Category Archives: Informal Fallacies

George Will, Hasty Generalization

A larger point

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Today another example of the argument by anecdote. I’m still uncertain how to classify this–and thanks commenters for the comments–but this one instance of it I think is emblematic.

That was a joke. Today George Will finds two examples–two anecdotes as it were–of silly regulation by government at the behest of business interests.

>PHOENIX — In the West, where the deer and the antelope used to play, the spirit of “leave us alone” government used to prevail. But governments of Western states are becoming more like those elsewhere, alas.

>Consider the minor — but symptomatic — matter of the government-abetted aggression by “interior designers” against mere “decorators,” or against interior designers whom other interior designers wish to demote to the status of decorators. Some designers think decorators should be a lesser breed without the law on its side.

And that’s the thing. Let’s say the anecdotes are true as told. How can we conclude that they are “symptomatic of government-abetted agression.” These are two–only two–instances of apparently silly regulation. Why bother writing a column devoted to pointing out two instances of government silliness? Well, maybe, as some will certainly object, you have a “larger point.”

In the world of reasoning and logic, larger points follow from smaller points, and without smaller points, larger points do not exist. Or at least they are not justified.

So, what larger points could Will think he’s making?

He makes no effort to entertain the justifications for such regulations, he cannot conclude that they are unjustified. They certainly sound silly as he has described them. But one shouldn’t have a lot of confidence is such obviously uncharitable descriptions of minor consequences of regulation. One can certainly ask how emblematic those particular rules are of the regulation in question. And Will hasn’t done anything to establish that.

Could it be true that this regulation is actually strangling business? No evidence is offered of that. Now I suppose the reader might fill in his or her own outrageous anecdotes. But no effort is made even to gesture in the direction of evidence that would justify such broad conclusions as these:

>Beyond the banal economic motive for such laws, they also involve a more bizarre misuse of government. They assuage the status anxieties of particular groups by giving them the prestige, such as it is, that comes from government recognition as a certified profession.

So in the end we have what might be evidence that some of the rules consequent upon a couple of laws make people laugh. That’s comedy–and it’s certainly funny–but it’s not much of an argument.

But the larger point he’s making? There isn’t one.

Robert Samuelson, Straw Man

The two Gores

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The war on Al Gore is really the specialty of the Daily Howler, but with all deference to Bob Somerby, let me take a stab at it today. The old war on Gore involved the claim that he had a kind of pathological obsession with becoming President of the United States. On this theme, the New York Times’ Healy and Leibovich:

>For Mr. Gore, who calls himself a “recovering politician,” returning to Capitol Hill is akin to a recovering alcoholic returning to a neighborhood bar.

That gratuitous aside puts the whole idea of testifying before Congress back in the old light of Al Gore will do or say anything to become President. But that’s par for the course, and has been amply demonstrated by the above sources.

Luckily we still have Al Gore to kick around. And, like Charles Krauthammer, we can question his grip on reality. So in today’s Post Robert Samuelson writes:

>Global warming has gone Hollywood, literally and figuratively. The script is plain. As Gore says, solutions are at hand. We can switch to renewable fuels and embrace energy-saving technologies, once the dark forces of doubt are defeated. It’s smart and caring people against the stupid and selfish. Sooner or later, Americans will discover that this Hollywood version of global warming (largely mirrored in the media) is mostly make-believe.

And the rest of the op-ed is filled with claims about our extensive use of coal and its contribution to greenhouse gases and so forth. Kudos to Samuelson for not doubting the science of global warming like his colleague, George Will. But like George Will, Samuelson is guilty of confusing the Hollywood story on global warming–necessarily fantastical–with actual probable policy recommendations offered by experts. On any charitable interpretation of what Al Gore is saying, one can’t draw the conclusion that a magic wand will make the whole thing go away. But one can conclude, as has Gore, that there is a major obstacle to progress of any kind on the issue–the will to implement policies aimed at clean and renewable sources of energy.

This is where the new script meets the old one. Isn’t Al Gore some kind of political addict who thrives on the complexity of policy making (rather than simple-minded Texas bromides about the good and the evil)? At least Samuelson didn’t stick to that script.

General discussion, Hasty Generalization

Anecdotal arguments

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Glenn Greenwald has some thoughts worth considering about the fallacy of the “argument by anecdote.” He writes:

>The Ward Churchill whirlwind is one of the classic examples of this rotted genre. “Stories” of that type — which are, as I’ve noted before, perfect examples of the logical fallacy of “argument by anecdote” — are naturally attractive to lazy journalists because they enable broad political points to be made simply by focusing on single anecdotes in isolation. Very little analytical or journalistic work needs to be done in order to covert those anecdotes and cliches into a sensationalistic, attention-generating story.

While I think he’s correct in his assessment of the problem with that sort of arguing. I wonder however if the argument by anecdote is either (1) another way of saying “hasty generalization” or (2) it is a rhetorical specification of the same or maybe (3) something else.

Argument for (1) and (2): To focus on single anecdotes (usually outrageous, as Greenwald correctly notes) isn’t by itself reasoning badly. To infer from the single anecdotes to some broader generalization is reasoning badly. In this sense the argument by anecdote is a kind of fallacy of weak induction.

Argument for (3): on the other hand, the difference with the argument by anecdote is that usually that generalization is not made explicitly. It is merely implied that the anecdote is representative. So in a sense, the outrageous anecdote distracts us from the more pertinent question (and the one that has been assumed) as to whether that anecdote represents anything at all (which it doesn’t). In this sense, it’s a kind of fallacy of relevance.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

George Will, Straw Man

Notional Enemies

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Like all Marines, I spent a lot of time at firing ranges. It turned out however that sometimes these ranges lacked even fake targets. As a result we had to wage a kind of fake and frustrating war on an elusive “notional enemy.” One encounter with an actual enemy, however, gave me a new appreciation for the notional one. George F. Will, WaPo wordsmith, baseball fan, and resident raconteur, has made career out of this tactic. Real enemies, like real arguments, are hard to defeat; better to confront the fake ones. Although we are wearying of Will’s consistently fallacious claims, his nauseous elitism and his neo-conservative soap-boxing, today Will leads off with a real gem: >By striking down the District of Columbia's extraordinarily strict gun control law, which essentially bans guns, a federal appeals court may have revived gun control as a political issue. Perhaps I’m uninformed, but I was unaware that gun control had ceased to be a political issue. To argue that gun control has lain “dormant” lo these many years and that this federal court has now awakened some gun-toting, right wing giant is simply ridiculous. Will (inexplicably) wants to warn the Dems to look out for the right-wing gun nut majority that is now building steam. There’s not really an argument to be had there, so Will simply manufactures a premise that supports his tale of woe. We’ve seen this before, with our Beloved Leader. In lieu of an actual enemy, I’ll construct one, defeat it, and claim victory. I. Am. Awesome. Will isn’t ready to relinquish the traditional form of his preferred fallacy just yet, however: >Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of law and political science at Duke University, argued in The Post last week that even if the Second Amendment is construed as creating an individual right to gun ownership, the D.C. law should still be constitutional because the city had a defensible intent (reducing violence) when it annihilated that right. Go through the link in Will’s piece to Dr. Chemerinsky’s article. It’s actually a very nuanced claim about exactly what types of rights are enumerated in the Constitution and what types of rights the federal courts seem to be implying in their recent gun-control cases. Yet, Will ignores the built-in limitations of the 9th Amendment and mischaracterizes this piece as espousing some sort of paternalistic theory of Constitutional hermeneutics to prove the willingness of left to trample the rights of the people in their rush to take away all our guns. Here’s the payoff: >If the Supreme Court reverses the appeals court's ruling and upholds the D.C. gun law, states and localities will be empowered to treat the Second Amendment as the D.C. law does: as a nullity. This will bring the gun control issue — and millions of gun owners — back to a roiling boil. That is not in the interest of the Democratic Party, which is supported by most ardent supporters of gun control. Oh, is that right? -pm

Ad Hominem, Appeal to the People, David Brooks

A man with a fraudulent bearing

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Today we’ll continue the Brooks theme in celebration of our renewed free access to the opinion pages of the New York Times (I’m still asking myself why I was supposed to pay for this). Yesterday he wrote:

>Say what you will about President Bush, when he thinks a policy is right, like the surge, he supports it, even if it’s going to be unpopular. The Democratic leaders, accustomed to the irresponsibility of opposition, show no such guts.

This remark is confused on many levels. In the first place, Bush has obtusely adhered to failed policies, and, more damningly, neglected to question whether those policies were justified in the first place. Sometimes supporting something unpopular is just plain dumb. It’s moronic to suggest that such obtuseness constitutes courage. Besides, to do so is to commit a variant of the ad populum fallacy in that you take the lack of popular support for your position as a measure in favor of your position.

At a more basic level, however, this is a variation of the “manliness” meme so thoroughly discussed by Glenn Greenwald. Brooks has remarked on this before with Bush–even claiming that John Kerry, a man who actually voluntarily served his country in combat, was a “fraud with a manly bearing.” He wrote:

>The coming weeks will be so tough because the essential contest – of which the Swift boat stuff was only a start – will be over who really has courage, who really has resolve, and who is just a fraud with a manly bearing.

Never mind, of course, the courage to say that you blew it big time.

David Brooks, False Dichotomy, Straw Man

Welcome Back

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For those with “edu” email accounts, the New York Times Select pages are now free. That means once again we can read David Brooks, a man who has been wrong about everything. It’s been a while. But maybe some will remember David Brooks‘ favorite logical trope: the false dichotomy. For Brooks, the false dichotomy results from a straw man. First, he caricatures the opposition viewpoint, then he sets up that caricature as the unacceptable alternative in a false dichotomy. So today he misreads Carl Levin’s speech yesterday in the Senate. Brooks says:

>The intelligence agencies paint a portrait of a society riven at its base with sectarian passion. They describe a society not of rational game theorists but of human beings beset by trauma — of Sunnis failing to acknowledge their minority status, of Shiites bent on winner-take-all domination, of self-perpetuating animosities, disintegrating bonds and a complex weave of conflicts.

The problem is that no one argues (and no one’s view can be taken to imply) that Iraqi society is composed of “rational game theorists.” And the falsity of that claim does not imply the somewhat orientalist notion that Iraqi society is “riven at its base with sectarian passion.” So not only does that claim infantalize the Iraqis, grossly mischaracterize Levin’s argument, but it also fails to take into account the obvious fact that sectiarian passions can take shape in the mind of rational game theorists.

Amphiboly

Amphiboly

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All the world is logical today, so another meta-post. I wonder if anyone has any examples of amphiboly. Here's a famous example:

"This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got there I'll never know. . . "

But maybe I should give a definition. Here, by way of historical edification, is Ockham's:

Circa quam primo sciendum est quod sicut fallacia aequivocationis accidit ex hoc quod alia dictio potest diversimode accipi, ita fallacia amphiboliae accidit ex hoc quod aliqua oratio potest diversimode accipi, absque hoc quod alia dictio primo diversimode accipiatur; ita quod sicut dictio est multiplex, ita tota oratio est multiplex. (Summa Logicae III-4, cap. 5, 2-7, p. 764/5)

He says more (but I can't find an electronic version other than the one above). We all know that equivocation regards single words, Ockham tells us that amphiboly regards ambiguous phrases. I must confess that with all of my fallacy searching in recent years, I can't remember having spotted one in the wild. It would be great if some of you could come up with real or real-life examples of this.

Ad Hominem, Ad hominem tu quoque, V.D.Hanson

Tu quoque Yogi Berra

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There must be something in the water at the venerable Hoover Institution. Just last week, we visited a piece, wherein one of their fellows leveled that most traveled of ad hominem attacks, the tu quoque at former VP Al Gore. This week, as Uncle Yogi once said, is “déjà vu all over again.” V.D. Hanson is concerned, folks—concerned that we, the people, only focus on the failings of right wing politicians, pundits, and politico-religious types. He means to remedy the situation. He says, >But moralist Republicans don't have the market cornered on hypocrisy. If giving into excess embarrasses some of them, for a number of Democrats–supposedly the party of the people–hypocrisy arises from enjoying elite privileges while alleging that America bestows favors unduly on the few. I suppose it’s fun to argue against a position no one has held or even implied. I haven’t heard anyone pretend that Mark Foley’s failings whitewash Ted Kennedy’s. Moreover, it has no bearing whatsoever, as Hanson implies it does, on the populist programs of those prominent Democrats he indicts. Hanson gives us a litany of hypocrisies perpetrated by the left and then pretends that it makes their period as the party in power somehow moot because all politicos are cut from the same cloth. Ye gods. There’s a stark distinction between the duplicity that lead to a war that has cost 3,000+ U.S. lives, along with the lives of untold thousands of Iraqis and the global warming activist who uses the quickest form of transport available to disseminate information. Hanson simply glosses this distinction, because, you know, they’re all crooks and liars, right? >For both liberals and conservatives, the days of the simple-living Harry Truman and clean-living Dwight Eisenhower are apparently long gone–and for two reasons. >First, the country has changed. Globalization, high technology and billions in borrowed money have made Americans in general materially wealthy beyond our parents' wildest imagination. >… >Second, in our world of celebrity sound bites and media saturation, talk, not reality, is what counts. Multimillionaires lecture us about fairness, while sinners rail about sin. Ah, yes—the good old days. Regardless of the fact Pound, err…Hanson, has a point here—we are a society of consumers, more importantly of irresponsible, uncouth consumers and that’s not a good thing—the point is out of place here. Unless we can now impeach all politicos as the very root of avarice and greed, all we’re left with is the conclusion that we’re all just a bunch of hypocrites, in spite of our high ideals. Great story. Really. Compelling and rich. Hanson regroups, however, to deliver another kick to this equine carcass: >The political leaders of this country are essentially too often homogeneous. Republicans may represent constituents of traditional values; Democrats may champion the underprivileged. But their similar lifestyles reflect more a political class' shared privilege than the inherent differences of their respective constituents' beliefs. National figures may talk conservative or liberal, but they both are more likely to act like libertines. Indicting all politicos as hypocritical and wrong adds nothing. In fact, it’s rather banal. Still worse is that Hanson hasn’t argued so as to support the conclusion that the analogous evils of both conservatives and liberals have some bearing on their legislative activity. Beyond his dazzling pithiness, the problems here are evident: one, Hanson assumes, incorrectly, that some causal link exists between how one lives and how one performs in the political arena. Secondly, even if that were the case, he so muddies the waters that it is unclear how the hypocritical similarities between politicos have any bearing on anything. Look who’s pithy now. -pm

Ad hominem tu quoque, Appeal to Ignorance, Begging the Question, category mistake, Robert Kagan, Unqualified Authority

Binge and surge

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**Update below**

I was going to make a post about the fallacy of amphiboly, but then I read Robert Kagan’s “The Surge is Succeeding” in today’s Washington Post. Kagan’s article is instructive in its subtle and misleading use of evidence. In the end he doesn’t so much as argue that the surge is working so much as claim the press ought not to be saying that it’s not working, because it’s too early to tell, so it’s working. That’s a pretty straightforward argument from ignorance. And we’ve seen this sort of thing before from Kagan–given the absence of attacks on the US in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, the invasion has stopped terrorism. Well, the acute will notice that the latter is a causal fallacy.

But back to the question of evidence. Kagan’s central evidence for the success of the surge:

>Four months later, the once insurmountable political opposition has been surmounted. The nonexistent troops are flowing into Iraq. And though it is still early and horrible acts of violence continue, there is substantial evidence that the new counterinsurgency strategy, backed by the infusion of new forces, is having a significant effect.

>Some observers are reporting the shift. Iraqi bloggers Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, widely respected for their straight talk, say that “early signs are encouraging.”

There is a puzzling circularity to Kagan’s reasoning here. His evidence for the success is the sentence that follows that reports evidence of the success–not the other way around. For most normal evidentialists, the Press–for which Kagan has no regard (more in a second)–reports things they claim to be happening, and we either believe them or disbelieve them. Not t’other way round. So Kagan ought to write: some observers have noticed a shift, and after considering their authority against that of, say, the White House, and the rest of the world media, I believe them. After all, they’re bloggers known for “straight talk.”

In addition to his strange selection of authorities and the weird and apparent circularity of his argument, Kagan finds time to dig at the press:

>A front-page story in The Post last week suggested that the Bush administration has no backup plan in case the surge in Iraq doesn’t work. I wonder if The Post and other newspapers have a backup plan in case it does.

Zing! Take that fact-reporting newspaper! The Post–for however wrong it has been about this entire Iraq fiasco–does not need a military back-up plan in case the surge works. It’s a newspaper. We hope that it will report when the surge is working. But apparently, it keeps reporting otherwise. Since those are facts friendly to the enemy, the Post must be working for the enemy. Sheesh.

And yet, Kagan writes for the Post.

**update**

Glenn Greenwald says what commenter Phil has been saying lately:

>No rational person would believe a word Robert Kagan says about anything. He has been spewing out one falsehood after the next for the last four years in order to blind Americans about the real state of affairs concerning the invasion which he and his comrade and writing partner, Bill Kristol, did as much as anyone else to sell to the American public.

Indeed.

Complex Question, General discussion

complexes about questions

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Yesterday in Critical Thinking class we went over the list of fallacies generally described as fallacies of “ambiguity” (I know that that’s not an entirely accurate or useful designation). Among these is the fallacy of the complex question. Generally this fallacy occurs when one sneakily makes a dubious or contentious assertion and then asks a question on the basis of that assumes the truth of that assertion. I told the students–and I think this is true–that it’s fairly rare. Furthermore, when it’s committed, it’s obvious. So far in the two plus years we’ve been at this I’ve only found two instances of it (click here). So I offered extra credit (lots of it) for any student who could find an actual example. So I thought perhaps to throw the idea out here. Anyone?