Category Archives: Fallacies of Relevance

David Brooks, Equivocation, Ignoratio Elenchi, Plain Bad Arguments

Confusing Criminals

It isn’t always clear, and often is, perhaps, not the case, that pundits are trying to deceive by their fallacious arguments. Sometimes the flaws in the argument suggest more basic incoherences and confusions in their thought. This seems to be the case with David Brooks’ “Two Steps Towards a Sensible Immigration Policy” (NYT 8/4/5), in which he employs a literary device that ultimately undermines the argument that he is trying to make about immigration reform.

Imagining a “working class guy from the south side of San Antonio” as his interlocutor, he sketches the problem of immigration:

>He’s no racist. Many of his favorite neighbors are kind, neat and hard-working Latinos. But his neighborhood now has homes with five cars rotting in the front yard and 12 single men living in one house. Now there are loud parties until 2 a.m. and gang graffiti on the walls. He read in the local paper last week that Anglos are now a minority in Texas and wonders if anybody is in charge of this social experiment.

The problem with immigration for this guy seems to be that some immigrants are “bad” and the minority status of Anglos. The latter is a population problem, i.e., the sheer number of immigrants entering Texas (and suggests a more “racial” concern that Brooks admits), the former a crime problem, i.e., the failure of our immigration policy to prevent “bad” immigrants (gang members or other unruly people) from entering the country. But, it is also significantly more than that, since none of the behaviors that trouble this guy are particularly serious crimes, but are closer to “socially disruptive behavior” (I mean something like behavior that does not conform to certain prevalent social expectations, e.g., size of households, disposal of non-functional cars, appropriate party times and forms). There is thus a sort of conflation of crime and “anti-social” behavior. This latter defined relative to norms that are supposedly prevalent among Anglos.

Unfortunately getting “tough” on immigration doesn’t seem to solve the population problem as Brooks notes:

>But we can’t just act like lunkheads and think we can solve this problem with brute force. Tough enforcement laws make us feel good but they don’t do the job. Since 1986, we’ve tripled the number of Border Patrol agents and increased the enforcement budget 10 times over, but we haven’t made a dent in the number of illegals who make it here.

Presumably if we can’t regulate the flow of immigrants we can’t regulate the flow of “bad” immigrants either.

Instead, by controlling economically necessary immigration we will be able to lessen the number of illegal immigrants.

>The only way to re-establish order is to open up legal, controllable channels through which labor can flow in an aboveground, orderly way. We can’t build a wall to stop this flood; we need sluice gates to regulate the flow.

This is the real point of his column: to argue for two bills before the senate, one allowing for a temporary worker program and the other for tougher boarder controls.

But he has just finished telling the guy from San Antonio that the latter aren’t effective in addressing his concerns. There is only one way that we can make Brooks’ argument coherent. We must supply something like one of the two following concealed premises:

A) Illegal immigrants are likely to commit other crimes.

B) It is harder to prevent crimes committed by illegal immigrants than legal immigrants.

It is tautological that illegal immigrants are “criminals” by breaking immigration laws. But Brooks and the guy from San Antonio seem to be more concerned with the “subculture of criminality across America” supposedly caused by illegal immigration. But unless A or B are true, there is no reason to think that the bills before the Senate will effectively address this problem, or for that matter that illegal immigration is the cause of increased criminality (beyond the tautological sense).

I don’t know which of the two premises Brooks or the guy from San Antonio would prefer to accept, and I don’t know whether there is any reason to think that either of these is true. I suspect that the real problem here is that the policies for which Brooks is arguing will not address the concerns of the guy from San Antonio, who seems to confuse criminal behavior with disruptive behavior. Add to that a confusion between the criminality of illegal immigration and other forms of criminal behavior and we see how Brooks can suggest that these policies will address the guy from San Antonio’s concerns.

1. These policies will address criminality (of illegal immigration).
2. Addressing criminality (of illegal immigration) will address criminal behavior. (By A or B perhaps)
3. Addressing criminal behavior will address disruptive behavior. (The guy from San Antonio might assume).

Therefore, these policies will address the concerns of the guy from San Antonio.

Nonetheless Brooks would seem to admit that these bills will not solve all the problems.

>So here’s the bottom line for the guy in San Antonio: Everybody’s expecting a big blowup on this issue, but we’ve got a great chance of enacting serious immigration reform. It won’t solve all problems. There will still be wage pressures and late-night parties.

But it seems that he should add one more: criminals. Having confused the criminality of illegal immigration with other forms of criminality he cannot do this.

> But right now immigration chaos is spreading a subculture of criminality across America. What we can do is re-establish law and order, so immigrants can bring their energy to this country without destroying the social fabric while they’re here.

As usual we are not evaluating the truth of Brooks’ conclusion. It may be the case that these two bills are good and beneficial. But it is important to note that Brooks’ has not given us or his friend in San Antonio reason to believe this.
And along the way he seems to have missed the point of his own argument.

Ignoratio Elenchi, John Tierney, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Polar Bears for Global Warming

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Most op-ed writers seem to have a fingerprint argument or rhetorical device. Whether it is David Brook’s penchant for dichotomous sociological classifications or George Will’s beloved Bartlett’s Quotations after a while the style gives away the author. A couple of weeks ago I analyzed one of John Tierney’s columns (Source) and uncovered his fingerprint argument. We can see precisely the same argument form in his most recent column, “The Good News Bears” (Source: NYT 8/6/5).

The characteristic pattern of Tierney’s opinion pieces is anecdotal evidence for substantive conclusions. In this column he suggests that global warming–if it is occurring–may in fact be a good thing:

>But I can see why Mr. Kalluk doesn’t mind the idea of a little climate change. “The ice is always going to freeze in the winter,” he said, “but it would be better for us if we had a longer summer. We’d have more time to use our boats. There would be more jobs and a longer tourist season.” The bears would be still around, and their charisma would be making more money for the locals, not just for the WWF fund-raisers down south.

Mr. Kalluk, an inuit who lives in Resolute Bay Nunavut, has visions of eco-tourism dollars in his eyes and so seems content with the prospect of climate change. More importantly, for Tierney’s argument, the climate change *may* not have any harmful effects for polar bears. Commenting on the 20% increase in polar bear populations, Tierney says.

> The chief reason for the rise is probably restrictions on hunting (for which conservationists deserve credit). In this village of fewer than 200 residents, Mr. Kalluk and the other hunters are limited each year to three dozen bears, which they allocate by drawing names out of a hat.

>But the increase might also be related to the recent warming, which could be helping bears in some places.

No evidence is offered for this last hypothesis other than that polar bears have survived in warmer climates before.

But even if we were inclined to accept this speculation from a non-expert, Tierney’s argument misses the point entirely. Even if environmental groups use “charismatic mega-fauna” like the polar bear to drum up support to fight global warming, this does not mean that that is the only or even the primary reason for trying to avoid climate change in the arctic. So even if it is true that the polar bears benefit from warmer climate, this would not suggest that warmer climate in the arctic is a good thing. Tierney has entirely missed the point.

Of course, that brings us back to his underlying argument–some guy in the arctic could make money from climate change, so maybe its not such a bad thing afterall.

Division/Composition, Hasty Generalization, Op-Eds and other opinions, Straw Man

Failures of Composition

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I have now come to see that the post below is mistaken. The fallacy is not one of composition, but is simply a hasty generalization. The reason I am wrong about the composition is that the argument does not assert that each liberal is weak on terrorism and therefore the Left as a whole is weak on terrorism. Instead, the fallacy lies in arguing that the Left is weak on terrorism on the basis that a few members of the left are weak on terrorism. We decided to leave this up, despite its flaws because the overall point that a fallacy is occuring here seems correct, even if I mis-diagnosed it at first. 8/8/5

>The denial of the peril facing America remains a staple of the left.

One of the cheapest rhetorical moves available to the pundit showcases the fallacies of composition and division. In these fallacies, the arguer claims that since X is a property of the whole (division) or a part (composition), therefore it is a property of the part (division) or the whole (composition): If table salt is a good seasoning, then its constituents Sodium and Chlorine are good seasonings; If Sodium and Chlorine are poisonous, then table salt is poisonous.

The fallacy of composition is often very close to the fallacy of hasty generalization, in which the attribution of a property to some members of a set is taken too quickly as evidence that the whole set possesses that property. Similarly the fallacy of division is often very close to the fallacy of accident, in which a generalization that is accidentally true of a collection is applied to an instance where it is untrue. The the argument that I am going to analyze is for mthe most part implicit, it will be hard to disentangle and identify precisely the fallacy that it commits.

This argument is a favorite of the talk show pundits–and any conscious viewer, I suspect, is aware of the fallacy even if she or he is not able to identify it precisely. It is usually combined with a straw man fallacy to create its persuasive effect. At the risk of belaboring the obvious here’s the logical analysis.

John Leo in a muddled column in the U.S. News and World Report (Source: USNWR 8/805) argues that the liberal Left does not take terrorism seriously.

>In the wake of the London bombings, New York City is now searching the bags of subway riders. As you might expect, this is provoking the usual cluster of perverse reactions. Someone on Air America, the liberal talk radio network, suggested that riders carry many bags to confuse and irritate the cops.

Far more troubling than the anonymous source in journalism is the uncredited, unsourced, and unexplained “someone” or “some argue” that is the staple of sloppy punditry. This allows the writer to attribute a view (often one they can’t find a credited source for) to someone vaguely associated with their real targets.

>From the first moments after the attacks of 9/11, we had indicators that the left would not be able to take terrorism seriously. Instead of resolve, we got concern about emotional closure and “root causes,” warnings about the allegedly great danger of a backlash against Muslim Americans, arguments that violence directed at America is our own fault, and suggestions that we must not use force, because violence never solves anything. “We can’t bomb our way to justice,” said Ralph Nader.

What’s important here is that Leo picks and chooses a series of seemingly idiosyncratic responses to terrorism from people who may be on the “left,”(but without doing his job and identifying these people). These views, or the unseriousness of them, are then attributed to the whole, i.e., the liberal left. We are given two more pieces of evidence. The first a series on the BBC (“a perennial leader in foolish leftism,”) which claimed:

>arguing that terrorism is vastly exaggerated. Al Qaeda barely exists at all, the series argued, except as an idea that uses religious violence to achieve its ends. Besides, the series said, a dirty bomb would not kill many people and may not even kill anyone.

The second, an unnamed writer, in the NYRB who claims:

>that the real weapons of mass destruction are world poverty and environmental abuse.

So here we have it. The evidence that the left is unserious about terrorism. But can we infer this from particular beliefs held by the left? We would have to consider more closely the meaning of this “collective term.” But let this suffice for the time being: it seems clear that there are many beliefs and attitudes held by people who are in general “on the left” that are not held by all. Thus, any argument would need to show that these beliefs are held prominently on the left, or even universally. Did significant members of Congress on the left assert these things? Did the major publications on the left argue for these positions? Do most of the core members of the left accept these views?

Depending upon how we state the argument there seems either to be a fallacy of composition or a “hasty generalization.” Either way, the conclusion does not seem to be justified.

In Leo’s column, we don’t find this argument displayed with the full force that we find on the “O’Reilly Factor,” or in a great deal of what Ann Coulter writes. The next two steps of the argument are generally to then impute these claims to particular members of the left (as a sort of fallacy of division) and then argue against them. This is taken then as a refutation of the particular person’s views whatever they in fact are.

George Will, Slippery Slope, Straw Man

Will on Frist’s stem cell flip flop

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We can’t be all negative all of the time. Sometimes praise should be given where it is due. Today, suprisingly, George Will takes on those on the extreme right who would challenge what he takes to be Bill Frist’s eminently reasonable and (as it turns out) scarcely modified position on stem cell research. According to Will,

many thoughtful people fear that the House-passed legislation puts the nation’s foot on a slippery slope leading to such a commodification of life.

This is not a thoughtful way to argue, as Will correctly points out:

Life, however, is lived on a slippery slope: Taxation could become confiscation; police could become gestapos. But the benefits from taxation and police make us willing to wager that our judgment can stop slides down dangerous slopes.

Good points all of them. We might add that the slippery slope is not some kind of physical or logical law; it’s a fallacious form of argument, an error in reasoning, and therefore a form of deception.

Unfortunately, Will cannot sustain this positive momentum; he is quick to return to battle the straw men that populate the imaginary cohorts of his argumentative opposition. In the first place, he cannot help himself from quoting a doctored version of a John Edwards quote about stem cell research under a Kerry presidency. Will says,

It is carelessly said, and hence widely believed, that in 2001 President Bush halted ongoing stem cell research — “banned” it — thereby denying suffering Americans imminent medical marvels. Remember John Edwards’s fantasy that “when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

First, probably few people believed that. Second, John Edwards never said that. What he said was this:

Christopher Reeve just passed away. And America just lost a great champion for this cause. Somebody who is a powerful voice for the need to do stem cell research and change the lives of people like him, who have gone through the tragedy. Well, if we can do the work that we can do in this country — the work we will do when John Kerry is president — people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk. Get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.

Which is more or less what Bill Frist is saying. In the second place, Will takes issue with those who would question the motives of either Frist or Bush on the matter of stem cells (or for any question of deeply held beliefs).

The minor disagreement between Bush and Frist refutes the crackpot realism of those who cannot fathom the fact that people in public life often do what they do because they think it is right. Both Bush and Frist have thought seriously about this subject and come to mildly divergent conclusions. But neither conclusion crosses the scarlet line of supporting the creation of embryos to be mere sources of cells. And neither conclusion is the result of the sort of slapdash thinking that exaggerates the differences between them and explains those differences in terms of banal political calculations.

Will is certainly correct to point out that one should critique an opponent’s views on their merits, not on the motivations for them. But Will should also know–and he relished the Kerry flip-flop talk as much as the next conservative–that politicians do very little by accident (isn’t that what their media advisors are for?); so people are rightly skeptical. Besides, even though he is returning to his original position on the matter, Frist has stopped supporting the President’s position of stem cell research (he even apprised the President of this fact in a phone call before the change became public). It makes perfect sense then to ask that, if the facts surrounding the President’s policy have not changed, why has Frist stopped supporting it (or why has he returned to his original position)? In the end Will’s insistence on the principle of charity–on considering the stated justifications for someone’s position–for such thoughtful people as *Bush and Frist* (but not, mind you, for academics) raises another more important question: how do we decide when to apply, as Will has here, the principle of charity? I suggest we do so all of the time.

Accident, Op-Eds and other opinions, Richard Cohen, Straw Man

Rules for the breaking

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Despite the originary fallaciousness of the whole affair–a schoolyard ad hominem attack on Joseph Wilson–we haven’t bothered to comment on all of the silliness surrounding the Judith Miller jailing. No *serious* person would argue that Judith Miller deserves to be jailed *now* for her shoddy Iraq WMD coverage (as with much of the media, perhaps far below what might be considered minimally competent source and fact research), but that doesn’t stop the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen from bravely taking on some in the blogosphere who would argue as much. What Cohen does in much of today’s piece is not really fallacioius, it’s just silly. Why waste precious space in a newspaper of national circulation refuting the opinions of people who refute themselves? Cohen’s failures lie elsewhere. In particular, it consists in his insistence on the absolute applicability of the confidentiality pledge:

Whatever her politics, whatever her journalistic sins (if any), whatever the whatevers, she is in jail officially for keeping her pledge not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. (If that’s not the case, then we don’t know otherwise.) That pledge is no different than the one Bob Woodward made to Mark (Deep Throat) Felt or, if you will, the one I made to my sources back when I was revealing some unsavory facts about Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Only Agnew’s unexpected, but deeply appreciated, resignation saved me from going to jail. Like Miller, I thought my word was my word. Jail was something a journalist had to endure on occasion. It is, to quote “The Godfather’s” Hyman Roth, “the business we have chosen.”

The problem is that not all confidentiality pledges are the same–nor should the be. No one–not even a journalist–should be bound to a confidentiality pledge made to someone who is planning to murder someone, for instance. The question, obscured by many (including Bill Keller at the *New York Times*) is whether *in this instance* a confidentiality pledge applies. Inalienable rights have exceptions, one would think that professional standards of journalists would have exceptions as well (the alternative is the fallacy of accident). Cohen should discuss–or should at least be aware of the fact–that some have argued convincingly (the leaking was a crime, for instance) that this case is a very obvious exception.

Equivocation, False Dichotomy, Op-Eds and other opinions, Straw Man

Political Radicals or Maladjusted Kids?

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Oliver Roy, guest opiner in today’s Times treats us to a fuller exposition of a fallacy riddled argument that we have been discussing lately in his “Why do they Hate Us? Not Because of Iraq” (Source: NYT 7/22/05). This provides some occasion to look a little more carefully at some of the questions of historical causality that underlie these arguments.

These arguments have the following form:

1. Either terrorism is caused by specific events and policies, or it is caused by Islamist ideology.
2. Terrorism is not caused by specific events and policies.
3. Therefore, terrorism is caused by Islamist ideology.

There is almost certainly a false dichotomy in the first premise–though this seems to be generally implicit in all of these arguments–since the causal relations underlying terrorism are probably more complex than this dichotomy allows. Nevertheless, most of Roy’s argument is devoted to justifying #2 through a series of arguments.

First, we have the argument from chronology. This argument is based on the seemingly incontrovertible causal principle that a cause must precede its effect. This seems to imply something like the following.

A. If Y exists at a time prior to X, then X cannot be the cause of Y.

So,

B. If Islamic terrorism (militant Islamism, etc.) exists at a time prior to the invasion of Iraq, or Afghanistan, etc., then those conflicts cannot be the cause of Islamic terrorism (militant Islamism, etc.).

>First, let’s consider the chronology. The Americans went to Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, not before. Mohamed Atta and the other pilots were not driven by Iraq or Afghanistan. Were they then driven by the plight of the Palestinians? It seems unlikely. After all, the attack was plotted well before the second intifada began in September 2000, at a time of relative optimism in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

This argument is, of course, a straw man here. No one, I think, would argue that the cause of 9/11 was our retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan, or the subsequent invasion of Iraq. But, what Roy is going to do in order to make his argument seem more convincing than it should, is switch between general and specific instances of Y in our principle above (9/11, terrorism in general, Islamist mujahdeen in Afghanistan in the 80’s, London bombings). This becomes a fallacy of equivocation and allows him to set up these straw men arguments in order to knock them down.

He shows us that the presence of troops in Saudi Arabia can not be the cause of bin Laden’s radical islamism, since the latter preceded the former.

>Another motivating factor, we are told, was the presence of “infidel” troops in Islam’s holy lands. Yes, Osama Bin Laden was reported to be upset when the Saudi royal family allowed Western troops into the kingdom before the Persian Gulf war. But Mr. bin Laden was by that time a veteran fighter committed to global jihad.

Once again, no one would argue this, I think. Instead, the argument would be that a terrorist movement gains adherents and militants to the degree that populations feel violated, oppressed, and otherwise powerless. So although these events did not cause the existence of the movement, they feed, strengthen, and radicalize these movements.

Roy’s second argument is more interesting. Here he argues that the militants and terrorists are not really concerned about what happens to Afghanis or Iraqis.

>Second, if the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan – or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

If it is the case that there are virtually no Iraqis, Afghans, or Palestinians, one wonders what the denotation of “terrorists” includes. The decade and more of suicide bombings in Israel and the occupied territories, the insurgency in Iraq and Afghan, all seem to be excluded now from Roy’s argument. Now it suits his purpose to focus not on the broadest phenomena of Islamic militancy, but rather on a much narrower problem which excludes anyone who would cause trouble for Roy’s argument.

>It is also interesting to note that none of the Islamic terrorists captured so far had been active in any legitimate antiwar movements or even in organized political support for the people they claim to be fighting for. They don’t distribute leaflets or collect money for hospitals and schools. They do not have a rational strategy to push for the interests of the Iraqi or Palestinian people.

So there are two reasons for his second argument: (a) the militants and terrorists are foreigners; (b) the militants and terrorists do not have political programs in mind for the populations that they are supposedly fighting for.

>Even their calls for the withdrawal of the European troops from Iraq ring false. After all, the Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces. Western-based radicals strike where they are living, not where they are instructed to or where it will have the greatest political effect on behalf of their nominal causes.

Switching back now to the Western militants, Roy claims, quite incredibly and without argument, that the real motivation is a form of “culture shock” rather than politics.

>The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations.

The terrorists seem, on Roy’s view, to be maladjusted kids rather than political radicals. Perhaps there is some truth here, but the inadequate arguments presented above does nothing to support this view. Roy would need to spend more time presenting evidence for this curious view, and less time knocking down straw men, if we were to be obligated to take his conclusion seriously.

The motivations for terrorism are sometimes deeply perplexing, and the causes of both the multi-national Islamist movement and individual participation in terrorism for its sake are far more complicated than Roy and these argument’s recent proponents on the right can allow. Although a strong case can be made for the uncontroversial claim that Iraq and Afghanistan are not the sole cause of all acts of Islamist terrorism, the desire of these pundits seems to be exonerating the Bush administration of any causal contribution to the terrorism it is supposedly trying to combat. That argument has certainly not been made by Roy here and the growing body of argument and evidence seems to support the contrary.

Ad Hominem, Appeal to the People, Charles Krauthammer, Plain Bad Arguments

Give me that old time religion

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Over the year we’ve been in business we’ve seen plenty of ironic fallacies–these are the fallacies people commit by accusing others of committing fallacies. During the election the favorite was the reverse ad hominem–accuse someone else of attacking (thereby ignoring their justified attack and attacking them in turn). Here’s another variation on that theme–the reverse ad populum:

>These things come in waves, of course, but waves need to be resisted, even if the exercise leaves you feeling like King Canute. The new wave is fashionable doubt. Doubt is in. Certainty is out.

So Charles Krauthammer (famous for his use of the reverse ad hominem) would have us believe that since doubt is fashionable, people who believe it must do so simply because others do, not because perhaps they have a reason to doubt. This is a nice way of abdicating your responsibility for an argument against their view. That doesn’t make it right. And worse, I’m not sure if Krauthhammer knows this, but just because your belief is deeply held or profoundly felt doesn’t mean it’s *true.*

Of course, Krauthammer’s jeremiad (he used that word) on belief is really just a set up for his main argument.

>The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers–principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics–bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong–indeed, deeply un-American–about fearing people simply because they believe. *It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you.* And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

Now let’s look at this a little more closely. Embedded in the usual tripe about anti-religious feeling in the liberal media, is a familiar argumentative trope: religious [think Christian Evangelical not Muslim] versus secular. These two things do not rightly belong in the same category (at least in the way Krauthammer arranges them), so any attempt to compare them is bound to mislead. Besides, *legalized* abortion is not imposed on anyone the law recognizes; gay marriage (wherever it is legal) is not imposed on anyone either (barring probably unlikely shotgun weddings). These are activities, not views. Views cannot be imposed on anyone; activities can, but these activities can’t–unless your parents force the gay lifestyle on you; or force you to get an abortion. To avoid gay marriage, don’t go to gay weddings, or don’t be gay; to avoid abortion, give birth to any children you conceive.

Charles Krauthammer, Informal Fallacies, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

Neo-Con Abstractions and Sleight of Hand

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We have heard a fairly consistent chorus, since September 11th, castigating the Islamic world for their supposed failure to denounce Islamic extremists. Unable to blame all muslims directly for terrorism, some find it plausible to blame all muslims for complacency, and an ever-present suggestion of complicity as well, with terrorism. This enables those thinkers who are so disposed to conceive the world in abstractions and to pose its problems in terms of wars among and within “civilizations.”

Krauthammer has a particular love of this neo-con trope. Today he again draws on it to help explain Europe’s problem with terrorism (Source: NYT 7/15/05). For Krauthammer the phenomenon that needs to be explained is that the terrorists in London (and the murderer of van Gogh in Netherlands) are “native-born Muslims.” (Of course, the terrorist acts in Madrid are the unmentioned exception here.)

>The fact that native-born Muslim Europeans are committing terrorist acts in their own countries shows that this Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq, long predates Afghanistan and long predates Sept. 11, 2001. What Europe had incubated is an enemy within, a threat that for decades Europe simply refused to face.

This is an extremely interesting rhetorical move. It rests on a certain ambiguity in the author’s intention. If he aims to show that there was a radical Islamic movement advocating violence prior to the last 5 years, then one wonders who doubts such a thing. That claim seems uncontroversially true and does not need additional evidence. This makes the argument look very strong. But Krauthammer’s intention is more devious. He wants to suggest that these acts would have been committed even without, and perhaps more likely without, America’s war on terrorism. The fact that radical Islamic movements pre-exist the last five years, of course, does nothing to show what Krauthammer wants to suggest. It is only the difference between a proximate cause and a more remote cause. Though there would be good reason to suggest this if we limited ourselves to the Dutch case–though that is not probably a case of terrorism even if it was violence committed by a muslim with fundamentalist beliefs.

This is a complicated fallacious argument. This seems to be something like a ignoratio elenchi (the fallacy of missing the point) with the conclusion unstated but suggested by the context. His choice of the three American events (9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq) suggests that the relationship between these events and the continued terrorism is Krauthammer’s real though not explicitly stated concern.

a) native-born Europeans are committing terrorism
shows b) that Islamist malignancy pre-dated 9/11 etc.
c) (implicitly) therefore the “war on terrorism” is not the cause of these acts.

Granting that (a) provides evidence for (b) (unnecessarily of course), it is hard to see that (a) or (b) provides any reason to hold (c). It might provide reason to believe (d) the “war on terror” is not the *sole* cause of these acts (even if it might be the precipitating cause). But that last claim is also uncontroversial I would think.

But setting aside this deceptive argument, Krauthammer wants to use this to explain Europe being “weak” on terrorism.

>One of the reasons Westerners were so unprepared for this wave of Islamist terrorism, not just militarily but psychologically, is sheer disbelief. It shockingly contradicts Western notions of progress.

>Our first response was, therefore, to simply sweep this contradiction under the rug. Put the first World Trade Center bombers on trial and think it will solve the problem. Even today there are many Americans and even more Europeans who believe that after Sept. 11 the United States should just have done Afghanistan — depose the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda’s sanctuary — and gone no further, thinking that would solve the problem.

Again Krauthammer suggests something that he does not actually assert–that the war in Iraq was and is a necessary part of the response to terrorism–and which his argument does nothing to show. Like above, this is a sort of sleight of hand, whereby an argument that might support a particular conclusion is actually being used to suggest the truth of a much stronger conclusion. This is combined in an interesting way with a version of the straw man argument. Presumably very few thought that we should *only* go after Afghanistan and do absolutely nothing else to combat or prevent terrorism. The question has always been whether our intervention in Iraq is contributing to terrorism.

>But the problem is far deeper. It is essentially a civil war within a rival civilization in which the most primitive elements are seeking to gain the upper hand. Sept. 11 forced us to intervene massively in this civil war, which is why we are in Iraq. There, as in Afghanistan, we have enlisted millions of Muslims on the anti-Islamist side.

>But what about the vast majority of European Muslims, the 99 percent who are peace-loving and not engaged in terror? They must also join the fight. They must actively denounce not just — what is obvious — the terrorist attacks, but their source: Islamist ideology and its practitioners.

And here we get the Neo-Con’s penchant for abstractions revealed. Rather than a historically determined political phenomenon, we are treated to a child’s tale of conflicts within and among civilizations. And one wonders whether, in Kruathammer’s mind, all Christians and Jews must denounce not just Christian and Jewish extremist terrorist acts, but the Christian and Jewish fundamentalist ideologies and their practitioners as well.

David Brooks, Equivocation, False Dichotomy, Informal Fallacies, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

Smoking or non?

We remarked some time ago that David Brooks of the *New York Times* discovered a new fallacy: the *argumentum pro homine*. It’s a fallacy of relevance akin to the ad hominem argument, though instead of attacking a person, you praise him for traits that have nothing to do with the conclusions you mean to draw about him. One might wonder, however, whether Mr. Brooks employs this sort of praise in a backhanded sort of way. In today’s op-ed, “Mr.Bush, Pick a Genius,” we can’t tell whether Brooks means to malign or praise the poor Michael McConnell, a man who strikes him as a “genius” and a terrific Supreme Court nominee.

>McConnell (whom I have never met) is an honest, judicious scholar. When writing about church and state matters, he begins with the frank admission that religion is a problem in a democracy. Religious people feel a loyalty to God and to the state, and sometimes those loyalties conflict.

To be precise–which is what honest, judicious judicial scholars do–religious people feel a loyalty to what *they* take to be their own religion’s–or better, their own demonination’s–interpretation of Divine requirements. Considering the sheer number and diversity of Christian denominations alone, these loyalties will very likely conflict. The genius, as Brooks describes him, has discovered hot water.

This is all set up for the grand argument.

>So he understands why people from Rousseau and Jefferson on down have believed there should be a wall of separation between church and state.

“Wall of separation” is a suggestive, though wholly and unfortunately imprecise phrase. It’s the kind of phrase that will have the imprecise non-geniuses among us arguing at cross-purposes. In other words, it’s the kind of phrase that cries out for argument, justification, clarification, application, interepretation. But how, one wonders:

>The problem with the Separationist view, he has argued in essays and briefs, is that it’s not *practical.* As government grows and becomes more involved in health, charity, education and culture issues, it begins pushing religion out of those spheres. The Separationist doctrine leads inevitably to discrimination against religion. The state ends up punishing people who are exercising a *constitutional right*. [emphasis added]

It seems like the problem with the separationist view is that it’s *not constitutional*, not that’s it’s not practical. But that’s not the real point. This is:

>McConnell argued that government shouldn’t be *separated* from religion, but, as Madison believed, should be *neutral* about religion. He pointed out that the fire services and the police don’t just protect stores and offices, but churches and synagogues as well. In the same way, he declared in Congressional testimony in 1995, “When speech reflecting a secular viewpoint is permitted, then speech reflecting a religious viewpoint should be permitted on the same basis.” The public square shouldn’t be walled off from religion, but open to a plurality of viewpoints, secular and religious. The state shouldn’t allow school prayer, which privileges religion, but public money should go to religious and secular service agencies alike.

The rest of the article spins out the evidence for this view in the usual fashion–cherry picking cases of misguided or confused local officials discriminating against religious people. We’ve all heard these cases, so we won’t bother going through them in order to point out that much more than these anecdotes would be needed to demonstrate systematic religious discrimination.

But back to the point, notice how “neutral” is an interpretation of “separated.” And notice also how this view is supported by one wickedly specious analogy–the fire department and police have fairly well-defined objectives–property and life. Nonetheless, the problem with McConnell’s view is that he falsely contrasts secular with religious. “Secular” is not religious, or any particular religion; it is not another religion alongside the many religions. Some might even claim that “secular” is a kind of “neutrality” with regard to religion.

Informal Fallacies, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

Don’t know much about science

One of the worst arguments for the existence of God–consistently and solidly refuted since before the birth of Christ–is the argument from design. The occasion for mentioning this today is yet another intelligent design proponent op-ed contributor to the New York Times, Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, and lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Impressive credentials, for a clergyman.

Like others before him in the intelligent design camp, Cardinal Schönborn confuses science with theology:

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection – is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

If the Cardinal’s objection is that scientists sometime confuse philosophy with science–claiming that there evidence shows things that it doesn’t–then we join him; such scientists would be guilty of the very same thing the Cardinal is. For evolution shows nothing either way about the theological design hypothesis. Just as no serious scientist can affirm that evolution demonstrates the existence of God; no serious scientist can claim that it does not.

The devastating problems with the design argument lie elsewhere:

Naturally, the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees: “Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason.” It adds: “We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance.”

This raises two questions. First, if it is the case that the real aim of biology is to learn the design of the intelligent creator, then biology is either a version of art criticism or psychology. Second, how could we presume to understand the wisdom of the creator through his works, when discerning the wisdom of our fellow humans through their works remains an almost insurmountably difficult task. Wherein, for instance, lies the wisdom of the framers of the constitution?