ones.  This does in fact seem to entail that homosexual commitments differ in the same regard: i.e., not at all.

General discussion

Anything goes

Fig 1: The consequences of gay marriage

Some slippery slopes are valid; some are not.  For a slippery slope to work, the consequences have to be very likely.  In fallacious slippery slopes, on the other hand, the consequences are merely scary.

Here’s Ken Cuccinelli with a fallacious slippery slope:

Once the natural limits that inhere in the relationship between a man and a woman can no longer sustain the definition of marriage, the conclusion that follows is that any grouping of adults would have an equal claim to marriage. See, e.g. , Jonathan Turley, One Big, Happy Polygamous Family , NY Times, July 21, 2011, at A27 (“[Polygamists] want to be allowed to create a loving family according to the values of their faith.”).”

Polygamy, or what some call “Traditional Marriage” has already existed as a non-consequence of gay marriage.  This means that polygamy is not a stage along the gay permissiveness continuum.

More importantly, polygamy, whatever it might mean, is significantly different from dual marriage (is that a term?).  The legal relationships are undefined and it does not exist.  Marriage between non-child-producing couples already exists, and differs in no respect from gay marriage–except, perhaps, that gay marriages can result in natural children.

So let’s drop the polygamy business.  Yes, maybe it is scary and weird to you.  But remember, polygamy is what the Bible sometimes advocates (along with concubines!) and, more significantly, it’s got little to do with the rights of two unrelated people.

Let’s try to be more rigorous and more imaginative.  Perhaps Ken Cuccinelli ought to remember that when he opens his mouth to argue, he sets an example for the kids out there.  This is a terrible example.

General discussion

Today x, tomorrow why?

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By nearly any measure–ok, probably by every measure, CEO pay is vastly disproportionate to the pay of the average worker.  Here’s one example (via Bloomberg):

Former fashion jewelry saleswoman Rebecca Gonzales and former Chief Executive Officer Ron Johnson have one thing in common: J.C. Penney Co. (JCP) no longer employs either.

The similarity ends there. Johnson, 54, got a compensation package worth 1,795 times the average wage and benefits of a U.S. department store worker when he was hired in November 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Gonzales’s hourly wage was $8.30 that year.

Read the rest of the article (charts and all).  In light of this and similar facts, Congress tried to work up something.  Since Congress mostly sucks at lawmaking, they passed a rule that companies need at least to disclose the ratio.

This rule was not long for the world, as the House Financial Services Committee has just voted to repeal that mandate.  One member, Jeb Hensarling, reasoned thusly:

Today, joked House Financial Services chair Jeb Hensarling from Texas, CEO-worker pay disclosure, tomorrow a mandate that companies calculate the ratio of office supplies they get from national big box retailers to the goods they get from locals — or the ratio of healthy to unhealthy drinks in company soda machines.

Yes, when will these burdensome disclosures end?

General discussion

Global warming? Meh.

Here’s a great downplayer for the worry about global warming. At AmSpec Shawn Macomber interviews two professors at King’s College (New York), C. David Corbin and Matt Parks.  In making a contrast between the ‘blind spots’ of two generations, they have a unique way of describing what we’re worried about with the warming trend:

Still, every generation has its blind spots: in our college days twenty years ago we all wanted to save the whales; today they’re afraid global warming might give them a little too much ocean to swim in.

Yes. Well, we’re not worried about where we’ll swim when we are worried about global warming.  The point of the contrast is not to make a substantive claim, of course.  Instead, it’s more like a gesture that says: Fuck substantive claims about global warming.  I don’t care at all.  BLAH BLAH BLAH. 

General discussion

Religious orientation

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Speaking of the Daily Show, here is their version of the Vatican Standoff (discussed here the other day):

Here’s the Vatican’s Bishop Toso making essentially the same argument:

There are many areas where intolerance against Christians can clearly be seen, but two stand out as being particularly relevant at present.

The first is intolerance against Christian speech. In recent years there has been a significant increase in incidents involving Christians who have been arrested and even prosecuted, for speaking on Christian issues. Religious leaders are threatened with police action after preaching about sinful behaviour and some are even sentenced to prison for preaching on the biblical teaching against sexual immorality. Even private conversations between citizens, including expression of opinions on social network, can become the grounds of a criminal complaint, or at least intolerance, in many European countries.

If only Samantha Bee could have interviewed this guy.

General discussion

Fun with Derrida

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Jacques Derrida

Adrian Blau has an entertaining discussion of whether Derrida’s analysis of why we refer to 9/11 in the way we do is bullshit or simply crap.  A taste:

I’ll focus solely on Leiter’s 2003 blog entry, ‘Derrida and Bullshit’, which attacks the ‘ridiculousness’ of Derrida’s comments on 9/11. This came from an interview with Derrida in October 2001. Here is an abbreviated version; you can see the full thing on p. 85 onwards of this book.

… this act of naming: a date and nothing more. … [T]he index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this ‘thing’ that has just happened … But this very thing … remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about.

9/11 turned the world upside down. Or at least 45 degrees to the side.

So, is this bullshit, on the Frankfurt and/or the Cohen notions of bullshit? I would say no. I take Derrida to be saying the following.

We often repeat the name ‘9/11’ without thinking much about it. But the words we use can be very revealing. Why do we try to reduce this complex event to such a simple term? Because the event is so complex we cannot capture it properly. Precisely by talking about it in such a simple way, we admit that we don’t really understand it.

If I have understood Derrida – tell me if I haven’t – this explanation is surely wrong.

Read the whole thing and the discussion to follow.  Reminds me of the game some of us played in graduate school: interpret the work of Derrida using a simple phrase.  My favorite: “Aporias or ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales.'”

Via Leiter.

General discussion

Picture framing

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ad deformem

For the informal logic connoisseurs, the modus tonens (identified by our very own Scott Aikin and co author Robert Talisse) consists in repeating back an interlocutor’s argument in a derisive tone (see also here).  There is a visual version of that which has long bothered me.  It involves posting a jerky looking photo of the person whose view you derisively or incredulously report (not refute, by the way, and I think this is important).  This happens in reporting, as the refutation is the picture.  Let’s provisionally call it the “ad deformem” (against ugly).

Take the above example from Talking Points Memo.  No doubt there exist lots of pictures of Erickson.  This one makes him look like a bloviating jerk.  What did he say?

In many, many animal species, the male and female of the species play complementary roles, with the male dominant in strength and protection and the female dominant in nurture. It’s the female who tames the male beast. One notable exception is the lion, where the male lion looks flashy but behaves mostly like a lazy beta-male MSNBC producer.

Yes, he certainly deserves to be laughed at for that.  But I don’t see the relevance of an uncharitable picture.  I don’t see the relevance of any picture at all, actually, save to identify the mug for the onlooking audience–to distinguish Erickson from George Will for instance.

The argument seems bad enough on its own.  And I think the uncharitable picture undermines, rather than advances, the report.  An accurate report ought to be enough to call attention to the appalling view; the picture turns our attention away from that and onto the person with the view.

Naturally these two persons need not always conflict (the ad hominem after all is not always fallacious), but one ought to be judicious in using them.

General discussion

OSSA Day 3: Patterson on Arguments

Steven Patterson, “Are Arguments Abstract Objects?”

A standard story:  (p, q) is an argument iff (i) S intends for q to be inferred from p, and (ii) q and p are related by an inference rule.

Some counter-examples: #1: late for the movie: S has p (S is sick, and if sick will miss the movie), S doesn’t intend to infer that q (late).  #2: Pancake: S intends to infer q from p (pancakes today from helium is light), but it doesn’t follow.
#3. Snowy day: S intends to infer q from p, but there aren’t rules of inference in the midst of the two?

The analogical argument: Arguments are like musical compositions

-both are human productions

– there are individual works, but with identity-conditions

-but, these identity conditions are hard…

-understanding/appreciating requires training

-multiple conditions, can bilocate

– occur w/in contexts & have histories for development

Open concepts- don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions, but do have boundaries.  E.g.,  continuum from the Socrates syllogism, to the ontological argument, to the ‘you’ve got to be kidding me response to arguments, to imagistic & physical arguments.