General discussion

He invited him in to talk

From the Huffington Post but by Reuters:

(Reuters) – A North Carolina man faces ethnic intimidation charges after leaving bacon at a mosque and making death threats to its members as they prepared for worship in observance of Ramadan, Islam’s holy month, authorities said on Friday.

Russell Thomas Langford of Fayetteville was arrested late on Thursday, the Hoke County Sheriff’s Office said. He is a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, WTVD-TV in Raleigh said, quoting officials at Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina.

On Thursday afternoon, members of the Masjid Al Madina in Raeford found two packages of bacon at the mosque entrance, the sheriff’s office said.

A few years back in Texas, some neighbors, incensed at the idea of the freedom of religion in their neighborhood, decided to hold pig races. This provoked the following response from a representative of the mosque:

Muslims do not hate pigs. . . they just don’t eat them.

Anyway, here’s the good part of the current tale.

A Chevy Tahoe was in the parking lot when the bacon was found, and the driver of the Tahoe, later identified as Langford, followed one of the members home, the sheriff’s statement said.

The suspect returned in the evening, showed a gun to one of the members, a retired Army captain and Muslim chaplain at Fort Bragg, and threatened to kill him, according to a report by WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C.

The chaplain invited him inside to talk, but the man left, the report said. Later, the man returned in his SUV and tried to run over a group of people who were going inside the mosque for evening Ramadan prayers, the report said.

He invited him in to talk.

General discussion

Atul Gawande on the mistrust of science

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The New Yorker published Atul Gawande’s commencement address at the California Institute of Technology. He calls upon the graduates to defend science from pseudo science. I don’t think he’s really defending science so much as basic reasoning. He writes:

To defend those beliefs, few dismiss the authority of science. They dismiss the authority of the scientific community. People don’t argue back by claiming divine authority anymore. They argue back by claiming to have the truer scientific authority. It can make matters incredibly confusing. You have to be able to recognize the difference between claims of science and those of pseudoscience.

Science’s defenders have identified five hallmark moves of pseudoscientists. They argue that the scientific consensus emerges from a conspiracy to suppress dissenting views. They produce fake experts, who have views contrary to established knowledge but do not actually have a credible scientific track record. They cherry-pick the data and papers that challenge the dominant view as a means of discrediting an entire field. They deploy false analogies and other logical fallacies. And they set impossible expectations of research: when scientists produce one level of certainty, the pseudoscientists insist they achieve another.

To be precise, all five of those moves are logical fallacies–well most of them anyway. And this speaks to the broader point–it’s not just science, but basic reasoning that he’s defending. The trouble is, however, that the enemies, as it were, of reason take themselves to be its defenders. In fact, calling them out on their sorry reasoning, as Gawande has just done, is, as Gawande notes, not advisable:

The challenge of what to do about this—how to defend science as a more valid approach to explaining the world—has actually been addressed by science itself. Scientists have done experiments. In 2011, two Australian researchers compiled many of the findings in “The Debunking Handbook.” The results are sobering. The evidence is that rebutting bad science doesn’t work; in fact, it commonly backfires. Describing facts that contradict an unscientific belief actually spreads familiarity with the belief and strengthens the conviction of believers. That’s just the way the brain operates; misinformation sticks, in part because it gets incorporated into a person’s mental model of how the world works. Stripping out the misinformation therefore fails, because it threatens to leave a painful gap in that mental model—or no model at all.

To put this another way. Science teaches you a lot of truths and techniques that don’t matter to people who most need them. Invoking these truths and techniques not only does not convince them, it makes it worse. By analogy, the truths and techniques of critical thinking 101 don’t matter to the people who most need them and invoking them only serves to make matters worse.

Read the rest of Gawande’s piece.  At least he’s optimistic.

General discussion

The mistaken racist

Here is a pretty sorry attempt at iron-manning Trump:

JOHN HEILEMANN (HOST): Let’s just say this first of all, when Trump does what he did in that Tapper interview, and he did it over and over again, he kept calling Curiel a Mexican, right? It is not even dog whistle politics. It is just pure racial politics. 

MARK HALPERIN (HOST): No, it’s not racial.

HEILEMANN: It’s racial politics. It is.

HALPERIN: Mexico isn’t a race.

HEILEMANN: It doesn’t matter whether Mexico is a race, it’s stirring up racial animus about people who don’t like Hispanics, and illegal immigrants coming across the border. That’s what he’s doing. He’s ringing the bell for them every time he does it. He’s not Mexican. He was born in Indiana. And eventually you can get Trump to acknowledge that he’s Mexican-American, it’s his heritage that’s what he’s doing here right? Then on top of that he is a potential president of the United States who has issued, over the course of the last week, vague threats, saying that the judge should be investigated. It is wildly inappropriate and yes, of course there are no political benefits to this and I’m sure that his team is beating it’s head against tables as they watch him blow news cycles behaving in this way that is again, I think racially tinged and also really wildly inappropriate things to say about a federal judge by someone who could be president of the United States.

HALPERIN: It’s certainly racially tinged. I just want to make the point that Mexico is not – Mexican is not a race. 

HEILEMANN:  I am fully aware that Mexico is not a race, but you can invoke things like that to stir up racial animus regardless of whether or not Mexico is a race or not. 

It’s no defense, by the way, of Trump that “Mexico is not a race.” I think it’s sufficient for one to be a racist, or racist-like, if they treat non-races, like Mexico, as if they were races.  These are going to be interesting times, unfortunately.

 

General discussion

Coddled college kids

Very often I translate arguments into the language of Philosophy 101. I fear this is a bad thing because it tends oversimplify matters. On the other hand, it usually works; this stuff isn’t that hard to do well. Consider this conclusion to a piece about coddled college students:

But what’s too often missing from this picture is the very thing that opponents of political correctness so often decry: a sense of proportion and judgment, and an awareness that what transpires on the radical edges of elite universities is not always an accurate barometer of what’s happening in the wider world.

Not that this needs explaining, but the criticism alleges that instances of coddling (that’s what I’m going to call it) have been greatly exaggerated. This amounts to accusing the people who make such charges of a very basic and completely avoidable reasoning error: hasty generalization. For added irony, in this case, this is what the critics of coddled college kids have accused the coddled college kids of.

By the way, let’s call this the one-two (You are ironically guilty of the very intellectual mistake you are committing!).

Anyway, my interest is with the charge of the author here (rather than the validity of the charge). It’s such a basic error that I marvel it forms the basis of such a long article. Then again, maybe people really just are not that good at this stuff.

General discussion

Insincerity

Samantha Bee had a segment on her show “Full Frontal” the other week about the origins of the Evangelical pro-life movement.  Long story short: abortion, or politics for that matter, didn’t matter to the Evangelical Christians until a group of cynical Republicans decided to make it so. Now, of course, next to who goes to what bathroom, the pro-life movement and Evangelical Christianity are one in essence.

Nowadays, we’re talking about a completely different movement and broadly different arguments. To allege that this history lesson undermines the case Evangelicals make for whatever it is they make a case for is an almost perfect example of the genetic fallacy (i.e., your view is false on account of its origins). In this case, the insincere origin of the Evangelical Christian version pro-life movement was insincere, so the current movement is.

I’m not alleging that Bee is guilty of this (it’s a comedy show after all, but I don’t think she’s drawing the inference). But it is worth considering what possible use this history lesson (stipulating on its accuracy) contributes to the discussion.

One lesson might be that sometimes people make arguments for almost entirely strategic reasons. For them the argument doesn’t actually matter (and so the violate the sincerity condition). But it does matter to someone.  Or it will eventually matter to someone.

On its own merits, well, the argument might have something. But you might not believe those merits. Nor does anyone else. So, in a sense, you’re distorting your own view on the argument’s strength. This is devious, because when time is limited, we tend really only to care about things other people care about.

Well, now they care about it. So there’s that.

General discussion

Use and mention

This seems like an obvious case of the use/mention distinction. Here is Dick Gregory, actor and civil rights activist, on the students who objected to the Dean recommending his work.

As a lifelong champion of civil rights and a firm believer in fighting for what is right, I applaud our young people for the various protests they have undertaken in recent years, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Recently, the young brothers and sisters of MRC Student Coalition at Matteo Ricci College, Seattle University, have taken up such a fight based on curriculum concerns. This protest, however, has become personal for me, since it is in part centered on my autobiography entitled Nigger, and the fact that some students became offended when Jodi Kelly, dean of Matteo Ricci College, recommended Nigger to a student to read.

Here’s the context:

The charge has appeared in several accounts of a tense meeting between the students and the Reverend Stephen Sundborg, president of the university, who urged the students to abandon their demand for the resignation of Jodi Kelly, dean of the university’s Matteo Ricci College, which offers degrees in the humanities. Several accounts state that the word was used by Kelly not to refer to the student or any individual, but to describe the book Nigger, the autobiography of Dick Gregory, the civil rights activist and biographer. On Gregory’s own website, he describes what he told his mother about the title of the book: that whenever she heard the name of his work, “you’ll know they’re advertising my book.”

It’s just not that difficult. The Dean mentioned, but didn’t use, the key term. Nor does it appear the kind of mention that’s really just a sneaky way of using the term indirectly (which is how my friend’s kids learned to swear and get away with it).

General discussion

Fouling is part of the game

Quote of the day (Aristotle Sophistical Refutations 11 (171b20-35):

So, then, any merely apparent reasoning about these things is a contentious argument, and any reasoning that merely appears to conform to the subject in hand, even though it be genuine reasoning, is a contentious argument: for it is merely apparent in its conformity to the subject-matter, so that it is deceptive and plays foul. For just as a foul in a race is a definite type of fault, and is a kind of foul fighting, so the art of contentious reasoning is foul fighting in disputation: for in the former case those who are resolved to win at all costs snatch at everything, and so in the latter case do contentious reasoners. Those, then, who do this in order to win the mere victory are generally considered to be contentious and quarrelsome persons, while those who do it to win a reputation with a view to making money are sophistical. For the art of sophistry is, as we said,’ a kind of art of money-making from a merely apparent wisdom, and this is why they aim at a merely apparent demonstration: and quarrelsome persons and sophists both employ the same arguments, but not with the same motives: and the same argument will be sophistical and contentious, but not in the same respect; rather, it will be contentious in so far as its aim is an apparent victory, while in so far as its aim is an apparent wisdom, it will be sophistical: for the art of sophistry is a certain appearance of wisdom without the reality. The contentious argument stands in somewhat the same relation to the dialectical as the drawer of false diagrams to the geometrician; for it beguiles by misreasoning from the same principles as dialectic uses, just as the drawer of a false diagram beguiles the geometrician.

This is often the analogy that I use when discussing fallacies. I get little traction, because the students think fouling is part of the game.

General discussion

Stereotyping

Like anyone who teaches critical thinking, I spend some time on the topic of stereotyping.  Like most philosophers (so goes the stereotype at least), my discussion is not informed by empirical research.

No longer: Stereotype (In)accuracy in Perceptions of Groups and Individuals:

Psychological perspectives once defined stereotypes as inaccurate, casting them as rigid (Lippmann, 1922/1991), rationalizations of prejudice (La Piere, 1936), out of touch with reality (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999), or exaggerations based on small “kernels of truth” (Allport, 1954/1979; Table 1). These common definitions are untenable. Almost any belief about almost any group has been considered a stereotype in empirical studies (Jussim, 2012). It is, however, impossible for all beliefs about groups to be inaccurate. This would make it “inaccurate” to believe either that two groups differ or that they do not differ.

Is this just a terminological problem? My informal (read: untutored) sense is that the term might best be limited to those instances of false generalizations about people meant to diminish or otherwise pigeonhole them, on analogy with the way fallacy names are applied. Thus, not all ad hominem scheme arguments are fallacious, but let’s reserve “ad hominem” for those instances which are.

Your argument is invalid