{"id":5332,"date":"2017-08-17T10:41:28","date_gmt":"2017-08-17T15:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5332"},"modified":"2017-08-17T10:42:06","modified_gmt":"2017-08-17T15:42:06","slug":"calling-fallacies-by-the-proper-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5332","title":{"rendered":"Calling Fallacies by their Proper Names"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In the wake of Trump’s false analogy between the behavior of the neo-Nazis and the antifa counter-protesters in Charlottesville, there has been a good bit of criticism of the point.\u00c2\u00a0 However, the term used in criticism has consistently been that he ‘equivocated’<\/strong> the two.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s the headline at the Daily Beast<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Netanyahu\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cynical Delay Denouncing Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nazi Equivocation<\/h1>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Other outlets have used the term ‘equivocation’ for the error, too.\u00c2\u00a0 CNN has consistently termed the error an ‘equivocation.’\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Today<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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… the moral equivalency and equivocation President Trump has offered …<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Today<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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…Trump’s equivocation earlier this week between white supremacists and those who were protesting them in Charlottesville.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yesterday<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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… his initial equivocation, saying there was “blame on both sides.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Vanity Fair<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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…the president of the United States equivocated.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even at the venerable Economist<\/a>: <\/em><\/p>\n

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Mr Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s equivocation on Saturday thrilled the\u00c2\u00a0Daily Stormer<\/em>…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And so on.\u00c2\u00a0 In a follow up post, perhaps Friday, I’ll talk about the problems with the slippery slope argument Trump made defending the monuments, so there is a lot of bad reasoning and falsity to criticize.\u00c2\u00a0 But, my point today is just something small.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just this:\u00c2\u00a0 if people are going to use the vocabulary of fallacy appraisal, it should be used correctly.<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s the big point: so much power is wielded by that vocabulary.\u00c2\u00a0 Think of the big-word points scored by folks who use that word — and notice the force it has when you’re criticizing someone.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the fallacy-spotting game, and throwing a fallacy name out there shifts the course of conversation.\u00c2\u00a0 So using fallacy vocabulary (especially when it’s composed of Latinisms), means you’re claiming a kind of informed position on the debate — like pausing and making a point of order.<\/p>\n

That’s the reason why you’ve got to be competent when using the vocabulary.\u00c2\u00a0 In this case, we’ve got a fallacy, and what’s being criticized, again is something just as simple as a false analogy (or false equivalence).\u00c2\u00a0 There may be an element of two wrongs to the reasoning, too (since T also implicated that because the antifa folks were violent, too, they bear blame, too).<\/p>\n

Regardless, what he did not do is equivocate.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/em>Here’s why.\u00c2\u00a0 Equivocation is an error of term-confusion.\u00c2\u00a0 It happens when you’ve got two meanings for a term, and you reason along only looking at the similarity of the term, but miss the dissimilarity of the meanings in the reasoning.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s an example:<\/p>\n

Students attend school to improve their faculties.<\/p>\n

Their faculties are their teachers<\/p>\n

So students go to school to improve their teachers.<\/p>\n

Funny? Yeah,\u00c2\u00a0 and fallacious! It’s because faculty\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>in the two instances meant different things, and so the syllogism\u00c2\u00a0looks\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>valid, it’s because the term\u00c2\u00a0faculty<\/em> appears as the middle term, but there’s two different things denoted by those two instances of the term.\u00c2\u00a0 (In the first, it means the mental functions, in the second, it means teachers.)<\/p>\n

Here is a lesson about fallacy-charges.\u00c2\u00a0 They come with a burden of proof.\u00c2\u00a0 When I charge you with begging the question, I need to show either (i) how your conclusion is one of your premises or (ii) how one of your premises is, given the argument, more controversial than your conclusion.\u00c2\u00a0 When I charge you with straw man, I need to show how you’ve distorted my view to look worse than it is.\u00c2\u00a0 And so on.\u00c2\u00a0 When you charge equivocation, you have to show (i) that there are two instances of a term in some reasoning, and (ii) show that those two instances of the same term\u00c2\u00a0 nevertheless mean different things in the two cases.<\/p>\n

So what’s the upshot?\u00c2\u00a0 Journalists don’t use the vocabulary of logic accurately.\u00c2\u00a0 For the most part, that’s not much of a surprise, but it’s disappointing to a college prof who tries to make it so that the names of things helps us keep them straight, not just that knowing lots of names for things makes it so that you can use them as you like.<\/p>\n

Here’s another shot, perhaps a bit more of a sympathetic view on the use of the term.\u00c2\u00a0 When one says a speaker had an ‘unequivocal’ statement, that means that the statement was clear about its meaning.\u00c2\u00a0 So unequivocal statements are unambiguous, at least on the level of terms.\u00c2\u00a0 So perhaps the view is that in being unclear <\/em>about whether T was really rejecting the commitments of Nazis or their behavior, T equivocated. <\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 However, I’m not entirely moved by this line of thought, since many of the cases are those of ‘equivocating between’ not ‘equivocating about’.\u00c2\u00a0 So, perhaps, there are different kinds of misuse of this term.<\/p>\n

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In the wake of Trump’s false analogy between the behavior of the neo-Nazis and the antifa counter-protesters in Charlottesville, there has been a good bit of criticism of the point.\u00c2\u00a0 However, the term used in criticism has consistently been that he ‘equivocated’ the two.\u00c2\u00a0 Here’s the headline at the Daily Beast: Netanyahu\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cynical Delay Denouncing … Continue reading Calling Fallacies by their Proper Names<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1],"tags":[1963,953,1581,733],"class_list":["post-5332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equivocation","category-general","tag-equivocation","tag-equivocations","tag-fallacy-of-equivocation","tag-false-analogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5332"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5335,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5332\/revisions\/5335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}