Category Archives: Informal Fallacies

Ad Hominem, Ad Hominem Abusive, General discussion

How not to defend yourself (gnu atheist style!)

18 Comments

For those of you who don't know, Rob Talisse and I have been posting about atheism and argumentative civility over at 3QuarksDaily.  First, here; the follow up here.  Our book, Reasonable Atheism is on the shelves now, too.   In the blog posts, we've been trying to untangle the ugliness about the charge of 'accommodationism' among the atheists. Well, that angers the gnus, because they keep thinking that people are wagging their fingers at them about tone.  And angry atheists don't like to be told to be nicer.  (And, by the way, nothing about what we'd written was about tone, anyway. So…)

We criticized PZ Myers, of pharyngula fame, for making an error we see a lot: holding a person in contempt for believing something you think is false.  The point is that there's a difference between being wrong and being stupid, and Myers makes the error all too often.  He posted a comment on our first entry (Feb 7, 2011 10:36:49 PM) and said that there are 'irrational reasons'.   But only people are irrational.  Reasons are irrelevant, insufficient, poorly arranged, and so on.  A person may be irrational for holding those reasons, but that's the point.  He's making the error in spades there.  We made the distinction again in the follow-up and even provided some examples.  And then Myers defends himself with this:

Dear sweet goddess of academic loquaciousness, is the whole book written in that style? Is anyone going to be able to read it? Those three paragraphs nearly killed me with their preening opacity! And, near as I can tell, all they're doing is fussing over the conjunction of two words that they found incomprehensible.

Wow.  That we were hard to read is a defense?  Seriously?  I now know why Myers thinks that most sophisticated defenses of religious belief are totally stupid.  He doesn't understand them, because he has no interest in reading hard things.   A shame, really, that someone who stands for rational discourse and reason helping has no interest in responding to criticism with any.

Oh, and if we needed to make explicit the form of the fallacy, it's ad hominem abusive.  Classic, baby, classic.

Appeal to Fear/Threat, General discussion

An appeal to the force

20 Comments

Whilst discussing the concept of the argumentum ad baculum the other day in Critical Thinking class, it occured to me that this scene from Star Wars might be an interesting example, in its fallacious and non fallacious varieties:

TARKIN: The regional governors now have direct control over
territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this
battle station.

TAGGE: And what of the Rebellion? If the Rebels have obtained a
complete technical readout of this station, it is possible, however
unlikely, that they might find a weakness and exploit it.

VADER: The plans you refer to will soon be back in our hands.

MOTTI: Any attack made by the Rebels against this station would be a
useless gesture, no matter what technical data they've obtained. This
station is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use
it!

VADER: Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've
constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to
the power of the Force.

MOTTI: Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader.
Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure
up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the
Rebel's hidden fort…

Suddenly Motti chokes and starts to turn blue under Vader's
spell.

VADER: I find your lack of faith disturbing.

TARKIN: Enough of this! Vader, release him!

VADER: As you wish.

Script here.  Video here.

There seem to be a number of arguments on the table here. 

Tarkin (the guy who looks like Vincent Price) first suggests the Empire ought to rule by fear and force, using the Death Star.  This is not a fallacious appeal to force, as he simply advocates violent coercion. 

Tagge worries that such force will be inadequate, since it is force, it can be defeated on its own terms, or that machines have inherent limitations which can be exploited by force (a well placed shot, for instance, at a weak point).  He doesn't seem to advocate diplomacy and rational persuasion, however, though perhaps one might infer something like this from what he said. 

Motti (the guy who gets choked) agrees with Vincent Price and advocates the use of force with the qualification that it is totally awesome and ought to be used now. 

But Vader says force is nothing compared to THE Force. 

Here is where it gets odd.  Motti gets into a scrum with Vader over which force to use–force or The Force.  What is hilarious is that neither thinks he shouldn't be using force broadly construed.  Funnier still is that the argument over which sense of force to be used is resolved by force (broadly costrued again).  Here it is:

Motti criticizes Vader for his "sorcerer's ways" and for his religious devotion to the Force–arguing:

1.  The Death Star is the ultimate power in the universe and ought to be used against the rebels;

2.  Not even a complete technical readout of the Death Star can defeat it;

But Vader rebuts him, arguing:

3.  ad 1 and 2.  The planet pulverizing power of the Death Star does not compare to The Force.

Motti replies:

4.  A truly useful "force" would also be able to (1) locate the rebels; and (2) recover the stolen tapes.

5.  Point 3 is therefore false.

Vader replies:

6.  Choking Motti, saying "your lack of faith is disturbing." 

Here's the question.  Has Vader countered Motti by choking him?  Or is his use of the force a fallacious appeal to force?  It seems on one reading that Vader doesn't rebut Motti's points by choking him (that could be a sorcerer's trick, after all), so it is an irrelevant and therefore fallacious appeal to force. 

On the other hand, perhaps Vader is demonstrating the reality of the force in its use–as if to say, "if the force weren't real, I couldn't choke you from a distance."  But if that were true, then why would Vader say this:

"I find your lack of faith disturbing." 

At that point, the choking I mean, it's not a question of faith anymore.  Unless by "faith" Vader means a trust in his (Vader's) skills at locating lost plans, etc.  If that's the case, however, I'm not sure how distance-choking makes Vader's point. 

I'm inclined at this point to think that Vader has made a fallacious appeal to force–but I might change my mind if some one of you readers can distance-choke me.

David Brooks, General discussion, oversimplified cause, Straw We

The simple reason there is no simple reason

2 Comments

David Brooks illustrates today that there's a simple, singular reason people employ the oversimplified cause argument scheme:

Over the course of my career, I’ve covered a number of policy failures. When the Soviet Union fell, we sent in teams of economists, oblivious to the lack of social trust that marred that society. While invading Iraq, the nation’s leaders were unprepared for the cultural complexities of the place and the psychological aftershocks of Saddam’s terror.

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

That simple reason is that we believe some kind of Brooksian dichotomy: people are either x or y, etc.  My question: so we've been making dichotomies (I don't think we have–Brooks has), and this is too simple, and this is the simple reason why there is no simple reason.  This refutes itself.

Ignoratio Elenchi

Showers of gold

12 Comments

I belong to a faculty union, now in it's third year of contract negotiations (for a contract which lasts four years).  The sticking point, unsurprisingly, is not money.  No one expects any of that–no one other than the administration, the top rung of which has been lavished with raises equal in some cases to my entire full time Assistant Professor salary.  No one is complaining; their punishment is that they get to be administrators.  The sticking point is workload. 

But that's not really want I wanted to talk about.  I'd like to talk about promises.  David Leonhardt, writing in the New York Times, writes:

To be clear, I’m making an argument that’s different from “Government workers are overpaid.” I’m saying that they are paid in the wrong ways — in ways that make life easier on union leaders and elected officials, at least initially, but that eventually hurt both workers and taxpayers.

The best example is health insurance. Health plans for union workers and retirees are much more likely to require little or no co-payment, which leads to lots of medical treatments that don’t make people any healthier, and to huge costs. Ultimately, some of these plans will probably prove so expensive as to be unsustainable. Workers would have been better off accepting a less generous benefit package and slightly higher salaries.

 Got that.  He's not saying they're overpaid.  He's saying they're overpaid.

On a different point.  Workers negotiated those plans on purpose.  They accept lower salary in favor of better health and retirement benefits, because they understand that this is part of their compensation.  The responsibility for making these deals sustainable belongs not to them, but to the people with whom they negotiated.  If it doesn't, then Leonhardt has justified negotiation in bad faith, and has placed the blame on failing to follow through on promises with the promise breaker. 

In the moral universe, promises such as those outlined in contracts entail moral obligations to uphold them–however "unsustainable" they may be.  If they turn out, in this case, to be unsustainable, the fault lies with the promiser. 

**In other news.  Corporations have no personal right to privacy:

“Two words together may assume a more particular meaning than those words in isolation,” he wrote, adding that “personal privacy” suggests “a kind of privacy evocative of human concerns.”

The chief justice had examples here, too. “We understand a golden cup to be a cup made of or resembling gold,” he wrote. “A golden boy, on the other hand, is one who is charming, lucky and talented. A golden opportunity is one not to be missed.”

I wonder if Roberts noticed all of the clerks laughing.

George Will, Straw Man

Crazy Train

7 Comments

We've all been busy here at the Non Sequitur.  But today I had a moment for a short post.

Here's Paul Krugman on George Will (via Eschaton):

Oh, boy — this George Will column (via Grist) is truly bizarre:

So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons—to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

As Sarah Goodyear at Grist says, trains are a lot more empowering and individualistic than planes — and planes, not cars, are the main alternative to high-speed rail.

And there’s the bit about rail as an antiquated technology; try saying that after riding the Shanghai Maglev.

But anyway, it’s amazing to see Will — who is not a stupid man — embracing the sinister progressives-hate-your-freedom line, more or less right out of Atlas Shrugged; with the extra irony, of course, that John Galt’s significant other ran, well, a railroad.

Like Kramer on Seinfeld, I'd take issue with the last bolded comment.  This argument, such as it is, is classic Will:  The most dishonest kind of straw man used to provoke an explanatory hypothesis about the the straw manned arguer's motives and intellgence in making such bizarre and wrong-headed claims.  On the strength of this, you'll feel justified in ignoring anything else such a person would say.

This one is especially odd since trains are self-evidently awesome–and they're kind of bow-tie conservative-ish, like baseball.  Besides, as Sarah Goodyear points out, they do the same things planes do: they send you in a tube to another city.  The only difference is that trains usually drop you off downtown.

Ad hominem tu quoque, Hasty Generalization, inconsistency, Jonah Goldberg

I won’t forget to place roses on your grave

5 Comments

Tu Quoque arguments, it seems to me, have a statute of limitations on when the first of the two inconsistent acts can be relevantly inconsistent with the second. (See my long article in Informal Logic for the full story)  For example, someone may express appropriate surprise at the fact that the altarboy later became an atheist when he was a grownup, but that's not inconsistency in the relevant sense for an accusation of hypocrisy.  The two acts need to be close enough in time for them to be relevant to each other.  And so it's usual when someone runs an argument from inconsistency, she will say something like:

Person S says we should not do X, but then she turns right around and does X.

The important thing is that S turns right around and does it.  If she did X years ago, perhaps S has learned her lesson.  Or she's changed her mind.  Or maybe the facts regarding X have changed.  X may be the best option, nowadays.  The lesson: with charges of hypocrisy, time's relevant.

With that in mind, let's look at Jonah Goldberg's commentary on the (albeit grudging) praise of Ronald Reagan's presidency from liberals.  This is part of a trend he sees. Barry Goldwater, after being demonized by LBJ, was later portrayed as an "avuncular and sage grandfather type." William F. Buckley, too, went from being called a Nazi to later being an actual defender of liberalism.  Reagan, now:

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Gipper is enjoying yet another status upgrade among liberals. Barack Obama took a Reagan biography with him on his vacation. A slew of liberals and mainstream journalists (but I repeat myself) complimented Obama’s State of the Union address as “Reaganesque.” Time magazine recently featured the cover story “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan.” Meanwhile, the usual suspects are rewriting the same columns about how Reagan was a pragmatist who couldn’t run for president today because he was too nice, too reasonable, too (shudder) liberal for today’s Republican party.

Trouble is, while Reagan was alive, liberals didn't have too high an opinion of him:

[My] favorite comes from Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London, which in 1982 held a vote for the most hated people of all time. The winners: Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula.

Now, first, note that these are cases where we're looking at things said in 1982 and 2011.  Almost thirty years difference.  Second, note that these inconsistencies are ones distributed over a group, Liberals, not individual people.  Regardless, it's almost as though Goldberg isn't paying attention to the subtext of these retrospectives:  that despite the fact that liberals disagreed with these conservatives, liberals could nevertheless see their virtues as people in retrospect.  And one of the reasons why those virtues are worth mentioning now is that current conservatives so clearly fail to have them.  I take it back.  Goldberg gets that part:

[S]o much of the effort to build up conservatives of the past is little more than a feint to tear down the conservatives of the present.

But, for some reason,  he thinks instead this is a point he's scoring on liberals by showing how they're inconsistent.  Again, in cases where time's changed the variables, sometimes what you've inveighed against earlier becomes the best choice.  Ask any liberal: would you take  Reagan or Buckley over Palin or Goldberg for a decent conversation about government and political norms?  You know the answer.  Goldberg thinks this means that liberals think that the only good conservative is a dead conservative. He's missed the point.  The point, instead, is sadly that all the good conservatives are dead.

Weak Analogy

Dibs

17 Comments

Chicago (where I live) just had a fairly large blizzard (20 or so inches or about 51 cm) .  This, as you might imagine, causes problems for transportation.  Despite a robust system of public transportation, Chicago is a car city.  When it snows, these cars–often parked on the streets, get buried beneath mountains of plowed snow.  This creates a unique sort of property problem. 

It goes like this.  You spend four hours liberating your car from its snow tomb, or creating a parking spot where before there was just piled snow, so you conclude that on account of your mixing your labor with that parking spot, that you can call "dibs" on it; you worked it, it's yours.

Having just liberated my own vehicle from a snow tomb, I have a bit of sympathy for this approach.  Nonetheless, I'd prefer an honor system.  A student of mine this morning put it like this: if you are looking for parking, then you have yourself worked to free your car from a spot, which is now open.  Not a bad idea, though it needs some filling out.  

Another student forwarded me the following argument against dibs (from Time Out Chicago):

Why is dibs a bad thing? While snowfall can be a magical thing, snow doesn't magically turn public spaces into private property. It's a very un-Chicagolike tradition: When snow falls, all of a sudden neighbors become vehement and territorial.

If someone puts in the effort to shovel a spot, they don't deserve a claim on that space? If you push someone's car out of the snow, you don't say you own their car, do you? I also question how much sweat people put in. The snow that fell [in mid-December] was not enough that people had to dig their cars out, yet there are chairs all over.

Is there evidence that dibs is a problem? There's a thinly veiled threat of violence associated with dibs. People who've violated dibs have gotten their cars keyed. I once heard a story about someone breaking the back window of someone's car and putting a hose in there and turning it on.

Doesn't tradition carry some weight? Not all traditions are good. Political corruption is another Chicago tradition.

Even though I'm leaning against dibs, these are really terrible reasons.  The second one, especially.  The principle works on the Lockean (or something like it) theory of property.  If you mix your labor with it, you've earned it.  In this case you earn it temporarily, and no, it's not like claiming someone's car is yours.  

**Update

on dibs from the New York, I mean, Huffington Post.

Ad Hominem Abusive, Straw Man

What about quests?

So Bill O'Reilly, cable TV blowhard hardly worth commenting on, has advanced the argumentum ad aestum (ex aesto?  ab aesto?–ideas anyone), or the argument from the tides, for the existence of God.  The thought goes something like this:

O'REILLY: I'll tell you why [religion's] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

You can explain it–moon, gravity, etc. (from the same link as above):

Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and the Sun and the rotation of the Earth.

Most places in the ocean usually experience two high tides and two low tides each day (semidiurnal tide), but some locations experience only one high and one low tide each day (diurnal tide). The times and amplitude of the tides at the coast are influenced by the alignment of the Sun and Moon, by the pattern of tides in the deep ocean (see figure 4) and by the shape of the coastline and near-shore bathymetry.

O'Reilly remains unconvinced.  He replies:

Okay, how did the Moon get there? How'd the Moon get there? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How'd the Moon get there? How'd the Sun get there? How'd it get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn't have it? Venus doesn't have it. How come? Why not? How'd it get here?

Now now Bill, there's no reason to throw around the insults.  There's a perfectly adequate explanation for all of this.  Besides, the original argument had to do with the regular behavior of the tides (a sign, I'd say, of an obsessive-compulsive deity), not with the existence of objects. 

In all seriousness, O'Reilly displays an unfortunate characteristic of the cable TV blowhard (print pundit, etc.)–the near constant attempt to make the closing argument.  It's not just that his objectors are wrong (they're not); it's that the argument with them (pinheads) is over; they're "desparate," they have nothing to contribute.  A mind such as O'Reilly's, however, will never use the closer alone, he'll use it in conjunction with some variety of straw man or other fallacy.  Here I think he's changed the subject, and then accused the objector with not having an answer to his new argument (in their old argument).  I suppose this is a representational straw man, as that wasn't the point in the first place of the objector's argument. 

*For the title: watch this, the greatest review of any kind anywhere.

Ad Hominem Abusive

He forgot to mention that he is fat

We got twenty feet of snow around here, complete with thundersnow, so what better day could there be for a global warming post.

"Al Gore is fat" is shorthand for all of the ad hominem (meanie-meanie-bo-beanie variety) that people have heaped up on Al Gore for his attempt to explain the science of global warming to a science-disliking nation. 

Now our new Senator, Mark Kirk, has found a new way to achieve the same basic goal:

Another Republican blasted from both sides of the spectrum for his record on emissions, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, said he is "not terribly concerned" about taking heat from green groups for his criticism of EPA action on carbon emissions.

"The consensus behind the climate change bill collapsed and then further deteriorated with the personal and political collapse of Vice President [Al] Gore," Kirk said in a brief interview last week.

The thought goes something like this.  Al Gore's (personal characteristic) makes me doubt the scientific consensus behind global warming, because who would believe something that a (personal characteristic of Al Gore) believes.  

Update:

Then, FWIW, there's this funny item.

ignorance of basic matters of logic, Plain Bad Arguments, Red Herring, weak man

Ever tried red herring?

2 Comments

Some people think gun control is a good idea.  But "gun control" could mean any number of things.  It might mean, for instance, a complete ban on guns.  Some people want that.  It might also mean a ban on military-style weapons.  Seems more sensible to me.  This might make it more difficult for some solitary crazy person to kill a lot of people at once.  You would have thought that, of course, until you consulted history:

(1) THE (NON) EFFECT ON PUBLIC SAFETY: Set aside the fact that criminals don’t obey any law. Set aside too the fact that even if all firearms could be magically disintegrated by appropriate legislation, the murderous would simply use other more time-tested methods of killing. It should not be forgotten that some 7000 were killed in a single day at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 using the available hand weapons, which did not include firearms. At the Civil War battle of Gettysburg in 1863, both sides suffered approximately 51,000 casualties in three days of fighting using primarily single shot, breech loading rifles and muzzle loading cannon quite crude by contemporary standards. Some 5000 horses were also killed. The problem, in 1066, 1863 and today is human nature, not the tools employed.

The little number there will tell you the author of this argument is presenting a convergent case.  The unique ridiculousness of this claim, therefore, may not be representative of the whole argument.  If I were to engage in a bit of weak-manning, I might argue that a person who would advance such a claim doesn't need to be listened to any longer.  But that's not fair play.  You can read the rest of the argument for yourself. 

This one is just uniquely hilarious, as it seems completely to miss the point that high-capacity magazines (assault weapons, etc.) make it easier for lone nutcases to kill a lot of people in a very short amount of time.  It doesn't, of course, end our inhumanity to each other in the form of war.  To invoke this, I think, is a textbook worthy instance of the red herring technique.  In case you're not familiar with that technique, here's another example:

It's not the case that the oil spill caused tons of environmental damage in the Gulf, have you ever tried red herring?  They're excellent and they're on the menu at your local Swedish restaurant. 

link courtesy of balloon juice.