John and I just published our essay on varieties of the straw man fallacy, "Straw Men, Weak Men, and Hollow Men," over at Argumentation. Here's the link to the paper.
Category Archives: General discussion
Anything else.
Low expectations
Bill O'Reilly will be interviewing President Obama before the Superbowl. O'Reilly doesn't want us to expect too much from him. Interviewing the President is, like, hard. For one, you've got all these rules about being respectful. You don't get to cut the President's mic if you don't like what he's saying, or interrupt him and call him a pinhead. Well, that's it:
That's because the rules are different when it comes to interviewing the president of the United States. . . . For example, he is addressed as "Mr. President." No one says "Yo, Barack, how you doin'?" There is a respect for the office that formalizes all conversation.
Right. You don't open with 'Yo.' But the point is that you don't undermine the dignity of the office, instead of make some lame attempt at racializing the president. Seriously, 'Yo'. Yo. Right, so were the president Irish, you make a big deal about not starting your conversation with President O'Malley with "Blarney!" or asking where he keeps his leprechauns. Methinks the pundit doth protest too much.
Regardless, O'Reilly prepares us for a subpar interview and a round of critical beatings of his interview. Instead of preparing his questions, he's preparing his rationalizations.
I fully expect to get hammered after the interview. Depending on how you feel about the president, the questions will either be too soft or too intrusive.
Nope. False dilemma. O'Reilly can't even rationalize properly. The questions will not be either too soft or too intrusive. They will be too improperly formed. Too ideologically obtuse. Too pandering to an audience on the other side of the camera and not to the person to whom they are posed. Too… Fox. And they will be insufficiently intelligent, serious, or intelligible. They will be exactly what we expect from Bill O'Reilly. Which means that our expectations will be low. Just as O'Reilly has asked us to set them. Except for different reasons. Oh well, at least we're all prepared for his journalistic failure. The only problem is that too many will blame the President and his office for O'Reilly's failure, not the interviewer. Sheesh, if O'Reilly knew already that this interview wouldn't portray him in a good light, why did he agree to it in the first place? Doesn't the President know that O'Reilly is important and that interviewing Presidents is hard on him and puts his career in danger? It is such a sacrifice, you know, interviewing a President when you know that you just can't win.
Daily Show on Nutpicking
Watch at this link for a fun back-and-forth between Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly on the argumentum ad Hitlerum.
TL;DR for O'Reilly, his Nazi invocation (about "the left") is just fine because his assistants found an anonymous commenter at a blog who called Nancy Reagan evil and wished that she die soon (of natural causes). What that has to do with the Nazis is beyond me.
That, of course, is some classic nut picking, or as the experts call it, weak manning. What makes it especially fallacious (if that is possible) is that it's deployed in an ideologically monochrome (should I drop this phrase? Should I not comment on my sentence during my sentence?) context in order to disqualify an opposing arguer on account of the very bad arguments they make. This last part being critical to the nutpicker.
Talk radio is entertainment
Bill O'Reilly, shame of Irish people everywhere, on talk radio:
Delightful. Now, I don't hold Mr. Maher to the same standard as The Washington Post because he's a comedian, a man who makes a living expressing a point of view. But apparently the president's point of view, more civility, is not being embraced by Mr. Maher.
Also, I've gotten a lot of mail asking me why I don't come down on right-wing talk radio, and it's the same thing: Talk radio is entertainment. People on there make a living expressing opinions. It's not a news forum; therefore the standards are not the same.
I guess whatever it is that O'Reilly does is not expressing his opinion. Nonetheless, it's odd to me to classify "expressing one's opinion" as sufficient condition for entertainment. Discuss.
Argument by Tu Quoque Analogy
Cal Thomas has conjoined two fallacy forms, and it will make all attentive readers smile. After hearing that Robert Brady (D-PA) has proposed a bill outlawing threatening elected officials, Thomas sees some analogies… some analogies that show some hypocrisies.
In the 1980s when conservative groups tried to "clean up" the bad language, sexual references and violence on TV, the Left cried "censorship." When conservatives campaigned against pornography and "music" that encouraged violence against women and racial epithets, they were told a healthy First Amendment required that even the most offensive speech be tolerated. It was the same argument used to allow the burning of the American flag at political protests. But the Left is intolerant of speech it disagrees with and so wishes to censor what it cannot overcome with superior argument.
Fallacy double-dipping. Faulty analogy used in order to fix a premise for tu quoque. It takes a special talent, you see.
The first problem is that Brady's bill is just extending the protections that are already given to the President to other officials. For sure, enforcing it requires some judgment, but, you know, so do most laws governing speech (e.g., libel). The crucial thing is that there's a difference between language that contributes to icky culture (profanity, obscenity, sexist and racist language) and language promoting violence on an individual. This bill is only about the latter. So Thomas' analogy is way too thin to show a real inconsistency here.
Second, by saying that the Left (who says Democrats are of the Left, anyhow?) censors language they can't defeat by argument, is Thomas thinking that this bill extends to criticism? It certainly seems so. But that's not what Brady was talking about. It was about threatening, not disagreeing with, refuting, or holding wrong. Maybe that's just how Thomas does it, but most folks make that distinction. I'd noted earlier that Thomas, when warned about tone, seems to get more aggressive. He thinks he's being censored, not just criticized or given some advice. (Nothing causes Thomas to be more caustic than his being told that he maybe could try to tone it down.)
Onion funny
Outsourcing blogging to The Onion today:
NEW YORK—According to media analysts, the nation's TV commentators and political pundits have proved uncannily accurate when describing the deeply disturbed inner thoughts of accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner. "It's strange, but when it comes to getting inside the mind of this human being who seems to possess no empathy, sense of morality, or hold on reality, and who is motivated only by personal animus and self-glorification, the nation's major political pundits have been amazingly adept," said Horizon Media analyst Bob Cullen, who has studied extensive tape of commentators on all major TV news programs and found their remarks on "what the killer is thinking" to be consistently thorough and detailed across the board. "It's almost as though they have some way of knowing, firsthand, exactly what this demented and highly dangerous individual with the eyes of millions upon him is going through." Researchers at Horizon Media also reported that a number of prominent TV pundits appeared to be mimicking the exact same chilling gleam in Loughner's eye for what they could only speculate was "dramatic effect."
Hilarious.
Every effect has a cause, usually
Someone quipped the other day that whatever we do in the wake of Saturday's massacre (not tragedy), we must not consider what might have caused it. And so, George Will:
It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson's occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds.
Well, I say all men by nature desire to know. I'd also say the very frequency of mass casualty attacks means they fall into the "things deserving explanation category." It's "tragedies" plural, after all.
Who can blame George Will (and the rest of the pack of Wapo conservatives); no one likes to be associated with psychos. As someone else quipped (on twitter of all places): if they're looking for advice on how to manage the unjust assocation, maybe they can ask Muslims. If someone holds beliefs remotely similar to yours, after all, you're guilty unless you spend all day every day distancing yourself from them. Well, that's the way it is for Muslims, at least.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make today was already made by smarter and more articulate people. So I'll just repeat most of what they said.
While calling for caution, honesty, and rigor in attributing specific causes to the events in Tucscon, George Will casts caution to the wind in interpreting the words of others. He writes:
Three days before Tucson, Howard Dean explained that the Tea Party movement is "the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity." Rising to the challenge of lowering his reputation and the tone of public discourse, Dean smeared Tea Partyers as racists: They oppose Obama's agenda, Obama is African American, ergo . . .
Let us hope that Dean is the last gasp of the generation of liberals whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as racists. This McCarthyism of the left – devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data – is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.
By way of analogy, which is a kind of argument, I might pick out eleven words from Erick Erickson or Glenn Beck, or whoever, that suggest one ought to take up arms against the government. But that wouldn't be fair, would it? Well in their case it just appears to be plainly true. Anyway, the point is that Dean was making a more nuanced point that Will's slimy quotation suggests. And so we have, I think, the beginnings of a classic representational form straw man. It begins with pure distortion directly attributed to someone else. But this one has, I think, a key feature of the fallacious straw man–the employment of the distortion to close the argument–which is exactly what Will does. It's not enough, in other words, that Dean's contribution to the Tea Party discourse blows. He's also a moron for offering it, a moron not worthy of further serious intellectual engagement.
Poe’s Law and Straw Men
Poe's Law is one of the many eponymous laws of the internet. It runs, roughly, that you can't tell the difference between religious crazies and people parodying religious crazies. And vice versa. That means that anything you find, for example, on LandoverBaptist.com you can find a real religious nutcase who believes it and says it.
If Poe's Law is true, then I think it would be very difficult for charges of straw-manning to stick. That is, no matter how crazy a view you can dream up about religion, you would likely be able to find someone who really holds that view. As a consequence, you'd never really be distorting the dialectical situation with the issue — there's always someone dumber and crazier than you'd anticipated.
One thing to note, now, is that there's a difference between straw-manning and weak-manning. That is, it's one thing to distort what some speaker or another may say and it's another thing to take the weakest and dumbest versions of your opposition and refute only them. Straw-manning is the former, weak-manning is the latter. The point is that if Poe's Law is true, it may be impossible to straw man, but the dialectical terrain is littered with weak men. Your job is to sort them.
My worry is that without that distinction between accurate but selectively inappropriate representations of one's opposition (nutpicking one's versions of the opposition so they always are the dumb ones) and accurate and the best representations of one's opposition, we lose the thought that discourse is possible. If you think that Poe is true about the religious (that they're all borderline nutcases or people who are simply enablers of nutcases), then there's not much of a chance at reasoned exchange with them. Same goes for politics. That's bad.
N.B.: Robert Talisse and I have a longer version of this thought over at 3QuarksDaily. I also have a longish essay on it up over at my website on Academia.edu.
Metaphors of violence
There's been a good bit of discussion of the appropriateness of using the language of armed conflict to describe attitudes of public contempt for legislators. You have Sharon Angle's invocation of Second Amendment Remedies for problems with Congress. Sarah Palin posted a map with crosshairs on names of electorally vulnerable Democrats, and she's fond of evoking gun violence in how to exchange with Liberals, with "Don't Retreat, Instead RELOAD" as the catchphrase.
A few years back, CBS golf analyst, David Feherty, offered up the following joke:
If you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama Bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and Bin Laden would be strangled to death
There was also a Nintendo DuckHunt-inspired game, Lame Duck Hunt (posted by "Americans for Prosperity"), where there are chances to really put the heads of Pelosi and Reid in some gunsights.
Now Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) has been shot. And John M. Roll, the chief judge for the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, fatally.
In light of these events, it's right to ask: is the language of violence appropriate for reasonable political exchange? Here's my initial try at an answer: People should be free to express their frustration and antagonism with those they oppose. And the manner they express that opposition, I think, can appropriately use the language of violent conflict. However, it is appropriate under the conditions that we are clear that the use of violent language is strictly metaphorical. War metaphors for argument can emphasize the offensive tactical elements of argumentative exchange. Some arguments are full frontal assaults, others are ambushes or surprise attacks, wherein one overwhelms an opponent. One may lay to waste a position, skewer a point, or blow up a case. Arguments may have a thrust, like that of a sword. And consequently, every thrust can be parried. One shores up defensive positions, and when defeated, one may be engage in rear-guard maneuvers. One’s best arguments are heavy artillery, and one brings them out in long-standing debates to lay siege to well-defended viewpoints.
That's how I see Palin's crosshairs map and her 'reload' line. The crosshairs are targets, that is, electoral targets – races that deserve focused attention. The 'reload' line is more about self-confidence and trying again. Neither are overt endorsements of violence. But then there's Angle, Feherty, and the Lame Duck Hunt game. These are considerably closer to endorsing real violence, not the metaphorical violence of winning an argument or election. Angle and Feherty seem to be endorsing the use of deadly force in the face of disagreement. The Duck Hunt game encourages you to put crosshairs right between Pelosi's eyes.
That is, there seems to be a difference between using metaphors of violence to endorse continued vigorous debate and exchange and using the language of violent confrontation as an endorsement of violent confrontation. Only the latter is morally unacceptable. The former may have other dangers (perhaps in seeing argumentative exchanges through the lens of war), but it is not the overt commitment to physical hurt.
Vacation
In case you haven't noticed, dear reader, we are on vacation. While we are gone, please munch on the following tidbit of wisdom pulled off the Huffington Post:
When I think back on these things, I cringe. Not only did I not become the next Socrates, a paradoxical thing happened — the longer I stayed in teaching, the more I realized how much I didn't know.
Happy New Year.