John Oliver’s doing a bang-up job on the Daily Show, and he’s implemented the don’t feed the trolls policy with Sarah Palin. Salon’s got a brief discussion HERE.
One question about iron-manning is whether even addressing the argument given is appropriate. That is, how John and I have been working with the Iron Man has been to take the fallacy as interpreting the opponent’s argument in the best possible light and addressing that version. But sometimes, we can iron man when we just spend any time at all on an argument. That is, if Iron Man is fallacious because of (a) the waste of time and energy on an opponent’s argument, and (b) thereby giving them more intellectual credit than they deserve, then the improvement of the argument isn’t the core of the fallacy. Rather, it’s in the misuse of dialectical resources on a dumb argument.
In response to challenges to the legality and morality of the NSA’s surveillance program, President Obama said we should have a healthy debate about it (video HERE). This occasions George Neumayr at the American Spectator to make this comparison:
He is open to a “healthy†debate about it. Holder and Obama are like drunk drivers who cause a pile-up and then stroll back innocently to see if they can “help.â€
And when President Obama makes it clear that the content of the calls is not monitored, Neumayr sees a slope looming:
In a few years, the line will move to: yes, we are listening to your calls, but we are not recording them; yes, we are forcing you to pay for abortion but we are not requiring you undergo one.
The trouble is that in both the analogy and in the slippery slope, we have Neumayr assuming that the harm is already in the surveillance as it is. Notice that both of the Obama replies to criticism has been to challenge that thought — the harm of surveillance would be on content.
Adrian Blau has an entertaining discussion of whether Derrida’s analysis of why we refer to 9/11 in the way we do is bullshit or simply crap. A taste:
I’ll focus solely on Leiter’s 2003 blog entry, ‘Derrida and Bullshit’, which attacks the ‘ridiculousness’ of Derrida’s comments on 9/11. This came from an interview with Derrida in October 2001. Here is an abbreviated version; you can see the full thing on p. 85 onwards of this book.
… this act of naming: a date and nothing more. … [T]he index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this ‘thing’ that has just happened … But this very thing … remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about.
9/11 turned the world upside down. Or at least 45 degrees to the side.
So, is this bullshit, on the Frankfurt and/or the Cohen notions of bullshit? I would say no. I take Derrida to be saying the following.
We often repeat the name ‘9/11’ without thinking much about it. But the words we use can be very revealing. Why do we try to reduce this complex event to such a simple term? Because the event is so complex we cannot capture it properly. Precisely by talking about it in such a simple way, we admit that we don’t really understand it.
If I have understood Derrida – tell me if I haven’t – this explanation is surely wrong.
Read the whole thing and the discussion to follow. Reminds me of the game some of us played in graduate school: interpret the work of Derrida using a simple phrase. My favorite: “Aporias or ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales.'”
At a recent conference on Tolerance, Vatican representative Bishop Mario Toso makes the following obviously problematic assertion:
Intolerance in the name of “tolerance†must be named for what it is and publically condemned. To deny religiously informed moral argument a place in the public square is intolerant and anti-democratic. Or to put it another way, where there might be a clash of rights, religious freedom must never be regarded as inferior. On the other hand, the issue of religious freedom cannot and should not be incorporated into that of tolerance. If, in fact, this was the supreme human and civilian value, then any authentically truthful conviction, that excludes the other, would be tantamount to intolerance. Moreover, if every conviction was as good as another, you could end up being accommodating even towards aberrations.
Seems like the last sentence contradicts the first bolded one. If every religion is as good as another, you could end up being accommodating even towards aberrations.
But I think it is obvious what we’re talking about here. Where a Christian’s right to hate upon a homosexual conflicts with that homosexual’s right not to lose job, house, etc., the Christian’s right absolutely prevails, or is at least equal. It’s not obvious that this ought to be the case. It’s also not obvious why the Bishop thinks this ought to be the case, other than to invoke the tolerance regress argument: If you criticize my intolerance, you’re intolerant.
For the informal logic connoisseurs, the modus tonens (identified by our very own Scott Aikin and co author Robert Talisse) consists in repeating back an interlocutor’s argument in a derisive tone (see also here). There is a visual version of that which has long bothered me. It involves posting a jerky looking photo of the person whose view you derisively or incredulously report (not refute, by the way, and I think this is important). This happens in reporting, as the refutation is the picture. Let’s provisionally call it the “ad deformem” (against ugly).
Take the above example from Talking Points Memo. No doubt there exist lots of pictures of Erickson. This one makes him look like a bloviating jerk. What did he say?
In many, many animal species, the male and female of the species play complementary roles, with the male dominant in strength and protection and the female dominant in nurture. It’s the female who tames the male beast. One notable exception is the lion, where the male lion looks flashy but behaves mostly like a lazy beta-male MSNBC producer.
Yes, he certainly deserves to be laughed at for that. But I don’t see the relevance of an uncharitable picture. I don’t see the relevance of any picture at all, actually, save to identify the mug for the onlooking audience–to distinguish Erickson from George Will for instance.
The argument seems bad enough on its own. And I think the uncharitable picture undermines, rather than advances, the report. An accurate report ought to be enough to call attention to the appalling view; the picture turns our attention away from that and onto the person with the view.
Naturally these two persons need not always conflict (the ad hominem after all is not always fallacious), but one ought to be judicious in using them.
Mark Tooley objects to the Boy Scouts no longer discriminating against gay scouts. He sees it as a trend of the emasculation of male culture, a kind of conformity to the kind of society “determined to echo the preening voice of the sort of nagging school guidance counselor whom every adolescent boy dreads and seeks to avoid”. Yes, Tooley is analogizing contemporary politics to high school boys and their attitudes. The point for the NS readers is that he’s not just got a concern about the reasons, but also a concern about the consequences. He sees larger trouble brewing, and more than just the fact that BSA scoutmasters will likely be gay, too:
[It is not yet clear]what this policy means for transsexuals. Cross-dressing Scouts? Only one of countless issues that inevitably now will arise under the rubric of protected “orientation or preference.†For a more likely scenario, how about teenage Scouts wanting openly to celebrate their pornographic interests?
Yes, so Tooley’s mind has run from the question of whether there should be no prohibition on gay scouts to whether if they let them in, whether they’ll have to let them wear, you know, Priscilla Queen of the Desert wear for the backpacking trip. Or whether their interest in pornography will be allowable and protected.
It’s really two slopes, and separate ones. The ‘transsexuals’ line is an error for the simple reason that if there’s a uniform, there’s a uniform. So the same reason why Johnny can’t wear his All-State football jersey on the backpacking trip is the same reason why Sam can’t wear his sundress. Done.
The pornography issue is, again, simple. Exposing the boys to sexually explicit material, even if they do it themselves, isn’t lawful. What does Tooley think? That once you let the gays in, you might as well fire up the film projector for the stag films? (I suspect that it’s a background equivocation of protecting the boys’ interests — what if they’re interested in porn?, he asks.) He even thinks it’s “more likely”! More likely than what?
Steven Patterson, “Are Arguments Abstract Objects?”
A standard story:Â (p, q) is an argument iff (i) S intends for q to be inferred from p, and (ii) q and p are related by an inference rule.
Some counter-examples: #1: late for the movie: S has p (S is sick, and if sick will miss the movie), S doesn’t intend to infer that q (late). #2: Pancake: S intends to infer q from p (pancakes today from helium is light), but it doesn’t follow.
#3. Snowy day: S intends to infer q from p, but there aren’t rules of inference in the midst of the two?
The analogical argument: Arguments are like musical compositions
-both are human productions
– there are individual works, but with identity-conditions
-but, these identity conditions are hard…
-understanding/appreciating requires training
-multiple conditions, can bilocate
– occur w/in contexts & have histories for development
Open concepts- don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions, but do have boundaries. E.g., continuum from the Socrates syllogism, to the ontological argument, to the ‘you’ve got to be kidding me response to arguments, to imagistic & physical arguments.
OK, so we just finished our presentation at the OSSA, and things went very well. James Freeman had some very good criticisms about our examples, and we got some very good feedback and new ideas. Very thankful to David Hitchcock for running the session so efficiently.
We had two theses. Both familiar to NS readers. #1: The straw man comes in a variety of forms and each can be fallacious and non-fallacious. #2: there’s a parallel fallacy with the iron man, which is making others’ views better than they actually are. We’ll post a link to the main paper in a while (HERE).
Comment (James Freeman): Pretty much in agreement with the overall thesis, but the examples stink. For example, our music teacher case not only doesn’t have an argument being straw manned, but there’s not even a claim being misrepresented. How’s that a straw man? (Oooof! We’ll fix that one!)
The main objections:
Finocchiaro: Calling (even some) acceptable arguments ‘straw man’ is a real terminological confusion. You guys need a new term, because that’s a term for a fallacy.
Campolo: Your problems with iron man are too thin. There are lots and lots of worse consequences. Iron manned others don’t know that they don’t know. (An excellent iron man of our view, thanks!)
Bondy: There are even worse consequences Campolo had imagined — some folks you might iron man can get elected! (Thanks for iron manning us!)
Lewinski: Can’t Iron-Manning be a useful rhetorical tool, like prolepsis, where one improves one’s opponents… and then defeats the better versions?
Hoppmann: Aren’t there excellent epistemic reasons to Iron Man? You should, ideally, want to exchange with the very best opponents. Shouldn’t your defaults be set on interpreting the arguments as best as they can be?
Zarefsky: Are all pedagogical purposes legitimate for straw and iron man?
Botting: Isn’t there a further requirement of the dialectical tier? The reply to the others in disagreement?
Snoeck Henkemans, of the University of Amsterdam, argued that hyperbole can have a function in an arguer’s strategic maneuverings during the argumentation stage of a discussion. Â This is a topic close to our heart here at the NS, as our paper at OSSA (see later post on that) dealt with the closely related topic of the straw and iron man.
In any case, SH argued that hyperbole, especially aggrandizing hyperbole, can play a legitimate, i.e., ,non fallacious, role in sharpening the focus on elements of someone’s argumentation. Â Naturally, this comes from the perspective of pragma-dialectics, which enlarges the forum of argumentation beyond individual propositional moves, giving play to rhetorical elements, like hyperbole.
Problematically, or so people noted, there wasn’t a systematic principled distinction between legitimate and illegitimate hyperboles, as well as a general account of other related distortive speech acts.
