A Handbook of Logical Fallacies
"The Art of Reasoning" by David Kelley is by far the best textbook on
logic I have ever encountered. You can get it from:
The Institute for Objectivist Studies
* AD FIDENTIA
* AD HOMINEM
* AMBIGUOUS COLLECTIVE
* ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY
* APPEAL TO IGNORANCE
* ARGUMENT FROM INTIMIDATION
* ARGUMENTUM AD POPULUM
* ARGUMENTUM AD VERECUNDIAM
* ASSUMPTION CORRECTION ASSUMPTION
* BAREFOOT
* BARKING CAT
* BEGGING THE QUESTION
* BOOLEAN
* CHERISHING THE ZOMBIE
* DETERMINISM
* DISCARDED DIFFERENTIA
* DONUT
* ECLECTIC
* ELEPHANT REPELLENT
* EMPHATIC
* EXCLUSIVITY
* FALSE ALTERNATIVE
* FALSE ATTRIBUTION
* FALSIFIABILITY
* FALSIFIED INDUCTIVE GENERALIZATION
* FANTASY PROJECTION
* FLAT EARTH NAVIGATION SYNDROME
* FLOATING ABSTRACTION
* FROZEN ABSTRACTION
* GOVERNMENT ABSOLUTIST
* GOVERNMENT SOLIPOTENCE
* GRAVITY GAME
* GREEK MATH
* I-CUBED
* IGNORING HISTORICAL EXAMPLE
* IGNORED INTENTION
* IGNORING PROPORTIONALITY
* INSTANTIATION OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL
* JOURNALISTIC/POLITICAL FALLACIES
* MEATPOISON
* MEGATRIFLE
* MISPLACED PRECISION
* MISSING LINK
* MOVING GOALPOST SYNDROME
* NULL VALUE
* OVERLOOKING SECONDARY CONSEQUENCES
* PIGEONHOLING
* PERFECTIONIST
* PRETENTIOUS
* PRETENTIOUS ANTECEDENT
* PROOF BY SELECTED INSTANCES
* PROVING A NEGATIVE
* RELATIVE PRIVATION
* RETROGRESSIVE CAUSATION
* SELECTIVE SAMPLING
* SELF EXCLUSION
* SHINGLE SPEECH
* SILENCE IMPLIES CONSENT
* SIMPLISTIC-COMPLEXITY
* SPURIOUS SUPERFICIALITY
* STOLEN CONCEPT
* SUPRESSION OF THE AGENT
* THOMPSON INVISIBILITY SYNDROME
* UNINTENDED SELF-INCLUSION
* UNKNOWABLES
* VARIANT IMAGIZATION
* VERBAL OBLITERATION
* WOULDCHUCK
* AD FIDENTIA
(Against Self-Confidence) If you cannot directly refute someone's
principles, you strike indirectly with an attack on their confidence in
those principles. Question their certainty of the principles' validity:
"How can you be sure you're right?"
* AD HOMINEM
This is the technique of responding to ideas with insults and failing to
answer your opponent's real arguments.
Some Ad Hominem arguments probably have stupidity as their source: If he
can't see your ideas he may direct his rebuttal at your person.
Ad Hominem in reverse: "I'm sure you, as an eminently sensible person,
can see the virtues of this idea."
An ad hominem might be legitimate in situations where the credibility of
someone is in question. The fact that he is a lying, scheming SOB might be
relevant in the consideration of his testimony, but NOT in the consideration
of ideas he may hold.
The Homily Ad Hominem is an appeal to a person's feelings or prejudices,
rather than his intellect, with a trite phrase designed to reinforce a
subjective rather than objective view of a situation. If the homily is not
accepted in answer to the situation, the next thing that will be done is to
attack the person's character rather than answer his argument.
* AMBIGUOUS COLLECTIVE
To commit this fallacy is to use a collective term without any meaningful
delimitation of the elements it subsumes.
"We" "you" "they" "the people" "the system" "the general public" and
"society as a whole" are the most widely-used examples. This fallacy is
especially widespread and devastating in the realm of political discussion,
where its use renders impossible the task of discriminating among
distinctively different groups of people.
The term "society as a whole" implies that a group of people somehow
becomes an entity endowed with attributes other than those attributes
possessed by individuals in an aggregate. It would be better to use the
expression "composite" or "in the aggregate" than "as a whole" as this
preserves the awareness that the group is merely a collection of independent
elements.
Social problems are difficulties resulting from the interactions of
groups of people. Before a social problem (or indeed any kind of problem)
can be solved, it is imperative that the problem be precisely identified. To
identify a social problem, you must delineate precisely the groups of people
who are involved in that problem. The Ambiguous Collective fallacy prevents
this identification. The use of the word "public" as a synonym for
"government" is a widespread example.
An antecedentless pronoun is an example in the singular of the Ambiguous
Collective fallacy.
I often challenge those who commit this fallacy to eliminate from their
discussion all general collective terms, and each time they want to use such
a term to use instead a precisely delimiting description of the group the
term is intended to subsume. Very few people are able to do this.
I suspect that quite often an Ambiguous Collective is used as an attempt
to make a flimsy idea seem more significant or more valid by making the
entities it refers to seem larger or more important.
One reason this fallacy is so widespread and difficult to deal with is
that it is built into the English language. Consider the question "Do you
love anyone?" The ambiguity involved here arises from the fact that the word
"anyone" can denote either of two completely different meanings:
1. An individual, specifiable human being. A single, particular person,
in the sense that there is some one person whom I love.
2. A non-selected unitary subset of the human race, in the sense that I
love whichever person happens to be in my proximity.
Here are some examples of the Ambiguous Collective fallacy:
"Last November, 77% of us voted in favor of term limits."
In this statement, who exactly are the "us"? The speaker wants to convey
the idea that term limits are very widely supported, but if in fact the 77%
refers only to those who voted, the supporting subgroup may well be a quite
small percentage of the total population.
"We need to train doctors to teach us how to get and stay healthy."
In this statement, who are the "we" and who are the "us"? Is the speaker
trying to promote socialized medicine by advocating government control of
the medical schools? When he says "we need to" does he really mean "the
government should"? And is the "us" merely a subtle way of saying "me"?
The economic sanctions against South Africa provide an example of the
consequences in real life of the Ambiguous Collective fallacy:
"I imagine you support your government's sanctions against South Africa?"
"Of course. Every decent person does."
"What about disinvestment of American business from my country, you are
all for that too?"
"I campaigned for it on campus. I never missed a rally or a march."
"Even if it means a million blacks starve as a direct consequence? Your
plan is similar to trying to convert a country by withdrawing all your
missionaries and burning down the cathedral. You forced your own businessmen
to sell their assets at five cents on the dollar. But it wasn't the
impoverished blacks who purchased those assets. Overnight you created two
hundred new millionaires in South Africa, and every one of them had a white
face! That's maliciously stupid! We would be grateful to you if your efforts
had been failures!"
Perhaps the most widely-known example of the Ambiguous Collective fallacy
is the statement:
"Government of the people, by the people, and for the people."
In this statement "the people" has three distinctly different meanings:
One group of "the people" (the victims, or producers) are ruled by another
group of "the people" (the bureaucrats, with their action arm, the police)
in order to achieve the goals of yet another group of "the people" (the
politicians).
* ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY
The anti-conceptual mentality treats abstractions as if they were
perceptual concretes. It regards a concept as a self-contained given, as
something that requires no logical process of integration and definition.
This syndrome is motivated by the desire to retain the effortless, automatic
character of perceptual awareness, and to avoid the mental independence,
effort and risk of error that conceptual integration entails. In the anti-
conceptual mentality, the process of integration is largely replaced by a
process of association.
The anti-conceptual mentality breeds an identification with and
dependence upon the group, usually a group united by such concrete traits as
race, sex, or geographical proximity. The moral universe of such people
consists of concrete substitutes for ethical principles: customs,
traditions, myths, and rituals.
The anti-conceptual mentality is incapable of abstracting from concrete
differences among people and formulating general principles of common human
rights, or common standards for judging an individual's moral character and
conduct. Its sense of right and wrong is anchored not in reason but in
loyalty to the tribe and its practices. The solidarity of the tribe is
sustained in part by xenophobia--thus the bigoted racism frequently
manifested by these people.
For the anti-conceptual mentality, relativism is the only possible
alternative to tribal prejudice because for him the refusal to judge is the
only alternative to judging by concrete-bound criteria. If one does not
think in terms of principles, one has no way of distinguishing those aspects
of human conduct and character that are essential from those aspects that
are optional.
* ARGUMENTUM AD POPULUM
(The Bandwagon fallacy) "All societies require military service. We are
a society. Therefore we should require military service."
* ARGUMENTUM AD VERECUNDIAM
The appeal to authority.
Whose authority? If an argument is to be resolved by such an appeal, the
authority must be one recognized by both parties. A justice system which
does not recognize the rights of the individual will not provide a
satisfactory authority. The only way the appeal to authority can be a viable
means of conflict resolution is if both parties can agree on a completely
neutral, objective authority to decide the issue. Where does one exist? Only
in the facts of reality.
Who decides? In all issues pertaining to objectivity, the ultimate
authority is reality--and the mind of every individual who judges the
evidence by the objective method of judgment: logic.
* ARGUMENT FROM INTIMIDATION
(The Virtue of Selfishness, chapter 19)
"Only the most degenerate, morally depraved, cretinous imbecile could
fail to see the truth of my argument."
Usually, however, the expression is somewhat more subtle:
"It would be unwise to exclude the possibility that my surmise is
correct."
"If one has to think about it, one is already without honor."... Spengler
To "dare" someone to do something is to challenge him to perform an
action as proof of his courage. This is the behavior of a person with the
aspirations of a tyrant but without the power to compel. Since he does not
have that power, he attempts to swindle his prospective victim into the
acceptance of his goals and the use of his judgements as the standard for
the victim's actions. He tricks the victim into performing the action by
implicitly impugning his character.
Intimidation also arises from people's tendency to evaluate themselves
only by making relative comparisons with other people. They thus conclude
(usually implicitly) that they can aggrandize themselves by belittling
others. I believe that a rational source of self-esteem is to be found by
evaluating myself against Reality. For example: if I want to see how strong
I am, I don't compete with another man's physical abilities - I simply
measure the weight of the heaviest barbell I can lift. I would be no
stronger if I lived in a world of weaklings - nor would I be any weaker if I
lived in a society of Schwartzeneggers.
Condescension is a milder form of this kind of intimidation.
* ASSUMPTION CORRECTION ASSUMPTION
He assumes (implicitly) that I will correct his mistaken assumptions.
* BAREFOOT
(See Rothbard, FOR A NEW LIBERTY, Chapter 10) - "If government didn't
exercise control over the manufacture, distribution, price and sale of shoes
we would all go barefoot!" If "shoes" doesn't suit you, just substitute
"police" or "fire protection" or "mail delivery" or anything else the
government claims to provide.
Nothing the government claims to provide cannot be provided in a more
humane, just, and economical manner by free associations of individual
people.
* ELEPHANT REPELLENT
"Hey, mister, you better buy a bottle of my Elephant Repellent. If you
don't buy it, the elephants will come into the neighborhood and trample you!
My proof that this stuff really works is that there are no elephants around
here." for "Elephant Repellent" substitute the word "Government" and for
"elephants" substitute the word "crime" or "Russians" or "poverty" or
"chaos" or anything else the government claims to prevent.
Nothing the government claims to prevent cannot be prevented in a more
humane, just, and economical manner by free associations of individual
people.
All statists use one or both of these fallacies. A good example, and an
illustration of the motive underlying their use, can be found in the
Commentaries of William Blackstone:
"...the whole should protect all its parts, and that every part should
pay obedience to the will of the whole; or, in other words, that the
community should guard the rights of each individual member, and that (in
return for this protection) each individual should submit to the laws of the
community; without which submission of all it was impossible that protection
could be extended to any."
Under the spurious claim that the State will "guard the rights of each
individual" Blackstone demands their obedient submission. In reality, the
rights are never guarded but the slavery is always imposed.
* BARKING CAT
From "Free To Choose" by Milton Friedman: What would you think of someone
who said, "I would like to have a cat provided it barked"? Your statement
that you favor a government provided it behaves as YOU believe desirable is
precisely equivalent. The political principles that determine the behavior
of government agencies once they are established are no less rigid than the
biological principles that determine the characteristics of cats. You can't
change the nature of government any more than you can repeal the laws of
physics. The way the government behaves and its adverse consequences are not
an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a
consequence of its nature in precisely the same way that a meow is a
consequence of the nature of a cat.
Those who want a centralized economic plan, as long as it's THEIR plan,
are the same as those who want a government, as long as it's THEIR
government. It's the same Barking Cat.
* BEGGING THE QUESTION
An assertion that implies and/or uses its answer.
"Why should you be good to people?" (He expects me to be good to him by
responding to his question.)
"We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime." (He
assumes that capital punishment does in fact discourage crime.)
* BOOLEAN
Choosing to view a continuum as represented by only its extremities. It
consists in dividing a range of options exhaustively into the two extremes
and then insisting that a choice be made between one or the other extreme,
without regard to any of the intervening alternatives. An example would be
to insist that if a man does not behave like a genius he must therefore be a
moron. A more subtly dangerous example is the attitude of a person who has
an aversion to the necessity of defining one's terms. She may attempt to
avoid this necessity by maintaining that "defining every single term used in
a discussion would result in such a tedious and turgid presentation that
communication would be impossible." What she ignores is the intervening
alternative of defining only the terms that are SIGNIFICANT to the
discussion.
In fact, some phenomena are Boolean by nature and some are Gaussian.
Human intelligence is Gaussian, the Law of Identity is Boolean.
The Excluded middle is another name for what I call the Boolean Fallacy.
* CHERISHING THE ZOMBIE
Touting the existence or effectiveness of an idea that has been dead for
a long time.
"The forthcoming election could be the big turning point in the
Libertarian Party's electoral significance." The LP has been a political
zombie since 1980 but he is still cherishing it.
"The President's statement casts doubt on the administration's
credibility." The Zombie is the idea that the administration has any
credibility.
Chief Justice Warren Burger: "We may well be on our way to a society
overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts." The Zombie is the self-
blinded belief that America has not already become such a society.
* FANTASY PROJECTION
* CONTEXT IMPOSITION
An attempt to impose his own intellectual or moral context on another
person by someone who has closed his mind to reality and manufactured a
fantasy, then expects (or if he is a tyrant, demands) others to share it and
help him sustain it. He ignores the objective realities of the situation,
concentrating instead on subjective perceptions that are false. (See the
definition of Social Metaphysics in the DICT file.)
One manifestation of this is the false dichotomy that you will frequently
find on questionnaires. Such as: "Are you a liberal or a conservative?" To
which a libertarian cannot provide an answer that is both truthful and
acceptable.
"There are no atheists in foxholes."
I have not been to war and do not presume to judge the mental lifeboats
sought by terrified men in the face of incomprehensible horrors. Subject to
sufficient stress, the human mind can be tortured into many grotesque
deformities. On the other hand, while cringing in the foxhole the sincere
atheist should realize fully that he does NOT believe in God: What sort of
sadistic deity would let the creatures he created perpetrate a situation
like this? Religion is a solace in times of stress (such as in foxholes)
only to those people who do not have any moral foundation other than
religion. A religious person might be able to survive that experience better
than a person who has NO belief system, because he has a support system in
his mind. If you are the unusual sort of person who possesses a rational
support system of your own, that is fine - but most people aren't. (But
then, perhaps those people turn to God only when the Devil no longer has a
use for them.)
Imposition of the Slave Mentality:
"Aren't you thankful that they allow you this?"
I am expected to limit myself to the context of "their" allowables. The
proper answer is, "No, I am resentful that they forbid other freedoms I
should possess." They have a six-inch knife and have stuck it four inches
into me. Should I be thankful they have not shoved it in the final two
inches? Or resentful that they have shoved it in four inches? I am expected
to accept their behavior and to judge my situation from within their
context.
Sometimes their tactic is to assert what they want your opinion to be.
They behave as though by naming it in advance they will make you unable to
alter it: "If you were terminally ill, you too would advocate life
preservation."
The most famous example of this fallacy:
"Let 'em eat cake!"
* I-CUBED
You assume that your adversary is Ignorant, Incompetent, and/or
Inexperienced and then impose this context on the discussion. I almost
always encounter this from astrologers, who admonish me to "examine this
before you reject it!" They always assume I have not done so.
* PIGEONHOLING
An attempt to subsume something into a frame-of-reference that is too
small to incorporate the thing.
You call me a name so you don't have to see me, you just see the name
that you call me.
Tyrants have a need to call other people names; it soothes their
consciences when they exerise coercion. Oppression of people offends their
Christian values; but it is no crime to tyrannize a "wog" or a "raghead." It
is the nature of tyranny to reduce its victims to names of disparagement.
* DISCARDED DIFFERENTIA
Define by using the Genus only.
* ECLECTIC
Eclecticism consists of selecting the good parts from a set of ideas and
discarding the bad parts. But this process implies that you already know how
to do the selecting, and have a standard of judgment to use for evaluating
the ideas.
If you in fact do, then there is no problem and eclecticism is a valid
intellectual process. But if you approach a set of ideas from a state of
ignorance, you are not intellectually equipped to pick and choose from among
them. You could not know whether what you accepted is true or false.
Herein lies the danger of eclecticism: if you are going to pick and
choose you must already have enough knowledge to do the picking.
* SPURIOUS SUPERFICIALITY
When a disputant insists on introducing irrelevant considerations,
ignoring his opponent's logic and evidence. He cannot grasp the whole of the
issue--or the principle underlying it--so he focuses on some small part
(usually just one word) and directs his rebuttal to an attack on that tiny
bit which is all he can perceive. He views things through his specialized
eyes, extracts a part of the truth and refuses to see more, sometimes
quoting your least significant statements, in order to make it appear that
you have said nothing better. When something is too strange or complicated
to deal with directly or comprehensively, he extracts whatever parts of its
behavior he can comprehend and represents them by familiar symbols--or the
names of familiar things which he thinks do similar things.
"What do you mean by ------?" Where ------ is any word included in your
presentation, usually a quite ordinary word which your opponent uses without
any difficulty in other contexts. (This is so widespread that perhaps it
should be given its own name: The Dictionary Fallacy.)
Some Ad Hominem arguments probably have the same source: He can't see
your ideas so he directs his rebuttal at your person. Or will simply start
talking about something he CAN understand--the result being a jarring
change-of-subject in the discussion.
He seizes upon one instance and constructs a generalization from it:
Observing that I don't like clams, he concludes that I have an aversion to
sea food in general. She sees something happen once or twice and concludes
that it is a regularly-occuring phenomenon.
These responses are not consciously deliberated, but result from his
inability to perceive the focal idea of the discussion. His only alternative
to one of these responses would be bovine immobility--unless he possessed a
sufficient degree of intellectual acumen to realize his lack of
comprehension, and a sufficient degree of self-esteem to admit to it.
* EMPHATIC
To emphasize one element of a set at the expense of other equally
significant elements. Or to place emphasis on a spurious aspect of a
situation. You see this when people react violently to comparatively minor
troubles but are seemingly unshaken by really serious ones. It is a sort of
being at a loss for a proportionate emotional reaction--a shivering at
shadows.
* MEGATRIFLE
Take a small, inconsequential effect and magnify it to become all-
encompassing in its supposed influence. These are people whose fear of the
snake in the grass is so great that they are unable to see the bear that is
about to eat them.
When somebody gets all upset over something that makes no practical
difference, you are dealing with a person whose world exists only within her
mind (and the minds of her significant others) rather than outside it. So
don't bother asking "What difference does that make?" You will generally
find that verbal assurances are the only way to calm her down. Repeated
verbal reassurance plays the same verification role in the mind of a
subjectivist that repeated experiments plays in the mind of an objectivist.
* MISSING LINK
"Citizens support warfare through their tax dollars."
"Scientists are responsible for the danger of nuclear war."
"The advance of modern medicine underlies the present population
explosion."
"Auto manufacturers are responsible for air pollution."
"Taxpayers are forced to finance policies that many of them would
oppose."
These are frequently-heard statements nowadays. I believe they are cruel
misrepresentation of the facts. They seem to be variants of the POST HOC
fallacy. The designated entity may be a contributory cause but is certainly
not a sufficient cause of the phenomenon specified. An attempt is being made
to lay blame on someone who is only marginally (or not at all) responsible.
Consider the first statement on the list. The citizens do not do the
supporting--the government does. The statement implies that the citizen is
performing some positive action, when in fact he is only the passive victim
of acts of theft committed by the entity that DOES support warfare.
The statement asserts that there is a chain of causation consisting of
two links: the "citizens" and the "warfare." But in fact there is a link
missing from that chain. The missing link in the middle of the chain is "the
government."
That same link, government, lies between the "scientists" and the
"nuclear war."
The missing link in the third statement, connecting "modern medicine" and
the "population explosion" is "all these f___ing people!" (I just couldn't
resist that.)
The missing links connecting "auto manufacturers" and "air pollution" are
"the automobiles" and "the people who drive the cars."
Another example: The government contracts with Daddy Warbucks Corp. to
provide the army with a New Gun. The gun turns out to be poorly designed and
will not work. During a congressional hearing to investigate the multi-
million dollar boondoggle, congressman Flatula is heard to declare "This
whole mess was financed by the taxpayers!"
The implication is that the Taxpayers paid for the New Gun. But this is
not the case. Daddy Warbucks received payment from the accounting office of
the Department of Defense--he got a cheque from the government for $Mega. If
this particular contract had never been issued (and the New Gun had never
been manufactured) the $Mega would have stayed, NOT in the pockets of the
Taxpayers but in the coffers of the government.
In fact, the whole scheme was done at government expense. The fact that
the government got its money by robbing a selected group of people does not
in ANY way implicate those people in the actions of the government.
Consider a personal example: If you are robbed of $100 by a hoodlum, and
the hoodlum subsequently uses part of that money to finance an abortion for
his girlfriend, can it be said that this abortion occurred at your expense?
Did you participate in the abortion? No, you did not. It was performed by
a quack doctor of whose very existence you were completely unaware. Did you
sanction the abortion? No, you did not. You didn't even KNOW about the
abortion! Did you finance the abortion? No, you did not. The doctor received
his payment from the hoodlum. The doctor didn't know where the hoodlum got
the money, or even that you exist. And the hoodlum, like the government,
would likely neither know nor care which particular victim the money had
come from.
And here we see the underlying motivation of those who use this phrase
"at taxpayers' expense": the desire to impose upon YOU personally the
ethical culpability of sanctioning the behavior of the government and the
people who DO support it. What they say, in effect, is that because you are
the victim of an act of robbery (taxation) you are therefore responsible
ethically for the manner in which the thief uses the money he has stolen
from you.
This same viciousness can be observed in another assertion I encounter
frequently when I chide people for using the word "we" when referring to the
actions of the government (see the Ambiguous Collective fallacy). They reply
with "Well, you're a taxpayer too!"
The fact that I am a victim is being used as justification for assigning
to me culpability for the behavior of the thief.
One of the most prevalent examples of the Missing Link fallacy is the
question: "Why is that man in prison?" The proper answer is: "Because the
government decided he should be in prison."
A splendid example of the Missing Link fallacy is in Michael Shermer's
column in the Jan2006 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "Police have an
expression for people who put themselves into circumstances that force
officers to shoot them: 'suicide by cop.'"
* SIMPLISTIC-COMPLEXITY
If someone comes up against a large bundle of particular facts, but has
no general principles with which to integrate those particulars, and is not
in the habit of thinking in principles, the multiplicity of facts will
appear so complex to him that he will not be able to deal with the situation
analytically. This is why to many people ethical issues seem a nightmare
tangle of unanswered questions, a moral labyrinth. You will hear them say:
"This is too complex a situation to yield any easy solution!"
"Unfortunately, no easy answers exist. The solution to the problem will
turn out to be as complex as the problem itself."
"That's a simplistic view of a complex situation."
"To try to take all this potential diversity into account right at the
beginning would be a recipe for paralysis."
When somebody makes one of these assertions, he means that he doesn't
perceive any principle under which to subsume all the specific consequences
of that principle. For him the world is indeed too complex--he has no way to
sort facts, to identify their distinguishing characteristics, and to grasp
the fundamentals underlying them. Without any integrating principles he just
cannot cope. He will manifest a Descriptive (rather than Analytical)
intellectuality. He believes that his description IS an analysis, because he
confuses a statement of the causal conditions of a process with an analysis
of the process itself. He does not think in principles, but focuses his
attention on the presentation of specific phenomena only. Thus his solution
to the situation will be an Ad Hoc solution that will fail to address more
than a few of the particulars.
Complexity does not make something unintelligible, any more than the
complexity of the symptoms of a disease makes the cause of those symptoms
unintelligible. What makes the phenomenon unintelligible is the attempt to
analyze it without reference to fundamental principle--to a unifying cause.
Only cognitive abstraction offers a method for thinking about complicated
issues in a precise way.
By resorting to particularizing rather than generalizing, pragmatists are
left floundering in a mire of complexity. The contention that principles are
simplistic is a spurious one; it is only by means of principles that man is
able to retain and make use of the vast storehouse of knowledge relevant to
any given issue. Concretes by themselves are meaningless, and cannot even be
retained in the mind for long; abstractions by themselves are vague or
empty. But concretes subsumed by an abstraction acquire meaning, and thereby
permanence in our minds; and abstractions illustrated by concretes acquire
specificity, reality, the power to convince.
People who don't think in principles will not be able to see the
principles underlying a philosophy. Usually, all they will be able to see is
the behavior of individuals who call themselves adherents of that
philosophy.
* FLOATING ABSTRACTION
(Barbara Branden's lectures, Principles of Efficient Thinking - lecture
#4) A generalization subsuming no particulars.
Here are two examples of floating abstractions manifested in the real
world:
While I lectured my students on optimal strategies for economic
development, just outside the classroom (in Bangladesh) I could witness poor
villagers dying of hunger. The great distance that exists between the lives
of the poor and the abstract world of economic theory had never before been
so clearly illustrated for me. I was devastated.
We'd go to parties and he'd spin up these post-Jungian theories of racism
and class struggle, and these phonies would stand around with their heads
going up and down like they were bobbing for apples. Then I'd go to work and
see a report on some twelve-year-old who shot his mom because he wanted to
sell the TV to buy crack, and she wouldn't let him. Then I'd go back home
and I couldn't stand listening to him anymore.
* GREEK MATH
The inability to discriminate a scale delineating greater and lesser
positives from a scale delineating greater and lesser negatives. This
inability results in considering a lesser negative to be a positive. ("My
government is a good government--because it's not as bad as other
governments.") I call it the Greek Math fallacy because the Greeks did not
have the mathematical concept of zero--that which separates positive
quantities from negative quantities. See * RELATIVE PRIVATION
* EXCLUSIVITY
Trying to make an idea of limited applicability extend in its coverage to
the inclusion of an overly large range: "All human experience can be
explained by a study of energy flows."
* FALSE ALTERNATIVE also known as the FALSE DICHOTOMY
Assuming that only one alternative exists in a given situation, when in
fact, other and usually more fundamental alternatives also exist.
This is frequently expressed by statements such as:
"What other explanation could there be?"
"I just can't imagine how any other theory could account for that."
"If there had been no other strategies possible, would you have voted
against Hitler?"
This postulates a fantasy world which cancels out one of the basic
realities of existence: the continued presence of alternatives. In essence,
the question becomes "if the fabric of reality were rewoven into a different
pattern, would you still take the same moral stand against voting?" Since my
morals are derived from the nature of man and reality, it is not possible
for me to answer this question. In essence, these sorts of dilemmas are
perplexing not because they constitute moral problems, but because they
constitute metaphysical ones. The "dilemma" being suggested would exist only
in another universe that ran by rules inapplicable to our own.
* DONUT
A form of false alternative. It insists that all donuts be divided into
two piles: large donuts and sugar donuts.
Coach to basketball team:
All right guys, I want you to line up alphabetically by height.
* OVERLOOKING SECONDARY CONSEQUENCES
To consider only the immediate results of an action, ignoring the long-
term effects. Along with this is the fallacy of
* IGNORING HISTORICAL EXAMPLE
People who do not look into the future beyond the end of their nose also
do not look into the past beyond yesterday (and sometimes not even that
far). If they did, they would readily see that the previous implementation
of their schemes was invariably a failure. Not only do they fail to see that
their scheme WILL BE a failure, they fail to see that it HAS BEEN a failure.
* INSTANTIATION OF THE UNSUCCESSFUL
To insist on implementing something which is known to have failed. "What
we need is government control of the economy!"
* FALSE ATTRIBUTION
The Straw Man syndrome. Present a false description of your adversary and
then base your repudiation on that description. You caricature a position to
make it easier to attack:
Objectivism advocates infanticide, therefore Objectivism is evil.
If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be
impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant.
If the state prohibits abortions even in the ninth month, it will soon be
telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception.
The defendant must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an
encouragement for other men to murder their wives.
As a justification for your proposal, you present your supposition of
adverse consequences.
* FALSIFIABILITY
Karl Popper: A conjecture or hypothesis must be accepted as true until
such time as it is proven to be false.
Popper maintains that scientists approach the truth through what he calls
"conjecture and refutation." In actuality, scientists approach the truth not
through conjecture and refutation, but through conjecture and CONFIRMATION--
the demonstration, by means of careful experiment, that a hypothesis
corresponds to the facts of reality.
Until the phenomenon is proven TRUE there is no obligation to base your
attitude toward it on the assumption that it MIGHT be true. If there were
such an obligation, then you would be obliged to give serious consideration
to every crackpot notion that has ever been put forward.
Falsifiability can be a valuable intellectual tool: it can help you to
disprove ideas which are incorrect. But it does not enable you to prove
ideas which are correct.
* PROVING A NEGATIVE
(The Objectivist Newsletter, April 1963) "Proving the non-existence of
that for which no evidence of any kind exists. Proof, logic, reason,
thinking, knowledge pertain to and deal only with that which exists. They
cannot be applied to that which does not exist. Nothing can be relevant or
applicable to the non-existent. The non-existent is nothing. A positive
statement, based on facts that have been erroneously interpreted, can be
refuted--by means of exposing the errors in the interpretation of the facts.
Such refutation is the disproving of a positive, not the proving of a
negative.... Rational demonstration is necessary to support even the claim
that a thing is possible. It is a breach of logic to assert that that which
has not been proven to be impossible is, therefore, possible. An absence
does not constitute proof of anything. Nothing can be derived from nothing."
Doubt must always be specific, and can only exist in contrast to things
which cannot properly be doubted.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
* APPEAL TO IGNORANCE
Assertions based on what we do NOT know: "No one knows precisely what
would happen if a core was to melt down."
The compounding of arbitrarily asserted possibilities. What COULD happen
is what is possible. The burden of proof is on the skeptic to provide some
specific reason to doubt a conclusion that all available evidence supports.
It is not true that "coulds" and "maybes" and "possibles" are an
epistemological free lunch that can be asserted gratuitously. The case
against the skeptic is that doubt must always be specific, and can only
exist in contrast to things which cannot properly be doubted.
For an idea to qualify as "possible," there must be a certain amount of
evidence that actually supports it. If there is no such evidence, the idea
falls under a different concept: not "possible," but "arbitrary."
* FLAT EARTH NAVIGATION SYNDROME
Devoting a lot of time and energy to solving problems that don't exist,
such as figuring out ways to navigate on a flat earth. Generalizing from a
hypostatization. Looking for an easy way out of a dilemma that does not
exist.
Theology is a study with no answers because it has no subject matter.
* FROZEN ABSTRACTION
(The Virtue of Selfishness, chapter 10) Substituting a particular
concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs--such as using a
specific ethics (e.g., altruism) for the wider abstraction "ethics."
* FALSIFIED INDUCTIVE GENERALIZATION
Restrict a wide abstraction to a narrow set of particulars and then
conclude that an attribute of these particulars must be definitive of the
abstraction, thus negating the entire principled structure underlying the
abstraction.
A similar fallacy is that of equating opposites by substituting
nonessentials for their essential characteristics. Conservatives always do
this when they claim to be Objectivists or libertarians.
* GOVERNMENT SOLIPOTENCE
The claim that if the government is not doing something about a problem,
then nothing CAN be done about it. ONLY the government can solve society's
problems.
* GRAVITY GAME
This consists of demanding that an idea be proven over and over again
indefinitely before its validity is acceptable. (The name was conceived
while watching an infant throw her toy onto the floor over and over and over
again.) An open mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood. Nor
does it remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and
uncertainty.
* MEATPOISON * GOVERNMENT ABSOLUTIST
The National Association of Scholars proclaims, as the two foremost items
in its platform for reforming the academic community of America, its aims
to:
"enhance the quality and content of the curriculum"
"resist the ideological misuse of teaching and scholarship"
The NAS seems oblivious to the fact that these aims are merely two sides
of a coin, and that what they call "enhancing the quality and content of the
curriculum" their opponents will call "the ideological misuse of teaching
and scholarship." One man's Meat is another man's Poison.
The Government Absolutist (or Stateolatrist) is the person who makes
comparative judgments (usually of people's behavior) that are based not on
any moral or ethical principle but are made by reference to a government
(invariably his own government). The consequence is to make a spurious
distinction between two people (or groups) who in fact manifest identical
behavior.
Tom Clancy: "Terrorists don't relate to the people around them as being
real people. They see them as objects, and since they're only objects,
whatever happens to them is not important. Once I met a man who killed four
people and didn't bat an eye; but he cried like a baby when we told him his
cat died. People like that don't even understand why they get sent to
prison; they really don't understand. Those are the scary ones."
What Clancy cannot see is that any policeman or any soldier of any
country manifests exactly the same behavior that Clancy has condemned as
terrorism.
William Buckley: "The Cold War is a part of the human condition for so
long as you have two social phenomena which we can pretty safely denominate
as constants. The first is a society that accepts what it sees as the
historical mandate to dominate other societies--at least as persistently as
microbes seek out human organisms to infect. And the second phenomenon, of
course, is the coexistence of a society that is determined NOT to be
dominated or have its friends dominated."
Buckley does not realize that a Soviet analyst would make precisely the
same identification that Buckley has made, but with the roles reversed.
* MOVING GOALPOST SYNDROME
"Computers might be able to understand Chinese and think about numbers
but cannot do the crucially human things, such as...." And then follows his
favorite human specialty: falling in love, having a sense of humor, etc. But
as soon as an artificial intelligence simulation succeeds, a new "crucial"
element is selected (the goalpost is moved). Thus the perpetrators of this
fallacy will never have to admit to the existence of artificial
intelligence.
The proponents keep changing their definition, presenting you always with
a moving target that you can never get hold of. Rand referred to this as
trying to grasp a fog.
* NULL VALUE
A statement (or question) that gives (or elicits) no cognitively
meaningful information: "Are you honest?" If he's honest, he'll say 'Yes'.
But if he's a liar, he'll say 'Yes'. You learn nothing in either case.
* PERFECTIONIST
To deny yourself a benefit because it is not a PERFECT benefit. Or even
because it is not as good as you would like it to be. To stick with what you
have, no matter how bad it is, rather than switch to something that is
better--but not perfect.
I once knew a woman who refused to use any contraceptive. She was in her
mid-20s and was sexually active with her boyfriend. Her rationale for this
refusal, which she stated in a very clear and explicit manner, was that "no
contraceptive is 100% reliable, therefore none of them is acceptable to me."
(I knew her only briefly and was not present to observe the long-term
consequences of this idiocy.)
Other such rationales for rejecting change include:
Reification of the Possible, which is to regard a possible outcome as
being a foregone certainty, when making an evaluation of a cause.
Reification of the Existent, which consists of the claim that one possible
outcome of a scheme might lead to a state of affairs that already exists
under the present circumstances.
We take risks every day of the week. When buying a house, for instance,
you know you may have to spend money to repair it someday, but you don't go
live in a cave instead in order to avoid the risk. You accept the risk
because the benefits outweigh it. But the word "outweigh" implies an act of
self-responsible judgment, and what the person who uses the Perfectionist
fallacy is trying to avoid are self-responsibility, judgment, and risk.
* PRETENTIOUS
Here the speaker assumes omniscience with respect to the subject under
consideration. He assumes also that he speaks for the entire human race.
"We don't know what life is" (or insanity, intelligence, etc).
"We can't conceive of personal death."
"My contention must be true because we can think of no alternative
mechanism as a cause for this phenomenon."
Just because your eyes are shut doesn't mean the sun has been turned off.
If you believe so, then your belief system has locked you into a low level
of awareness about a situation that has been resolved everywhere except in
your own mind.
* PRETENTIOUS ANTECEDENT
Having made a brief reference to, or speculation about, a phenomenon, he
later asserts that the phenomenon has been fully explained.
Although the direct evidence he presents is extremely thin, he later
assumes that his thesis has been established with certainty.
* PROOF BY SELECTED INSTANCES
Richard Feynman: "Many years ago I awoke in the dead of night in a cold
sweat, with the certain knowledge that a close relative had suddenly died. I
was so gripped with the haunting intensity of the experience that I was
afraid to place a long-distance phone call, for fear that the relative would
trip over the telephone cord (or something) and make the experience a self-
fulfilling prophecy. In fact, the relative is alive and well, and whatever
psychological roots the experience may have, it was not a reflection of an
imminent event in the real world. After my experience I did not write a
letter to an institute of parapsychology relating a compelling predictive
dream which was not borne out by reality. That is not a memorable letter.
But had the death I dreamt actually occurred, such a letter would have been
marked down as evidence for precognition. The hits are recorded, the misses
are not. Thus human nature unconsciously conspires to produce a biased
reporting of the frequency of such events. If enough independent phenomena
are studied and correlations sought, some will of course be found. If we
know only the coincidences and not the unsuccessful trials, we might believe
that an important finding has been made. Actually, it is only what
statisticians call the fallacy of the enumeration of favorable
circumstances." (Counting the hits and ignoring the misses.)
The Confirmation Bias consists of sorting through a body of data and
selecting those that most confirm what you already believe, and ignoring or
rationalizing away those that do not.
Another example is the Texas Sharpshooter effect: a man shoots at the
side of a barn and then proceeds to draw targets around the holes. He makes
every shot into a bull's-eye. For example: if an epidemiologist were to draw
a circle around the greater Boston area, he would find an incidence of
leukemia comparable with the rest of the USA. Draw a circle around Woburn
and he'd find a worrisome elevation. Draw a circle around the Pine Street
neighborhood and he'd find an alarming cluster. Is it a real cluster? Or is
he just drawing bull's-eyes where he found bullet holes?
These people don't tell you how many possible combinations of data
arrangements they searched through in the process of arriving at their
conclusions, nor how many contorted definitions of "closeness" they used to
get their "statistically significant" results. Correlations have a
distribution just like any random variable. If you crank through enough
data, a certain number of correlations, even from purely random data sets,
will fall within the spread of a distribution where they appear significant.
Every quantitative researcher knows this. If you torture the data long
enough, it will talk.
Just go into the forest looking for any interesting leaf pattern. The
odds are pretty good that you will find one. Then come out saying that that
pattern is what you were looking for.
Prediction, or out-of-sample testing, is one very strong way to avoid
accepting a spurious conclusion resulting from data manipulation, because
coincidences in one data set are very unlikely to re-occur in a different,
independent set.
A large professional organization once surveyed its members on a variety
of topics. One of the questions on the poll was "Did you vote in the last
society election?" When the responses to this question were compared with
the actual voting records, the pollsters noted a large discrepancy--the
percentage of respondents who said they had voted was significantly larger
than the percentage of society members who actually had voted.
Of course! Those who responded to the survey were a self-selected
subgroup of the general membership: those members who are more likely to
participate in organizational affairs such as voting and polling.
"They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I
know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese."
And then there is the optimist who exclaims "I've thrown three sevens in
a row. Tonight I can't lose!"
And President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on
discovering that half of all Americans have below average intelligence.
* PROVING A NEGATIVE
(The Objectivist Newsletter, April 1963) "Proving the non-existence of
that for which no evidence of any kind exists. Proof, logic, reason,
thinking, knowledge pertain to and deal only with that which exists. They
cannot be applied to that which does not exist. Nothing can be relevant or
applicable to the non-existent. The non-existent is nothing. A positive
statement, based on facts that have been erroneously interpreted, can be
refuted--by means of exposing the errors in the interpretation of the facts.
Such refutation is the disproving of a positive, not the proving of a
negative.... Rational demonstration is necessary to support even the claim
that a thing is possible. It is a breach of logic to assert that that which
has not been proven to be impossible is, therefore, possible. An absence
does not constitute proof of anything. Nothing can be derived from nothing."
Doubt must always be specific, and can only exist in contrast to things
which cannot properly be doubted.
* RELATIVE PRIVATION
To try to make a phenomenon appear good, by comparing it with a worse
phenomenon, or to try to make a phenomenon appear bad, by comparing it with
a better phenomenon. See * GREEK MATH
Consider junkfood. A very nutritionally-conscious person has a rather low
opinion of junkfood. But what would be your attitude toward a greasy
hamburger if you hadn't eaten for three or four days? You can malign
junkfood because your nutritional standards are high enough to permit you to
do so. But an Ethiopian would like nothing better than to have access to
MacDonald's, Hardee's or Wendy's and, in fact, such access would be the best
thing that could happen to the Ethiopian. Because you have alternatives that
the Ethiopian does not have, he is in a position of relative privation when
compared to you.
In just the same way, the people who labored in sweatshops at the turn of
the century were in a state of relative privation when compared to you.
Because your alternatives are different (and much better), the sweatshop
seems to you to be an abomination, but in fact the sweatshop was immensly
preferable to the alternatives available at that time.
"Eat your carrots! Just think of all the starving children in China."
"I used to lament having no shoes--until I met a man who had no feet."
The real danger from this last example of the fallacy is that if people
believe that their own situation really is ameliorated by such a comparison,
they will naturally conclude that their own situation can, in practice,
actually BE ameliorated by MAKING somebody else worse off! This is what
underlies the behavior known as "beggar thy neighbor."
"I know of no assumption that has been more widely and totally disproved
by actual experience than the assumption that if a few people could be
prevented from living well, everyone else would live better."
"Misery loves company."
The counter to the relative privation argument when applied, for example,
to compare America with other more tyrannous countries is to note that the
proper comparison to make should not be between America and other tyrannies
but between America and the ideal of freedom.
* RETROGRESSIVE CAUSATION
An interview with a young woman who had seven children--all of them
"crack babies":
Interviewer: "Didn't you ever think about the effect your drug use was
having on your children?"
Woman: "Yeah, that thought entered my mind now and then. Whenever it did,
I got high so that I wouldn't have to think about it."
The cause (drug use) has an effect (remorse). She invokes the cause in
order to eliminate the effect. Thus the effect acts retrogressively to
induce further implementation of the cause.
* SELF EXCLUSION
This is a form of the Stolen Concept fallacy. It denies itself. "Nothing
makes any difference." (including this statement?) "Music is the only
genuine form of communication." (but this statement, meant to be a
communication, is not music) "True knowledge is impossible to man." (but
this statement is meant to be knowledge) "There are no absolutes." (except
this one, of course) "Words have no validity." "One should not make
judgments." (but this statement is itself a judgment.)
"There are questions whose truth or untruth cannot be decided by men; all
the supreme questions, all the supreme problems of value are beyond human
comprehension." .... Nietzsche
David Kelley: "To assert 'what is known depends on the knowledge of it'
is to offer that very thesis as something known, and therefore as a
statement that subsumes itself. But this is manifestly not what the
proponent of the thesis intends. That facts depend on our belief in them, he
implies, is objectively true, a fact of reality about consciousness and its
objects, made true by the nature of things, not by his believing it.
Otherwise he would have to allow that objectivity is a fact for the
objectivist. He would have to allow that the primacy of consciousness is
both true, because he believes it, and false, because the objectivist denies
it. [The Marxist multi-logic dialectic does indeed assert this very notion.]
To avoid this, he must assert that the objectivist is wrong, which means
asserting the primacy of consciousness as a fact he himself did not create.
He thereby contradicts his own thesis. It is an inner or performative
contradiction, like that of the person who denies the axiom of action--the
denial itself being an action."
If I say, "Anything is possible" I must admit the possibility that the
statement I have just made is false.
Anything is possible, right?
No. It's not possible for you to be wrong when you claim that anything is
possible.
* UNINTENDED SELF-INCLUSION
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand
Russell.
Why didn't he put "I think" at the end of it? By omitting the "doubt-
qualifier" Russell is unintentionally describing his own attitude.
* SHINGLE SPEECH
Agglomerating several different superficial aspects of a subject, in
hopes that the resulting verbal structure will be comprehensible. The
aspects presented may be important, but they are treated topically, not
hierarchically--as talking points, not building blocks in a structured
argument. There is no sense of fundamentality, no sense of which concepts
are primary and which derivative, no sense of which ones explain, justify,
or depend upon which. And there may not even be any interconnection among
them.
* STOLEN CONCEPT
(The Objectivist Newsletter, Jan 1963) Using a concept while ignoring,
contradicting or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically
and genetically depends. "All property is theft." "The axioms of logic are
arbitrary." (something is arbitrary only in distinction to that which is
logically necessary.) "All that exists is change and motion." (change is
possible only to an existent entity) "You cannot prove that you exist."
(proof presupposes existence) "Acceptance of reason is an act of faith."
(faith has meaning only in contradistinction to reason)
"All men are abnormal." "Everybody is schizophrenic."
"What is reality?" In this question the word "is" is a stolen concept.
The reason stolen concepts are so widespread is that most people (and
most philosophers) have no idea of the roots of a concept. They treat every
concept as a primary, i.e., as a first-level abstraction; thus they tear the
concept from any place in a hierarchy and thereby detach it from reality.
Thereafter, its use is governed by caprice or unthinking habit, with no
objective guidelines for the mind to follow. The result is confusion,
contradiction, and the conversion of language into mere verbiage.
* SUPRESSION OF THE AGENT
"During the economic crisis, millions of people were thrown out of work."
Who threw them out? The first answer to this would probably be, "their
employers." The statement certainly invites the readers to infer this. But
in fact, government, which destroyed the unfortunate workers' industries by
means of taxation and regulation, is the causal agent that the passive
construction of the statement suppresses or banishes from the mind.
Dehumanization of the Action: "During the first two years of Garcia's
administration, the economy grew rapidly." This sentence establishes a
strong, though implicit, causal connection between Garcia's interventionist
programs and good economic news. "But inflation escaped the government's
control and the economy soon began to contract." Economic developments are
now pictured as things with their own, non-human, principles of action. They
are not caused by anything that humans like Garcia do, but proceed on their
own way.
* THOMPSON INVISIBILITY SYNDROME
(Atlas Shrugged Part3 Chap8 pg1076) Someone so far removed from your
frame of reference that he is psychologically invisible.
* UNKNOWABLES
(The Objectivist Newsletter, Jan 1963) "That which, by its nature, cannot
be known. To claim it unknowable, one must first know not only that it
exists but have enough knowledge of it to justify the assertion. The
assertion and the justification are then in contradiction. To make the
assertion without justification is an irrationalism."
Branden's argument implies that the unknowable must be a particular,
specifiable entity. I maintain that it can be merely an aspect of existence
that consciousness cannot perceive.
To assert that all things CAN be known is to imply that existence is
subsumed by consciousness.
I claim that there are unknowables. Not any particular, specifiable
unknowable items (for that would indeed be the contradiction Branden noted
above), but merely aspects of reality that are unperceiveable. For example:
you cannot simultaneously perceive both sides of your cat. My justification
for this assertion is the primacy of existence over consciousness.
Thus Quantum Indeterminacy is a genuine phenomenon. It is the closest we
can come to specifying an aspect of reality that is truly unknowable: the
simultaneous perception of position and momentum.
* VARIANT IMAGIZATION
Generating dissimilar images from similar concepts. Certain kinds of
crops, such as corn, are "harvested", but other kinds, such as trees, are
"slashed" or "devastated". Who would forbid farmers to "harvest" a crop of
beets? But who would willingly allow men armed with chainsaws to "devastate"
the ecology?
* VERBAL OBLITERATION
"When did I say that?" There is a kind of denial of the past involved
here. Unless you can specify the exact moment I made a certain statement,
then I insist that I never made that statement. For a clever (and
bewildering) retort reply: "About 20 minutes past 2 on Thursday afternoon."
The alteration of history by personal decree is done by the sort of
person who tries to rewrite history in your mind, just as he rewrites it in
his own mind as time goes on.
* WOULDCHUCK
If you take the old tongue-twister: "How much wood could a woodchuck
chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" and make a slight homonymous
substitution: "How much would could a wouldchuck chuck if a wouldchuck could
chuck would?" you arrive at a label for a certain kind of dissertation made
by people who are trying to "prove" an idea for which they have no factual
corroboration, or who are simply trying to obliterate the distinction
between the actual and the potential.
This is a description of much of scientific belief before the time of
Galileo. For instance, it was believed that if you dropped a 5-pound rock
and a 10-pound rock simultaneously, the 10-pounder WOULD hit the ground
first because, being heavier, it WOULD therefore be pulled down harder and
WOULD therefore travel faster. Notice the use of the word "would" in those
statements. This expression of conditional probability is chucked around as
though it were an assertion of factual reality. Implicit to such statements
is the assumption that what seems plausible is therefore true and requires
no further proof.
I became acutely aware of this "WouldChuck" phenomenon while reading the
Tannehills' book, "The Market For Liberty." The entirety of Part2, which
sets forth in detail their view of a free-market society, consists of the
WouldChuck argument. Here is a typical example:
"This insurance would be sold to the contracting parties at the time the
contract was ratified. Before an insurance company would indemnify its
insured for loss in a case of broken contract, the matter would have to be
submitted to arbitration as provided in the contract. For this reason there
would be a close link between the business of contract insurance and the
business of arbitration."
Sounds plausible, doesn't it? Yes... BUT, no proof of these conjectures
is offered. They are nothing more than unsubstantiated hypostatizations.
They always say: "This is what would happen if...."
They never say: "This is what does happen when...."
The former is based on surmise, the latter is based on fact.
The proponent of a scheme, through the use of the WouldChuck fallacy, can
articulate a comprehensive framework within which the implementation of his
scheme seems undeniably plausible. But if the framework itself has no other
foundation than this WouldChuck supposition, the whole scheme rests on a
very shaky basis. He has a plausible argument for everything, but no
detailed answers to anything. This type of presentation can often turn an
un-informed audience into a misinformed one.
Michael Gazzaniga, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at
Dartmouth, while working with split-brain people (whose corpus callosum had
been severed), identified what he calls "the interpreter mechanism," a
cognitive structure in the left hemisphere of the human brain that
automatically generates explanations for the events you experience and a
supportive context for your memories of them. This structure continually
seeks the meaning of events, insisting on finding some cause and effect
explanation, even when there is none. And it always comes up with a theory,
no matter how bizarre.
Unless you possess and use the intellectual tools by means of which to
evaluate, control and modify the output of this structure, you will be stuck
with explanations that are frequently outlandish and false memories that
have nothing to do with the facts of history.
You must use your rational faculty to make a firm distinction between
your conjectures and your knowledge of facts. Between what you THINK is true
and what you KNOW is true. If you don't, you are simply allowing your
interpreter mechanism to tell yourself lies.
* APPEAL TO IGNORANCE
Assertions based on what we do NOT know: "No one knows precisely what
would happen if a core was to melt down." And the compounding of arbitrarily
asserted possibilities.
What COULD happen is what is possible. The burden of proof is on the
skeptic to provide some specific reason to doubt a conclusion that all
available evidence supports. It is not true that "coulds" and "maybes" are
an epistemological free lunch that can be asserted gratuitously. The case
against the skeptic is that doubt must always be specific, and can only
exist in contrast to things which cannot properly be doubted.
* SILENCE IMPLIES CONSENT
Consent to what? Just what is it I consent to when I do NOT vote? To the
policies of Bush? To the policies of Clinton? To the policies of Marrou? To
the policies of all those whose principled disagreement with the electoral
system precludes their participation in it?
The process of implication contains a causal relationship. For one thing
to imply another thing, there must be a causal sequence between the two
things. People who make the assertion "silence implies consent" never
propose any chain of logical connection between the silence and the consent.
Precisely how does consent arise from silence? How can dead men be said to
consent to anything?
If my silence does imply consent, then how far does that implication
reach? If I am silent about one side of an argument, and also silent about
the other, and contradictory, side of the argument, then what implication
can be drawn concerning my consent to either side? Am I considered to
consent to all things about which I am silent? Even those about which I am
completely ignorant? To the fact that someone in Calcutta beats his wife? If
I must express disapproval of all things to which I do NOT consent, for fear
of reproach resulting from my silence about any of them, there would not be
sufficient hours in the day for such a plethora of expressions as would be
required for me to preserve my honesty and impartiality.
From your silence, he infers your consent. But the logical error of his
inference is not your responsibility. His attempt to make it so is usually
just the attempt of a tyrant to blame his victim for the tyrant's own
intellectual inadequacy.
* DETERMINISM
(The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1963) - "The doctrine of determinism
contains a central and insuperable contradiction--an EPISTEMOLOGICAL
contradiction--a contradiction implicit in any variety of dererminism,
whether the alleged determining forces be physical, psychological,
environmental or divine. In fact, Man is neither omniscient nor infallible.
This means: (a) that he must work to ACHIEVE his knowledge, and (b) that the
mere presence of an idea inside his mind does not prove that the idea is
true; many ideas may enter a man's mind which are false. But if man believes
what he HAS to believe, if he is not free to test his beliefs against
reality and to validate or reject them--if the actions and content of his
mind are determined by factors that may or may not have anything to do with
reason, logic and reality--then he can never know if his conclusions are
true or false....But if this were true, no knowledge--no CONCEPTUAL
knowledge--would be possible to man. No theory could claim greater
plausibility than any other--including the theory of psychological
determinism."
Most theories of what is biologically inherited vs. what is socially
learned never take into account the third alternative: that which is
volitionally chosen.
One of the catches to determinism is that you cannot argue with it. To
argue is to make an attempt to induce someone to alter the actions or
content of his mind. The determinist enters the argument with the claim that
such alteration is impossible--that he has no power to volitionally change
his state of consciousness. He says, and means literally, "My mind is made
up--don't confuse me with the facts!" But at the same time, the determinist
always counts on the free will he argues against, because he hopes to
persuade YOU that HE is right; and to be persuaded is to choose freely
between two or more competing options.
The fundamental question of free will does not involve Man's physical
behavior but his psychological behavior. It concerns Man's ability to
control the functioning of his own mind.
The argument is frequently heard that hormones control behavior. This is
not quite true. Although hormones do have a controlling effect on much
animal behavior, we humans have an organ whose size and functional
significance enables us to override the influence of hormones on our
behavior: the cerebral cortex. Indeed, it is the size and significance of
this organ that primarily differentiates us from our fellow animals. In
human beings, hormones don't exactly control behavior, what they do is
provide motivation for the behavior. It is my mind that chooses whether or
not I will act according to that motivation.
Under justice, individuals are held to be responsible agents for the acts
that they commit, and they are held responsible for the consequences of
those actions. Under all the forms of determinism you can't have justice,
because individuals are not held to be causal agents. Instead, they are
regarded as billiard balls, as entities who are merely acted upon, and
therefore helpless in doing the things they do.
On the Determinist premise, men are not merely unfit for freedom, they
are metaphysically incapable of it since they do not have fundamental
control over the choices made in their minds. Political issues become
matters of pure pragmatism: there is no right or wrong, but only effective
or ineffective techniques of social manipulation.
The idea of determinism does not apply to computers either: What if one
could devise an algorithm that could examine any Turing machine and find out
whether it would eventually halt? Turing himself proved that to be
impossible: the program for solving the halting problem would itself not
halt.
* JOURNALISTIC/POLITICAL FALLACIES
Weasel words - calling wars something else, such as "police actions" or
"pacification." Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of distortions
of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, "An important art of
politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have
become odious to the public." (Or have been shown to be failures.)
Some subtle methods of media distortion: the use of emotionally loaded
images. The limitation of debate to "responsible" options. The framing of
dissident viewpoints in ways that trivialize them. The personification of
complex realities (Saddam = Iraq). The objectification of persons
("collateral damage"). The isolation of events from their historical
context. (By taking a person's statements out of their historical context
and judging them by present-day standards, the journalist or politician
effectively hides the real author under a mask of caricature.)
Remember that journalists and politicians must look for strong, quick
impact, so they avoid the thoughtfully analytical and the cerebral, which
take too much time and mental effort.
* SELECTIVE SAMPLING
"The death rate among American soldiers in Vietnam was lower than among
the general population." But the soldiers in Vietnam were young and healthy.
They are being compared with a data base including non-young and non-healthy
people.
* IGNORING PROPORTIONALITY
"You are safer walking down a dark alley than sitting in your living room
with friends, because most murders are committed in the victim's home by his
acquaintances." This ignores the fact that most people spend much more of
their time at home than walking down alleys.
Some journalists bias their reports by expressing outcomes in terms of
relative changes rather than of absolute numbers. Thus, reporters of one
experiment claimed a 19 percent reduction in coronary deaths among men
treated with drug Alfa when in absolute numbers there was only a 1.7 percent
difference between the two groups: from 9.8 percent of the untreated group
(187 of 1900) to 8.1 percent of the treated group (l15 of 1906). Similarly,
reporters of another trial which used the drug Beta, described an absolute
difference of 1.4 percent as a 34 percent relative reduction.
* MISPLACED PRECISION
The museum guide says the dinosaur skeleton is 90,000,006 years old--
because when he was hired six years ago he was told that it was 90 million
years old.
The time for the Olympic 30-kilometer relay race, which takes almost an
hour and a half to run, is measured to one one-hundredth of a second.
* IGNORED INTENTION
To ignore the intent of an activity and criticize it for not meeting
expectations which it was never intended to meet.
This is a surprisingly frequent rebuke. They criticize a work because it
does not address a subject which it was not intended to address. Some people
seem to think that an essay focused on one topic is somehow flawed if it
does not encompass other related fields. Rather like criticising Feynman
because his QED does not contain instructions for building a cyclotron.
"I find it curious that your essay on ethics ignored the concept of self-
defense entirely."
A Swedish medical study was criticized because it did not select patients
randomly. But it did not intend to do so--it deliberately chose old men who
had prostate cancer, and the conclusions drawn from the study were not meant
to be applied to other categories of people.
A geographical study of salmon in British Columbia showed that sea lice
are 73 times more prevalent on salmon near a fish farm than in distant
waters. But the study was criticized for not addressing whether the sea lice
significantly harm the salmon, something the study had no intent to do.
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