Category Archives: Fallacies and Other Problems

This category covers all broken arguments. Some are straightforwardly fallacious, others suffer from a lack of evidence or some other unidentifiable problem.

Equivocation, False Cause, non causa pro causa, Robert Kagan

Non causa

5 Comments

It’s good to be skeptical of the press. There may be reasons to approach press reports of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) with caution, but flying into speculative refutation is deeply confused. In that spirit, Robert Kagan attempts a futile recasting of the role of the Iraq war in the war on terrorism:

>For instance, what specifically does it mean to say that the Iraq war has worsened the “terrorism threat”? Presumably, the NIE’s authors would admit that this is speculation rather than a statement of fact, since the facts suggest otherwise. Before the Iraq war, the United States suffered a series of terrorist attacks: the bombing and destruction of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Since the Iraq war started, there have not been any successful terrorist attacks against the United States. That doesn’t mean the threat has diminished because of the Iraq war, but it does place the burden of proof on those who argue that it has increased.

Notice that Kagan–a Washington Post columnist–suggests that the absence of successful attacks against the United States in the wake of the Iraq war is a matter of causal significance. It would have to be, if the burden has shifted onto those who suggest it has.

But that’s crazy talk. For, (1) according to the adminstration, Iraq is full of terrorists attacking (successfully) the United States (much like they did the USS Cole); (2) There were no terrorists in Iraq before the war (and Saddam had no ties–ask Bush–to al Qaeda); (3) Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11; (4) there have been terrorist attacks of the al Qaeda variety all over the world–including Iraq and Afghanistan.

In light of these very obvious and well known facts, the only way Kagan could approach a causal claim is by construing “terrorist attack” in a way that excludes anything that has happened since the Iraq war (and in the Iraq war or in the war in Afghanistan). And so he would have to equivocate on “terrorist attack” so as to render it meaningless.

But even he were right about the meaning of “terrorist attack”, there is nothing to suggest that the Iraq war has a causal relation to the absence of such attacks (as he very strongly implies). At best, as he says, it has no relation. If it has no relation, then the burden has not shifted on to the opposing side (each side may have the same burden of proof). The burden, Kagan ought to note, lies with the one, like him, who asserts the causal claim.

But the truly silly thing about this argument is that Kagan hasn’t seen the NIE either. So his criticism is purely of the speculative variety. The very sort he accuses others of advancing.

Ad Hominem, Straw Man

Prejudiced

2 Comments

There is a ballot initiative in my native state of Michigan which would make all affirmative action programs (based on race or ethnicity) illegal under Michigan law (similar initiatives were passed in California and Washington state). Touchy subject, race. George Will tells us this morning that some opponents of the measure do not want “to argue the merits”:

>some opponents of MCRI have adopted four tactics, none of which involves arguing the merits of racial preferences and all of which attempt — in the name of “civil rights,” of course — to prevent Michiganders from being allowed to vote on MCRI. The tactics have included:

And he goes on to list four separate charges, which, if true (and let’s assume they are), demonstrate the hypocrisy (at least) of some opponents of the Michigan ballot measure. But demonstrating the hyprocisy of some of an initiative’s detractors does not demonstrate the forthrightness of some or any of its supporters. Nor does it mean they’re right. Lots of voters–even lots of serious political writers–do not want to argue the merits of their case; they’d rather argue about whether the opponent was wounded in Vietnam, or whether he’s an effete snob who would never shop at Wal Mart. The merits of the case–whatever they are (and if they are)–still wait around to be argued.

And now to that argument:

>Because the plain language of MCRI is appealing, some opponents argue that MCRI would have terrible “unintended consequences.” It might, they say, eliminate single-sex public schools (Michigan has none; eight of 3,748 schools have a few voluntary single-sex classes) and breast-cancer screening or might stop a Department of Natural Resources program aimed at helping Michigan women become hunters (the initiative concerns only hiring, contracting and public schools).

>Given the caliber of opposition arguments. . .

These are the best arguments Will could find? If so, it looks as if Will doesn’t want to argue the merits either. And least not seriously. He wants to (1) malign all of the supporters with the hyporcritical actions of some of them and (2) find the weakest arguments against the initiative he supports and make fun of them in order to lend support to the view that the supporters of the initiative

>are provoking remnants of the civil rights movement, which now is just a defender of a racial spoils system, to demonstrate its decadence, even thuggishness.

And everyone knows that’s a straw man.

Ad Hominem, General discussion

Foul mouths

7 Comments

Sometimes calling people names is not fallacious. And so, David Broder:

>When Powell wrote that Bush’s demand would compound the world’s “doubt [about] the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” he was appealing to Jefferson’s standard.

>It is a standard this administration has flagrantly rejected. Bush was elected twice, over Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry, whose know-it-all arrogance rankled Midwesterners such as myself. The country thought Bush was a pleasant, down-to-earth guy who would not rock the boat. Instead, swayed by some inner impulse or the influence of Dick Cheney, he has proved to be lawless and reckless. He started a war he cannot finish, drove the government into debt and repeatedly defied the Constitution.

No inference is being explicitly or implicitly drawn on the basis of the meanie-meanie-bo-beanie remark (and it doesn’t seem to play a functional roll in this paragraph or the op-ed as a whole). Since no inferences are being drawn, if Broder is guilty of anything, it’s uttering or uncritically repeating dubious memes about Gore, Kerry and Bush. But that’s a question for those who study and analyse the formation and dissemination of the “conventional wisdom.” He continues:

>Now, however, you can see the independence party forming — on both sides of the aisle. They are mobilizing to resist not only Bush but also the extremist elements in American society — the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left and the doctrinaire religious extremists on the right who would convert their faith into a whipping post for their opponents.

We might point out that being vituperative and foul-mouthed doesn’t mean you don’t have an argument, and that one finds many of the same bloggers on the right (add that to religious extremists and the balance shifts!), but that’s a factual point that we’d have to establish by reference to the relevant evidence. My anecdotal sampling of the blogosphere hardly seems sufficient evidence for such claims, so I won’t make them. Maybe Broder shouldn’t either, but he’s not arguing from this, he’s reporting it as fact. So once again, we’d leave that to the foul-mouthed blogers to discuss.

Bush, Red Herring, Straw Man

Straw Herring

2 Comments

It’s always right to point this sort of thing out. So Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post saves us valuable time:

>Straw Man Watch

>Here’s an astonishing exchange from the Rose Garden on Friday:

>”Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretary of State feels this way, don’t you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you’re following a flawed strategy?”

>Bush’s response was a straw-man argument.

>”THE PRESIDENT: If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic. I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

>It would have been worthwhile if someone at the news conference had followed up with something like this:

>”In your response to the question about Colin Powell’s statement that ‘the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism’ you made it sound like Powell was saying we were as bad as the terrorists, and you got very angry. But that’s not even remotely what Powell was saying. He’s simply saying that by pretty universal moral standards, your actions are questionable. Could you please respond to that critique, rather than to a made-up one?”

>No one did.

One might argue that this is not a straw man, but rather a red herring. The President has distracted–successfully I might add–the press corps with a completely different argument, one about the moral equivalence of the United States and the terrorists rather than “the moral basis”–our ius in bello–in the war against terrorism. Besides, he never actually claims that he has answered Powell’s objection. Straw man or not, however, Bush’s remarks are deceptive–and it’s a crying shame that no one of those gathered said anything.

George Will, Straw Man

Juicing

9 Comments

Among the requirements for writing a paper in any of my philosophy courses, students find the following two very challenging: (1) absolutely no quoting or near verbatim paraphrasing; (2) treat the argument you object to with charity (if it’s weak, make it stronger than it is). The first rule keeps the kids from larding their papers with quotations. But it also prevents them from violating the second rule with the contextless citation: the “gotcha quote,” in other words. The “gotcha quote” is often the centerpiece of the political attack ad–“I voted for it before I voted against it.” People remembered the quote but they didn’t remember the context. The people who truck in such dishonest quote-picking out to be ashamed of themselves. Today George Will does both of those things–he lards his column with quotations maliciously selected in order to dismiss rather than seriously challenge the argument surrounding them–gotcha quotes in other words. He might as well read them aloud with that voice so often employed in the political attack ad. Here’s an example:

>The GOP, he says, courts whites “whose interests are overwhelmingly focused on tempering, if not altogether rolling back, the civil rights movement.” Please. Who favors rolling back guarantees of voting rights and equal access to public accommodations?

I don’t know George. Did Edsall give any evidence for this claim? I find it strange that you don’t offer any evidence to support your claim that no one does, especially when you cite a book about that topic. Perhaps you might have established your conclusion by demonstrating that Edsall has not offered any evidence for his claim. You could say that he tends to make wild accusations unsupported by any attempt at evidence. But you don’t say that and you don’t give any evidence that he doesn’t. Persons used to reading such books will be inclined to think that Edsall has offered evidence for his extraordinary claim. Even if they’re sympathetic to your view, they’ll realize that such things just don’t get said without reasons. Those reasons might be completely specious, but you can’t just dismiss them out of hand.

Conservative friends and fans of George Will please listen carefully. Such lazy and deceptive writing does not (1) establish the truth of the conclusions he argues for; (2) does not mean he’s wrong and (3) does not establish the truth of the opposite position (whatever that is). It only means he has wasted everyone’s time–especially yours, since you tend to agree with him and some of you look to him for supporting arguments. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we should expect better of the people who occupy the highest places in our civil discourse. You should expect better of your intellectual heroes. Juiced atheletes earn their disgrace, so should juiced writers.

Ad Hominem, George Will, Straw Man

Willful ad hominem

To add to J.’s discussion of Will’s straw liberal argument:

The absurdity of the argument becomes clearest to me in his final example:

>The current issue of the American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine, carries a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for “lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses”” and for having brought ”great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world.”

>What is this focus of evil in the modern world? North Korea? The Bush administration? Fox News Channel? No, it is Coca-Cola (number of servings to Americans of the company’s products each week: 2.5 billion).

So, a progressive magazine has an advertisement criticizing Coca-Cola for labor abuse, human rights abuse, and environmental abuse and Will’s response is to point out the number of coke’s served each week.

This staggers me. What possible relevance to the ad could the number of Cokes possess? Is anyone questioning whether Coke tastes good? Or that it sells well?

Will might respond that it shows the degree to which ordinary americans like the taste of coke and progressive magazines take advertisements from people who think Coca-Cola engages in various forms of injustice. True. But again, what possible relevance to the ad does that have? And, even if we read Will’s comment this way, does it even show that progressives are “out of touch” with americans? That a magazine takes an advertisement from someone criticizing Coca-Cola, suggests this as much as the NYT taking an advertisement from Firefox (1 billion Microsoft Explorers bought!) suggest that the NYT is out of touch with americans. The argument, even given the kindest possible interpretation is stunningly misleading.

But then it becomes clear. As pointed out yesterday. It isn’t responding to actual arguments that Will is interested in. He only wants to portray liberals as condescending and out of touch with regular Americans and the rest of the ideological caricature that substitutes for serious criticism of liberalism in the last 20 years.

Just as in the case of Wal-Mart, Will doesn’t have any interest in responding to the actual criticisms leveled against it, but instead he engages in quasi-populist demagoguery and ad hominem argument based on the caricature of liberals as snobs and elitist. Note the wonderful ad hominem swipe at John Kerry:

>Which vexes liberals such as John Kerry. (He and his helpmeet last shopped at Wal-Mart when?)

False Dichotomy, George Will, Straw Man

Corporations Bad

10 Comments

It seems George Will cannot argue for any of his libertarian-ish positions without counterposing it to the clueless, elitist, and dishonest “liberal” one. But, as we’ve noted before, the existence of the liberal straw man–not hard to find, but meaningless when you find it–does not justify the conclusions Will would like to draw. The disjunction, in other words, between dumb-ass liberal and smarty pants libertarian economist is not an exhaustive one. Between these a million possibilities. Many of them quite sensible and worthy of serious consideration. The straw man, a sign of a failed mind, is also often the sign of another fallacy–the false dichotomy. I invite the reader to the Will archive to examine the evidence for herself. So much by way of general observation. Let’s look at today’s iteration, a completely confused counter to the “liberal” arguments against Wal Mart.

>The median household income of Wal-Mart shoppers is under $40,000. Wal-Mart, the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy, has almost as many employees (1.3 million) as the U.S. military has uniformed personnel. A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation’s productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation. By lowering consumer prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates . Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).

>People who buy their groceries from Wal-Mart — it has one-fifth of the nation’s grocery business — save at least 17 percent. But because unions are strong in many grocery stores trying to compete with Wal-Mart, unions are yanking on the Democratic Party’s leash, demanding laws to force Wal-Mart to pay wages and benefits higher than those that already are high enough to attract 77 times as many applicants than there were jobs at this store.

Everyone loves to save money at the big boxes. Even the sponsor of the failed Chicago “Big Box” ordinance. Gee, in addition to the big savings, people also like to work, especially when there are no other jobs available. But just because people are applying for jobs at Wal Mart does not make them good jobs. It does not make them jobs with reasonable benefits. It does not make them pay a living wage (where one can shop anywhere else but Wal Mart). It does not mean that Wal Mart doesn’t leach off the state welfare system (passing its big volume costs on to us!). (Sidebar–if Wal Mart can pass off its costs to the welfare system on account of its job creation and such, isn’t that an argument for state-assisted healthcare among other things? Just a thought).

As Will seems forever not to understand, the liberal argument is not: “Grrrrr. Corporations bad! Make money with blood of worker, get fat off work of little guy! Me know it all franken-democrat! Grrrrr.” There’s more inanity in today’s op-ed. Much more. Maybe tomorrow we’ll return to it.

Bush, Straw Man

Put on a bridle

2 Comments

Finally, a story about reasoning poorly and uncivilly is getting some momentum. Newsweek had this to say about Bush’s rhetorical strategy:

>Bush’s rhetorical strategy is twofold: first, issue a statement of fact about your own position; second, caricature your opponents to look foolish. First, the statement of fact: “We’re training Iraqi troops so they can defend their nation. We’re helping Iraq’s unity government grow in strength and serve its people. We will not leave until this work is done,” he explained.

>Second, the caricature: “Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone,” he said. “They will not leave us alone. They will follow us.”

>Are there any senior Democrats who have said that troops should leave Iraq in the hope that “terrorists would leave us alone?” The Democratic argument is that troops should leave Iraq either to encourage Iraqis to take control, or simply to avoid greater casualties in what looks like a low-grade civil war.

Only it’s more than 6 years too late. He has always done this. The people who support him do this. The press has said nothing until now. Shame.

Politicians, Post hoc ergo propter

Five years

1 Comment

Five years and no attacks. Yesterday Tim Russert asks Dick Cheney whether the 300 billion we’ve spent on Iraq might have been better spent on homeland security. Cheney responds:

>Well, Tim, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of securing the nation against terrorists. You know, we’re here on the fifth anniversary, and there has not been another attack on the United States. And that’s not an accident, because we’ve done a hell of a job here at home, in terms of homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we’ve put in place, in terms of the financial tracking program we put in place, and because of our detainee policy, where we, in fact, were able to interrogate captured terrorists to get the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to disrupt…

Russert actually follows up on that question (imagine that). Cheney is quite specifically alleging a causal connection between the most controversial of the adminstration’s policies and the absence of terrorist attacks on our soil. It’s hardly clear, however, that any were planned or attempted. And we’ll likely not be in the near future in a position to know that for certain. But Cheney makes it fairly clear that he has no specific knowledge of authentic disrupted plots. If he did, he’d probably tell us. Because they’ve been telling us about disrupted plots (that didn’t turn out to be plots at all) for five years.

But there’s certainly evidence that al Qaeda has other plans. But more fundamentally, Cheney should be careful what he wishes for. If he wants to take credit for absence, then he better be ready to take responsibility if it happens again on his watch.

False Cause, non causa pro causa, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, V.D.Hanson

Fascism

2 Comments

We return again briefly to this mistaken application of the term “fascism” to a vast array of groups with different objectives and goals. Here’s the funny thing. Just as some correctly pointed out that you can’t engage in warfare against a technique–the war on terror–you can’t engage in warfare on a misapplied political adjective. V.D.Hanson writes,

>The common denominators are extremist views of the Koran (thus the term Islamic), and the goal of seeing authoritarianism imposed at the state level by force (thus the notion of fascism). The pairing of the two words conveys a precise message: The old fascism is back, but now driven by a radical fundamentalist creed of Islam.

In the first place, as a factual matter, Iran, al-Qaeda, Syria, and sundry terrorists have little common cause outside of their intense dislike for us or some of our friends–Israel for instance and, oddly, Saudi Arabia. Their client terrorist groups are directed at their own local interests. Al qaeda has local interests as well–the overthrow of the corrupt Saudi monarchy (which is supported by our military). Syria is baathist and decidedly secular (like Iraq *was*), with internal islamist enemies (the muslim brotherhood). These are commonly known facts–or they ought to be.

But more fundamentally, you can no more go to war against fascism than you can go to war against terrorism. Fascism is a political ideology (like Hegel on steroids). Military weapons, which islamo-fascist-utterers urge upon various and sundry targets, cannot kill the idea, only the person with the idea. But it’s not the idea that bothers us–otherwise we’d wage war on Jerry Falwell–it’s the violent way of achieving the idea. And that brings us back to the war on terror (a method). War is waged–so people who’ve participated it in have told me–against nation-states. Ignorant of this fact, Hanson argues:

>And appeasement–treating the first World Trade Center bombing as a mere criminal justice matter or virtually ignoring the attack on the USS Cole–only spurred on further aggression.

So the legalistic Clinton administration–what with its parsing of words and all–spurred further aggression! Perhaps someone ought to point out to Hanson that the current enemies (except the new specious ones Hanson is recruiting–Iran and Syria) are *not* nation-states. More basically, however, reacting with our military is just exactly what they want, as endless experts have pointed out. They are waging a war of ideas. The idea is violence. What a wonderful dream Iraq has turned out to be for them. For they know that no amount of blowing someone up with convince him that democracy works. Being blown up can only convince him that blowing people up works; being terrorized that terror works. This is how one loses a war of ideas.