|
LOGIC ARGUMENTS
________________________________________________________________________ |
|
SKEPTICISM AND THINKING "STRAIGHT"
_________________________________________________________________________
The
Burden of Skepticism
What is Skepticism? It's nothing very esoteric. We encounter it every day. When we buy a used car, if we are the least bit wise we will exert some residual skeptical powers -- whatever our education has left to us. You could say, "Here's an honest-looking fellow. I'll just take whatever he offers me." Or you might say, "Well, I've heard that occasionally there are small deceptions involved in the sale of a used car, perhaps inadvertent on the part of the salesperson," and then you do something. You kick the tires, you open the doors, you look under the hood. (You might go through the motions even if you don't know what is supposed to be under the hood, or you might bring a mechanically inclined friend.) You know that some skepticism is required, and you understand why. It's upsetting that you might have to disagree with the used-car salesman or ask him questions that he is reluctant to answer. There is at least a small degree of interpersonal confrontation involved in the purchase of a used car and nobody claims it is especially pleasant. But there is a good reason for it -- because if you don't exercise some minimal skepticism, if you have an absolutely untrammeled credulity, there is probably some price you will have to pay later. Then you'll wish you had made a small investment of skepticism early. Now this is not something that you have to go through four years of graduate school to understand. Everybody understands this. The trouble is, a used car is one thing but television commercials or pronouncements by presidents and party leaders another. We are skeptical in some areas but unfortunately not in others. For example, there is a class of aspirin commercials that reveals the competing product to have only so much of the painkilling ingredient that doctors recommend most -- they don't tell you what the mysterious ingredient is -- whereas their product has a dramatically larger amount (1.2 to 2 times more per tablet). Therefore you should buy their product. But why not just take two of the competing tablets? You're not supposed to ask. Don't apply skepticism to this issue. Don't think. Buy. Such claims in commercial advertisements constitute small deceptions. They part us from a little money, or induce us to buy a slightly inferior product. It's not so terrible. But consider this: I have here the program of this year's Whole Life Expo in San Francisco. Twenty thousand people attended last year's program. Here are some of the presentations: "Alternative Treatments for AIDS Patients: it will rebuild one's natural defenses and prevent immune system breakdowns -- learn about the latest developments that the media has thus far ignored." It seems to me that presentation could do real harm. "How Trapped Blood Proteins Produce Pain and Suffering." "Crystals, Are They Talismans or Stones?" (I have an opinion myself) It says, "As a crystal focuses sound and light waves for radio and television" crystal sets are rather a long time ago -- "so may it amplify spiritual vibrations for the attuned human." I'll bet very few of you are attuned. Or here's one: "Return of the Goddess, a Presentational Ritual." Another: "Synchronicity, the Recognition Experience." That one is given by "Brother Charles. Or, on the next page, "You, Saint-Germain, and Healing Through the Violet Flame." It goes on and on, with lots of ads about "opportunities" -- ranging from the dubious to the spurious -- that are available at the Whole Life Expo. If you were to drop down on Earth at any time during the tenure of humans you would find a set of popular, more or less similar, belief systems. They change, often very quickly, often on time scales of a few years: But sometimes belief systems of this sort last for many thousands of years. At least a few are always available. I think it's fair to ask why. We are Homo sapiens. That's the distinguishing characteristic about us, that sapiens part. We're supposed to be smart. So why is this stuff always with us? Well, for one thing, a great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society. There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community. There may be more such failings in our society than in many others in human history. And so it is reasonable for people to poke around and try on for size various belief systems, to see if they help. For example, take a fashionable fad, channeling. It has for its fundamental premise, as does spiritualism, that when we die we don't exactly disappear, that some part of us continues. That part, we are told, can reenter the bodies of human and other beings in the future, and so death loses much of its sting for us personally. What is more, we have an opportunity, if the channeling contentions are true, to make contact with loved ones who have died. Speaking personally, I would be delighted if reincarnation were real. I lost my parents, both of them, in the past few years, and I would love to have a little conversation with them, to tell them what the kids are doing, make sure everything is all right wherever it is they are. That touches something very deep. But at the same time, precisely for that reason, I know that there are people who will try to take advantage of the vulnerabilities of the bereaved. The spiritualists and the channelers better have a compelling case. Or take the idea that by thinking hard at geological formations you can tell where mineral or petroleum deposits are. Uri Geller makes this claim. Now if you are an executive of a mineral exploration or petroleum company, your bread and butter depend on finding the minerals or the oil: so spending trivial amounts of money, compared with what you usually spend on geological exploration, this time to find deposits psychically, sounds not so bad. You might be tempted. Or take UFOS, the contention that beings in spaceships from other worlds are visiting us all the time. I find that a thrilling idea. It's at least a break from the ordinary. I've spent a fair amount of time in my scientific life working on the issue of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Think how much effort I could save if those guys are coming here. But when we recognize some emotional vulnerability regarding a claim, that is exactly where we have to make the firmest efforts at skeptical scrutiny. That is where we can be had. Now, let's reconsider channeling. There is a woman in the State of Washington who claims to make contact with a 35,000-year-old somebody, "Ramtha" -- she, by the way, speaks English very well with what sounds to me to be an Indian accent. Suppose we had Ramtha here and just suppose Ramtha is cooperative. We could ask some questions: How do we know that Ramtha lived 35,000 years ago? Who is keeping track of the intervening millennia? How does it come to be exactly 35,000 years? That's a very round number. Thirty-five thousand plus or minus what? What were things like 35,000 years ago? What was the climate? Where on Earth did Ramtha live? (I know he speaks English with an Indian accent, but where was that?) What does Ramtha eat? (Archaeologists know something about what people ate back then.) We would have a real opportunity to find out if his claims are true. If this were really somebody from 35,000 years ago, you could learn a lot about 35,000 years ago. So, one way or another, either Ramtha really is 35,000 years old, in which case we discover something about that period -- that's before the Wisconsin Ice Age, an interesting time -- or he's a phony and he'll slip up. What are the indigenous languages, what is the social structure, who else does Ramtha live with -- children, grandchildren -- what's the life cycle, the infant mortality, what clothes does he wear, what's his life expectancy, what are the weapons, plants, and animals? Tell us. Instead, what we hear are the most banal homilies, indistinguishable from those that alleged UFO occupants tell the poor humans who claim to have been abducted by them. Occasionally, by the way, I get a letter from someone who is in "contact" with an extraterrestrial who invites me to "ask anything." And so I have a list of questions. The extraterrestrial are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, "Please give a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem." Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last Theorem, so I write out the little equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like "Should we humans be good?" I always get an answer. I think something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions. Anything vague they are extremely happy to respond to, but anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything, there is only silence. The French scientist Henri Poincar6 remarked on why credulity is rampant: "We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling." That's what I have tried to say with my examples. But I don't think that's the only reason credulity is rampant. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, let's say high school students, the habit of being skeptical, perhaps they will not restrict their skepticism to aspirin commercials and 35,000-year-old channelers (or channelees). Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Then where will we be? Skepticism is dangerous. That's exactly its function, in my view. It is the business of skepticism to be dangerous. And that's why there is a great reluctance to teach it in the schools. That's why you don't find a general fluency in skepticism in the media. On the other hand, how will we negotiate a very perilous future if we don't have the elementary intellectual tools to ask searching questions of those nominally in charge, especially in a democracy? I think this is a useful moment to reflect on the sort of national trouble that could have been avoided were skepticism more generally available in American society. The Iran/Nicaragua fiasco is so obvious an example I will not take advantage of our poor, beleaguered president [Reagan] by spelling it out. The Administration's resistance to a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and its continuing passion for blowing up nuclear weapons -- one of the major drivers of the nuclear arms race -- under the pretense of making us "safe" is another such issue. So is Star Wars. The habits of skeptical thought CSICOP encourages have relevance for matters of the greatest importance to the nation. There is enough nonsense promulgated by both political parties that the habit of evenhanded skepticism should be declared a national goal, essential for our survival. I want to say a little more about the burden of skepticism. You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as dearly as you do. This is a potential social danger present in an organization like CSICOR. We have to guard carefully against it. It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you're in deep trouble. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all. Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science. Really good scientists do both. On their own, talking to themselves, they churn up huge numbers of new ideas and criticize them ruthlessly. Most of the ideas never make it to the outside world. Only the ideas that pass through rigorous self-filtration make it out and are criticized by the rest of the scientific community. It sometimes happens that ideas that are accepted by everybody turn out to be wrong, or at least partially wrong, or at least superseded by ideas of greater generality. And, while there are of course some personal losses -- emotional bonds to the idea that you yourself played a role inventing -- nevertheless the collective ethic is that every time such an idea is overthrown and replaced by something better the enterprise of science has benefited. In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. 1 cannot recall the last time something like that has happened in politics or religion. It's very rare that a senator, say, replies, "That's a good argument. I will now change by political affiliation." I would like to say a few things about the stimulating sessions on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and on animal language at our CSICOP conference. In the history of science there is an instructive procession for major intellectual battles that turn out, all of them, to be about how central human beings are. We could call them battles about the anti-Copernican conceit. Here are some of the issues: We are the center of the Universe. All the planets and the stars and the Sun and the Moon go around us. (Boy, must we be something really special.) That was the prevailing belief -- Aristarchus aside -- until the time of Copernicus. A lot of people liked it because it gave them a personally unwarranted central position in the Universe. The mere fact that you were on Earth made you privileged. That felt good. Then along came the evidence that Earth was just a planet and that those other bright moving points of light were planets too. Disappointing. Even depressing. Better when we were central and unique.
There are other important examples -- privileged reference frames in physics and the unconscious mind in psychology -- that I'll pass over. I maintain that in the tradition of this long set of debates -- very one of which was won by the Copernicans, by the guys who say there is not much special about us -- there was a deep emotional undercurrent in the debates in both CSICOP sessions I mentioned. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the analysis of possible animal "language" strike at one of the last remaining pre-Copernican belief systems:
Now, let's take a closer look at the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence. How is this different from pseudoscience? Let me give a couple of real cases. In the early sixties, the Soviets held a press conference in Moscow in which they announced that a distant radio source, called CTA-102, was varying sinusoidally, like a sine wave, with a period of about 100 days. Why did they call a press conference to announce that a distant radio source was varying? Because they thought it was an extraterrestrial civilization of immense powers. That is worth calling a press conference for. This was before even the word "quasar" existed. Today we know that CTA-102 is a quasar. We don't know very well what quasars are: and there is more than one mutually exclusive explanation for them in the scientific literature. Nevertheless, few seriously consider that a quasar, like CTA-102, is some galaxygirdling extraterrestrial civilization, because there are a number of alternative explanations of their properties that are more or less consistent with the physical laws we know without invoking alien life. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is a hypothesis of last resort. Only if everything else fails do you reach for it. Second example: British scientists in 1967 found a nearby bright radio source that is fluctuating on a much shorter time scale, with a period constant to ten significant figures. What was it? Their first thought was that it was something like a message being sent to us, or an interstellar navigational beacon for spacecraft that fly the spaces between the stars. They even gave it, among themselves at Cambridge University, the wry designation LGM-1-Little Green Men, LGM. However (they were wiser than the Soviets), they did not call a press conference, and it soon became clear that what we had here was what is now called a "pulsar." In fact it was the first pulsar, the Crab Nebula pulsar. Well, what's a pulsar? A pulsar is a star shrunk to the size of a city, held up as no other stars are, not by gas pressure, not by electron degeneracy, but by nuclear forces. It is in a certain sense an atomic nucleus the size of Pasadena. Now that, I maintain, is an idea at least as bizarre as an interstellar navigational beacon. The answer to what a pulsar is has to be something mighty strange. It isn't an extraterrestrial civilization, it's something else: but a something else that opens our eyes and our minds and indicates possibilities in nature that we had never guessed at. Then there is the question of false positives. Frank Drake in his original Ozma experiment, Paul Horowitz in the META (Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay) program sponsored by the Planetary Society, the Ohio University group and many other groups have all had anomalous signals that make the heart palpitate. They think for a moment that they have picked up a genuine signal. In some cases we have not the foggiest idea what it was; the signals did not repeat. The next night you turn the same telescope to the same spot in the sky with the same modulation and the same frequency and band pass everything else the same, and you don't hear a thing. You don't publish that data. It may be a malfunction in the detection system. It may be a military AWACS plane flying by and broadcasting on frequency channels that are supposed to be reserved for radio astronomy. It may be a diathermy machine down the street. There are many possibilities. You don't immediately declare that you have found extraterrestrial intelligence because you find an anomalous signal. And if it were repeated, would you then announce? You would not. Maybe it's a hoax. Maybe it is something you haven't been smart enough to figure out that is happening to your system. Instead, you would then call scientists at a bunch of other radio telescopes and say that at this particular spot in the sky, at this frequency and bandpass and modulation and all the rest, you seem to be getting something funny. Could they please look at it and see if they got something similar? And only if several independent observers get the same kind of information from the same spot in the sky do you think you have something. Even then you don't know that the something is extraterrestrial intelligence, but at least you could determine that it's not something on Earth. (And that it's also not something in Earth orbit; it's further away than that.) That's the first sequence of events that would be required to be sure that you actually had a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Now notice that there is a certain discipline involved. Skepticism imposes a burden. You can't just go off shouting "little green men," because you are going to look mighty silly, as the Soviets did with CTA-102, when it turns out to be something quite different. A special caution is necessary when the stakes are as high as here. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It's okay not to be sure. I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of places out there, and use the word billions, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you really think?" I say, "I just told you what I really think." "Yeah, but what's your gut feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. After my article "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" came out in Parade (Feb. 1, 1987), he got, as you might imagine, a lot of letters. Sixty-five million people read Parade. In the article I gave a long list of things that I said were "demonstrated or presumptive baloney' -- thirty or forty items. Advocates of all those positions were uniformly offended, so I got lots of letters. I also gave a set of very elementary prescriptions about how to think about baloney -- arguments from authority don't work, every step in the chain of evidence has to be valid, and so on. Lots of people wrote back, saying, "You're absolutely right on the generalities; unfortunately that doesn't apply to my particular doctrine." For example, one letter writer said the idea that intelligent life exists outside the earth is an excellent example of baloney. He concluded, "I am as sure of this as of anything in my experience. There is no conscious life anywhere else in the Universe. Mankind thus returns to its rightful position as center of the Universe." Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven't ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged. I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience. If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future. I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. __________________________________________________________________________ |
|
How
to Sell a Pseudoscience
Every time I read the reports of new pseudosciences in the Skeptical Inquirer or watch the latest "In Search Of"-style television show I have one cognitive response, "Holy cow, how can anyone believe that?" Some recent examples include: "Holy cow, why do people spend $3.95 a minute to talk on the telephone with a 'psychic' who has never foretold the future?" "Holy cow, why do people believe that an all-uncooked vegan diet is natural and therefore nutritious?" "Holy cow, why would two state troopers chase the planet Venus across state lines thinking it was an alien spacecraft?" "Holy cow, why do people spend millions of dollars each year on subliminal tapes that just don't work?" There are, of course, many different answers to these "holy cow" questions. Conjurers can duplicate pseudoscientific feats and thus show us how sleights of hand and misdirections can mislead. Sociologists can point to social conditions that increase the prevalence of pseudoscientific beliefs. Natural scientists can describe the physical properties of objects to show that what may appear to be supernatural is natural. Cognitive psychologists have identified common mental biases that often lead us to misinterpret social reality and to conclude in favor of supernatural phenomena. These perspectives are useful in addressing the "holy cow" question; all give us a piece of the puzzle in unraveling this mystery. I will describe how a social psychologist answers the holy cow question. Social psychology is the study of social influence__how human beings and their institutions influence and affect each other. For the past seven decades, social psychologists have been developing theories of social influence and have been testing the effectiveness of various persuasion tactics in their. It is my thesis that many persuasion tactics discovered by social psychologists are used every day, perhaps not totally consciously, by the promoters of pseudoscience. To see how these tactics can be used to sell flimflam, let's pretend for a moment that we wish to have our very own pseudoscience. Here are nine common propaganda tactics that should result in success. 1. Create a Phantom The first thing we need to do is to create a phantom __ an unavailable goal that looks real and possible; it looks as if it might be obtained with just the right effort, just the right belief, or just the right amount of money, but in reality it can't be obtained. Most pseudosciences are based on belief in a distant or phantom goal. Some examples of pseudoscience phantoms: meeting a space alien, contacting a dead relative at a seance, receiving the wisdom of the universe from a channeled dolphin, and improving one's bowling game or overcoming the trauma of rape with a subliminal tape. Phantoms can serve as effective propaganda devices. If I don't have a desired phantom, I feel deprived and somehow less of a person. A pseudoscientist can take advantage of these feelings of inferiority by appearing to offer a means to obtain that goal. In a rush to enhance self-esteem, we suspend better judgment and readily accept the offering of the pseudoscience. The trick, of course, is to get the new seeker to believe that the phantom is possible. Often the mere mention of the delights of a phantom will be enough to dazzle the new pseudoscience recruit. After all, who wouldn't want a better sex life, better health, and peace of mind, all from a $14.95 subliminal tape? The fear of loss of a phantom also can motivate us to accept it as real. The thought that I will never speak again to a cherished but dead loved one or that next month I may die of cancer can be so painful as to cause me to suspend my better judgment and hold out hope against hope that the medium can contact the dead or that Laetrile works. But at times the sell is harder, and that calls for our next set of persuasion tactics. 2. Set a Rationalization Trap The rationalization trap is based on the premise: Get the person committed to the cause as soon as possible. Once a commitment is made, the nature of thought changes. The committed heart is not so much interested in a careful evaluation of the merits of a course of action but in proving that he or she is right. To see how commitment to a pseudoscience can be established, let's look at a bizarre case__mass suicides at the direction of cult leader Jim Jones. This is the ultimate "holy cow" question: "Why kill yourself and your children on another's command?" From outside the cult I it appears strange, but from the inside it seems natural. Jones began by having his followers make easy commitments (a gift to the church, attending Wednesday night service) and then increased the level of commitment __ more tithes, more time in service, loyalty oaths, public admission of sins and punishment, selling of homes, forced sex, moving to Guyana, and then the suicide. Each step was really a small one. Outsiders saw the strange end product; insiders experienced an ever increasing spiral of escalating commitment. This is a dramatic example, but not all belief in pseudoscience is so extreme. For example, there are those who occasionally consult a psychic or listen to a subliminal tape. In such cases, commitment can be secured by what social psychologists call the foot-in-the-door technique. It works this way: You start with a small request, such as accepting a free chiropractic spine exam, taking a sample of vitamins, or completing a free personality inventory. Then a larger request follows __ a $1,000 chiropractic realignment, a vitamin regime, or an expensive seminar series. The first small request sets the commitment: Why did you get that bone exam, take those vitamins, or complete that test if you weren't interested and didn't think there might be something to it? An all too common response, "Well gosh, I guess I am interested." The rationalization trap is sprung. Now that we have secured the target's commitment to a phantom goal, we need some social support for the newfound pseudoscientific beliefs. The next tactics are designed to bolster those beliefs. 3. Manufacture Source Credibility and Sincerity Our third tactic is to manufacture source credibility and sincerity. In other words, create a guru, leader, mystic, lord, or other generally likable and powerful authority, one who people would be just plain nuts if they didn't believe. For example, practitioners of alternative medicine often have "degrees" as chiropractors or in homeopathy. Subliminal tape sellers claim specialized knowledge and training in such arts as hypnosis. Advocates of UFO sightings often become directors of "research centers." "Psychic detectives" come with long resumes of police service. Prophets claim past successes. For example, most of us "know" that Jeane Dixon predicted the assassination of President Kennedy but probably don't know that she also predicted a Nixon win in 1960. As modern public relations has shown us, credibility is easier to manufacture than we might normally think. Source credibility is an effective propaganda device for at least two reasons. First, we often process persuasive messages in a half-mindless state __ either because we are not motivated to think, don't have the time to consider, or lack the abilities to understand the issues. In such cases, the presence of a credible source can lead one to quickly infer that the message has merit and should be accepted. Second, source credibility can stop questioning (Kramer and Alstad 1993). After all, what gives you the right to question a guru, a prophet, the image of the Mother Mary, or a sincere seeker of life's hidden potentials? I'll clarify this point with an example. Suppose I told you that the following statement is a prediction of the development of the atomic bomb and the fighter aircraft: They will think they have seen the Sun at night You probably would respond: "Huh? I don't see how you get the atomic bomb from that. This could just as well be a prediction of an in-flight showing of the Dr. Doolittle movie or the advent of night baseball at Wrigley field." However, attribute the statement to Nostradamus and the dynamics change. Nostradamus was a man who supposedly cured plague victims, predicted who would be pope, foretold the future of kings and queens, and even found a poor dog lost by the king's page. Such a great seer and prophet can't be wrong. The implied message: The problem is with you; instead of questioning, why don't you suspend your faulty, linear mind until you gain the needed insight?
4. Establish a Granfalloon Where would a leader be without something to lead? Our next tactic supplies the answer: Establish what Kurt Vonnegut terms a "granfalloon," a proud and meaningless association of human beings. One of social psychology's most remarkable findings is the ease with which granfalloons can be created. For example, the social psychologist Henri Tajfel merely brought subjects into his lab, flipped a coin, and randomly assigned them to be labeled either Xs or Ws. At the end of the study, total strangers were acting as if those in their granfalloon were their close kin and those in the other group were their worst enemies. Granfalloons are powerful propaganda devices because they are easy to create and, once established, the granfalloon defines social reality and maintains social identities. Information is dependent on the granfalloon. Since most granfalloons quickly develop out-groups, criticisms can be attributed to those "evil ones" outside the group, who are thus stifled. To maintain a desired social identity, such as that of a seeker or a New Age rebel, one must obey the dictates of the granfalloon and its leaders. The classic séance can be viewed as an ad-hoc granfalloon. Note what happens as you sit in the dark and hear a thud. You are dependent on the group led by a medium for the interpretation of this sound. "What is it? A knee against the table or my long lost Uncle Ned? The group believes it is Uncle Ned. Rocking the boat would be impolite. Besides, I came here to be a seeker." Essential to the success of the granfalloon tactic is the creation of a shared social identity. In creating this identity, here are some things you might want to include: (a) rituals and symbols (e.g., a dowser's rod, secret symbols, and special ways of preparing food): these not only create an identity, but provide items for sale at a profit. (b) jargon and beliefs that only the in-group understands and accepts (e.g., thetans are impeded by engrams, you are on a cusp with Jupiter rising): jargon is an effective means of social control since it can be used to frame the interpretation of events. (c) shared goals (e.g., to end all war, to sell the faith and related products, or to realize one's human potential): such goals not only define the group, but motivate action as believers attempt to reach them. (d) shared feelings (e.g., the excitement of a prophecy that might appear to be true or the collective rationalization of strange beliefs to others): shared feelings aid in the we feeling. (e) specialized information (e.g., the U.S. government is in a conspiracy to cover up UFOs): this helps the target feel special because he or she is "in the know." (f) enemies (e.g., alternative medicine opposing the AMA and the FDA, subliminal-tape companies spurning academic psychologists, and spiritualists condemning Randi and other investigators): enemies are very important because you as a pseudoscientist will need scapegoats to blame for your problems and failures. 5. Use Self-Generated Persuasion Another tactic for promoting pseudoscience and one of the most powerful tactics identified by social psychologists is self-generated persuasion -- the subtle design of the situation so that the targets persuade themselves. During World War II, Kurt Lewin was able to get Americans to eat more sweetbreads (veal and beef organ meats) by having them form groups to discuss how they could persuade others to eat sweetbreads. Retailers selling so-called nutritional products have discovered this technique by turning customers into salespersons. To create a multilevel sales organization, the "nutrition" retailer recruits customers (who recruit still more customers) to serve as sales agents for the product. Customers are recruited as a test of their belief in the product or with the hope of making lots of money (often to buy more products). By trying to sell the product, the customer-turned-salesperson becomes more convinced of its worth. One multilevel leader tells his new sales agents to "answer all objections with testimonials. That's the secret to motivating people," and it is also the secret to convincing yourself 6. Construct Vivid Appeals Joseph Stalin once remarked: "The death of a single Russian soldier is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." In other words, a vividly presented case study or example can make a lasting impression. For example, the pseudosciences are replete with graphic stories of ships and planes caught in the Bermuda Triangle, space aliens examining the sexual parts of humans, weird goings-on in Borley Rectory or Amityville, New York, and psychic surgeons removing cancerous tumors. A vivid presentation is likely to be very memorable and hard to refute. No matter how many logical arguments can be mustered to counter the pseudoscience claim, there remains that one graphic incident that comes quickly to mind to prompt the response: "Yeah, but what about that haunted house in New York? Hard to explain that." By the way, one of the best ways to counter a vivid appeal is with an equally vivid counter appeal. For example, to counter stories about psychic surgeons in the Philippines, Randi tells an equally vivid story of a psychic surgeon palming chicken guts and then pretending to remove them from a sick and now less wealthy patient. 7. Use Pre-Persuasion Pre-persuasion is defining the situation or setting the stage so you win, and sometimes without raising so much as a valid argument. How does one do this? At least three steps are important. First, establish the nature of the issue. For example, to avoid the wrath of the FDA, advocates of alternative medicine define the issue as health freedom (you should have the right to the health alternative of your choice) as opposed to consumer protection or quality care. If the issue is defined as freedom, the alternative medicine advocate will win because "Who is opposed to freedom?" Another example of this technique is to create a problem or disease, such as reactive hypoglycemia or yeast allergy, that then just happens to be "curable" with whatever quackery you have to sell. Another way to define an issue is through differentiation. Subliminal-tape companies use product differentiation to respond to negative subliminal-tape studies. The claim: "Our tapes have a special technique that makes them superior to other tapes that have been used in studies that failed to show the therapeutic value of subliminal tapes." Thus, null results are used to make a given subliminal tape look superior. The psychic network has taken a similar approach -- "Tired of those phony psychics? Ours are certified," says the advertisement. Second, set expectations. Expectations can lead us to interpret ambiguous information in a way that supports an original hypothesis. For example, a belief in the Bermuda Triangle may lead us to interpret a plane crash off the coast of New York City as evidence for the Triangle's sinister effects. We recently conducted a study that showed how an expectation can lead people to think that subliminal tapes work when in fact they do not. In our study, expectations were established by mislabeling half the tapes. The results showed that about half the subjects thought they improved (though they did not) based on how the tape was labeled (and not the actual content). The label led them to interpret their behavior in support of expectations, or what we termed an "illusory placebo" effect. A third way to pre-persuade is to specify the decision criteria. For example, psychic supporters have developed guidelines on what should be viewed as acceptable evidence for paranormal abilities -- such as using personal experiences as data, placing the burden of proof on the critic and not the claimant, and above all else keeping James Randi and other psi-inhibitors out of the testing room. Accept these criteria and one must conclude that psi is a reality. The collaboration of Hyman and Honorton is one positive attempt to establish a fair playing field. 8. Frequently Use Heuristics and Commonplaces My next recommendation to the would-be pseudoscientist is to use heuristics and commonplaces. Heuristics are simple if-then rules or norms that are widely accepted; for example, if it costs more it must be more valuable. Commonplaces are widely accepted beliefs that can serve as the basis of an appeal; for example, government health-reform should be rejected because politicians are corrupt (assuming political corruption is a widely accepted belief). Heuristics and commonplaces gain their power because they are widely accepted and thus induce little thought about whether the rule or argument is appropriate. To sell a pseudoscience, liberally sprinkle your appeal with heuristics and commonplaces. Here are some common examples. (a) The scarcity heuristic, or if it is rare it is valuable. The Psychic Friends Network costs a pricey $3.95 a minute and therefore must be valuable. On the other hand, an average University of California professor goes for about 27 cents per minute and is thus of little value! (b) The consensus or bandwagon heuristic, or if everyone agrees it must be true. Subliminal tapes, psychic phone ads, and quack medicine feature testimonials of people who have found what they are looking for. (c) The message length heuristic, or if the message is long it is strong. Subliminal-tape brochures often list hundreds of subliminal studies in support of their claims. Yet most of these studies do not deal with subliminal influence and thus are irrelevant. An uninformed observer would be impressed by the weight of the evidence. (d) The representative heuristic or if an object resembles another (on some salient dimension) then they act similarly. For example, in folk medicines the cure often resembles the apparent cause of the disease. Homeopathy is based on the notion that small amounts of substances that can cause a disease's symptoms will cure the disease. The Chinese Doctrine of Signatures claims that similarity of shape and form determine therapeutic value; thus rhinoceros horns, deer antlers, and ginseng root look phallic and supposedly improve vitality. (e) The natural commonplace, or what is natural is good and what is made by humans is bad. Alternative medicines are promoted with the word "natural." Psychic abilities are portrayed as natural, but lost, abilities. Organic food is natural. Of course mistletoe berries are natural too, and I don't recommend a steady diet of these morsels. (f) The goddess-within commonplace, or humans have a spiritual side that is neglected by modern materialistic science. This commonplace stems from the medieval notion of the soul, which was modernized by Mesmer as animal magnetism and then converted by psychoanalysis into the powerful, hidden unconscious. Pseudoscience plays to this commonplace by offering ways to tap the unconscious, such as subliminal tapes, to prove this hidden power exists through extrasensory perception (ESP) and psi, or to talk with the remnants of this hidden spirituality through channeling and the seance. (g) The science commonplaces. Pseudosciences use the word "science" in a contradictory manner. On the one hand, the word "science" is sprinkled liberally throughout most pseudosciences: subliminal tapes make use of the "latest scientific technology"; psychics are "scientifically tested"; health fads are "on the cutting edge of science." On the other hand, science is often portrayed as limited. For example, one article in Self magazine reported our subliminal-tapes studies showing no evidence that the tapes worked and then stated: "Tape makers dispute the objectivity of the studies. They also point out that science can't always explain the results of mainstream medicine either". In each case a commonplace about science is used: (1) "Science is powerful" and (2) "Science is limited and can't replace the personal." The selective use of these commonplaces allows a pseudoscience to claim the power of science but have a convenient out should science fail to promote the pseudoscience. 9. Attack Opponents Through Innuendo and Character Assassination Finally, you would like your pseudoscience to be safe from harm and external attack. Given that the best defense is a good offense, I offer the advice of Cicero: "If you don't have a good argument, attack the plaintiff." Let me give a personal example of this tactic in action. After our research showing that subliminal tapes have no therapeutic value was reported, my coauthors, Tony Greenwald, Eric Spangenberg, Jay Eskenazi, and I were the target of many innuendoes. One subliminal newsletter edited by Eldon Taylor, Michael Urban, and others claimed that our research was a marketing study designed not to test the tapes but to "demonstrate the influence of marketing practices on consumer perceptions." The article points out that the entire body of data presented by Greenwald represents a marketing dissertation by Spangenberg and questions why Greenwald is even an author. The newsletter makes other attacks as well, claiming that our research design lacked a control group, that we really found significant effects of the tapes, that we violated American Psychological Association ethics with a hint that an investigation would follow, that we prematurely reported our findings in a manner similar to those who prematurely announced cold fusion, and that we were conducting a "Willie Horton"-style smear campaign against those who seek to help Americans achieve their personal goals. Many skeptics can point to similar types of attacks. In the fourteenth century, Bishop Pierre d'Arcis, one of the first to contest the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, was accused by shroud promoters as being motivated by jealousy and a desire to possess the shroud. Today, James Randi is described by supporters of Uri Geller as "a powerful psychic trying to convince the world that such powers don't exist so he can take the lead role in the psychic world." Why is innuendo such a powerful propaganda device? Social psychologists point to three classes of answers. First, innuendoes change the agenda of discussion. Note the "new" discussion on subliminal tapes isn't about whether these tapes are worth your money or not. Instead, we are discussing whether I am ethical or not, whether I am a competent researcher, and whether I even did the research. Second, innuendoes raise a glimmer of doubt about the character of the person under attack. That doubt can be especially powerful when there is little other information on which to base a judgment. For example, the average reader of the subliminal newsletter I quoted probably knows little about me knows little about the research and little about the peer review process that evaluated it, and doesn't know that I make my living from teaching college and not from the sale of subliminal tapes. This average reader is left with the impression of an unethical and incompetent scientist who is out of control. Who in their right mind would accept what that person has to say? Finally, innuendoes can have a chilling effect. The recipient begins to wonder about his or her reputation and whether the fight is worth it. The frivolous lawsuit is an effective way to magnify this chilling effect. Can Science Be Sold with Propaganda? I would be remiss if I didn't address one more issue: Can we sell science with the persuasion tactics of pseudoscience? Let's be honest; science sometimes uses these tactics. For example, I carry in my wallet a membership card to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a picture of the cutest little otter you'll ever see. I am in the otter granfalloon. On some occasions skeptics have played a little loose with their arguments and their name-calling. As just one example, see George Price's 1955 Science article attacking Rhine's and Soal's work on ESP -- an attack that went well beyond the then available data. I can somewhat understand the use of such tactics. If a cute otter can inspire a young child to seek to understand nature, then so be it But we should remember that such tactics can be ineffective in promoting science if they are not followed up by involvement in the process of science -- the process of questioning and discovering. And we should be mindful that the use of propaganda techniques has its costs. If we base our claims on cheap propaganda tactics, then it is an easy task for the pseudoscientist to develop even more effective propaganda tactics and carry the day. More fundamentally, propaganda works best when we are half mindless, simplistic thinkers trying to rationalize our behavior and beliefs to ourselves and others. Science works best when we are thoughtful and critical and scrutinize claims carefully. Our job should be to promote such thought and scrutiny. We should be careful to select our persuasion strategies to be consistent with that goal. __________________________________________________________________________ |
|
The
Basic Equipment
1.1 The first thing to get straight in thinking about thinking is the difference between questions about validity and questions about truth. But in getting this straight we shall find that we are also sorting out every other really fundamental notion. For the indispensable notions are all connected. We cannot fully master any one without getting the same grasp upon the lot. Once the essential preparation is complete, we may proceed to the main business of the book. That business is to consider examples of thinking, usually of bad thinking, in order to learn how to do the job better. Here and now we have first to clean and tidy the tools. 1.2 The reason to begin precisely where we are beginning is that thinking about thinking is concerned, at least in the first instance, with the validity or invalidity of arguments, rather than with the truth or falsity of propositions. What is true, or false, is propositions. What is valid, or invalid, is arguments. These notions and these distinctions are absolutely basic. To say that an argument is true or that a proposition is valid is as uncomprehending or as inept as to say that someone got to first base in basketball or that someone made a home run in tennis. 1.3 Consider propositions. There are, of course, propositions and propositions. Both those mutually advantageous proposals which one businessman makes to another and those improper but delightful suggestions which playboys put to their intended playmates are called, quite properly, "propositions." But in this book -- perhaps regrettably -- we shall engage with propositions only in a quite different sense of the word. In this, our relevant sense, the word "proposition" is defined as, "whatever may be asserted or denied." So a proposition for us becomes whatever may be expressed by the that-clause in such sentences as, "She asserted that he had been there on Wednesday," or "He denied that he had ever met her." 1.4 In the irrelevant, proposal sense a proposition may be said to be attractive or unattractive, profitable or unprofitable, and many other things besides. What it cannot be, or be said to be, is either valid or invalid. In our different sense there are again several things which a proposition may be: demonstrated, for instance, or probable, or refuted. Nevertheless, the primary characteristic is truth or falsity. For demonstration here is nothing else but proving that the proposition is true. The proposition which is probable just is probably true. Refutation, again, is not merely saying, but showing, that the proposition is false. It is because refutation involves more than denial that hard-pressed spokespersons so often assert that they have refuted charges when in fact all that they have done is deny them, perhaps dishonestly. 1.5 Propositions in this understanding are not to be identified with arguments, although all arguments contain propositions. Piety demands that our first example be a dull hack hallowed by immemorial tradition. Its tedious, trite, and trivial character will ensure that no one is distracted from what is being illustrated by any interest in the illustration. Later I shall deploy interesting and important examples. I hope thus to escape the dangers of boring myself and everybody else, or suggesting that the subject itself is as trifling as this first illustration. 1.6 Set out carefully and piously, the traditional example runs: if All men are mortal, and if Socrates was a man, then it follows necessarily that Socrates was mortal. This example includes three constituent propositions. The first two serve as premises, the last as a conclusion. In other contexts and in other arguments what is here conclusion might serve as premise, and what are here premises might be derived as conclusions from other premises. 1.7 The italicization of the constituent propositions and the representation of the whole argument in a hypothetical (if this, then) form are both important. The first device brings out two things: first, in general, that arguments are concerned with the logical relations between propositions; and second, in particular, what proposition is being said to be necessarily connected with what two others. Later much more will be said both about logical relations and about logically necessary connections. For the moment it is sufficient, but necessary, to emphasize that these are always and only relations of, and connections between, propositions. 1.8 The second of the two devices, that of representing a whole argument in hypothetical form, makes it clear why, in order to know whether the exemplary argument in which these three propositions are here embodied is valid, we do not need to know whether any of its constituent propositions are true. We do not for this purpose need to know because in offering the argument we are not actually saying anything about the truth or falsity of these constituent propositions. It is all hypothetical. Another argument of the same form would be no less valid even if all of its three constituent propositions happened in fact to be false. This would be true of the absurd argument: If All tigers are strictly vegetarian, and if Socrates the son of Sophroniscus was a tiger, then it follows necessarily that Socrates the son of Sophroniscus was strictly vegetarian. As we shall see in chapter 2, such hypothetical deductions, albeit from much more sensible premises, may serve as the initial steps in a more complex pattern of argument. Such deductions lead us from the actual falsity of the original conclusion in a valid argument to the further conclusion that at least one of the original premises must also be false. 1.9 Although to say that the present argument is valid is thus not to say that any of the three constituent propositions are true, it does imply the truth of the complex hypothetical proposition: If All men are mortal, and if Socrates was a man, then it follows necessarily that Socrates was mortal. In asserting this truth, what is asserted is that the argument from the two constituent premise propositions to the constituent conclusion proposition is valid. The fact that you can say that the claim that this argument is valid (or invalid) is a true (or false) claim is, however, no more a justification for confounding validity with truth than the fact that you can say that the contention that a certain man is a homosexual is a true (or false) contention is a warrant for identifying homosexuality with truth. 1.10 To say that an argument is deductively valid is, by definition, to say that it would be impossible to assert its premise or premises while denying its conclusion or conclusions without thereby contradicting oneself. That is what deduction is. We have just seen that an argument may be valid, notwithstanding that both its premise or premises and its conclusion or conclusions are false. Similarly, an argument may be invalid, notwithstanding that both its premise or premises and its conclusion or conclusions are true. 1.11 Later we shall return to the relations and lack of relations between validity and truth, and I will provide mnemonic illustrations. But the first thing now is to underline the connection between the two concepts of deductive validity and of contradiction and to explain what is so wrong about contradiction. Suppose someone were to maintain that, although Socrates was a man, Socrates was not mortal. No doubt such apparent irrationality in so simple a case is somewhat hard to imagine. Yet that difficulty should, if anything, make it easier to appreciate that if ever people were to behave in this way, then we would have to choose between two alternative conjectures. Either they are being in some way disingenuous, or else they are not fully masters of the meanings of all the words which they have uttered. 1.12 On the one hand, perhaps they have some sort of doctrinal commitment to affirm the two premises while nevertheless equally firmly denying the obvious conclusion. They may want to maintain that Socrates was a man and, as such, mortal, and yet that Socrates was a god and, as such, not mortal. Certainly there are those who hold that someone, though not Socrates (c. 470-399 B.C.E.), was at the same time both truly man and truly God. Or maybe our imaginary objectors have their reasons for wanting to say one thing in one context or to one group of people while saying something altogether inconsistent in another context or to another group of people. This temptation is familiar to us all. It is no prerogative of members of that scapegoat class, professional politicians. 1.13 On the other hand, it is also possible that our imaginary objectors are careless or confused about the crucial difference between all and some. Some men are mortal is consistent, as All men are mortal is not, with Some men are not mortal. Again, there is no call for any far-fetched supposing. We meet all too many cases of people who, having noticed that something or other is true for a few instances of such and such a sort of thing, proceed forthwith to assume, or even to assert, that the same is true of all things of that sort. We have, surely, all done it ourselves? (Such generalizations about all and every something or other are, by the way, called universal propositions.) 1.14 There may appear to be a third possibility, that an objector might be interpreting one of the key terms in one way in one of the premises and in another way in the other premise or in the conclusion. The word "Socrates," for instance, might he employed to refer to one person on one occasion and to another on the other. Again, "mortal" might be construed as meaning "liable to death," whereas "not mortal" was understood as metaphorically "immortal" -- immortal, that is, in that wholly different sense in which a great person who indisputably has died, or will sometime die, may nevertheless truly and consistently be numbered among the immortals. 1.15 This apparent third possibility is thus the possibility of equivocation. The word "equivocation" is here defined as "the employment of some word or expression in two or more different senses without distinction in the same context." If equivocators realize that they are equivocating in their employment of one of the key terms in an argument, then their performances are certainly disingenuous. If they do not realize this, then, equally certainly, they are "not fully masters of the meanings of all the words they have uttered." In the most literal sense they do not know what they are talking about. 1.16 The basic point developed in the five previous paragraphs is extremely important. It is none the less so for having been made with a hackneyed, traditional example developed in a somewhat far-fetched way. This basic point is that the terms "valid" and "invalid," as applied to deductive arguments, and the expression "deductive argument" itself have all to be defined in terms of self-contradiction and the avoidance of self-contradiction. It is because these are thus central notions that our concern with logic inextricably involves us also in concerns with both meaning and truth. The basis of the necessary and inescapable involvement with meaning will be immediately obvious. Given that a valid deductive argument is, by definition, one in which to assert the premises while denying the conclusion is to contradict yourself, then it becomes at once clear that no one can be in a position to know whether or not any argument is valid, except insofar as he or she has mastered the meanings of all its crucial terms. 1.17 It may be more difficult to appreciate that there are necessary connections between logic and truth and why these connections make it so essential to argue validly and to avoid contradiction. For did not this chapter itself begin by insisting that "thinking about thinking is concerned, at least in the first instance, with the validity or invalidity of arguments rather than with the truth or falsity of propositions"? And have we not gone on to assert that arguments may be valid, though both their premises and their conclusions happen to be false, or invalid, though both their premises and their conclusions are in fact true? 1.18 Yes, this was said. It is all true. But it is also true that, though sound argument and a reasonable appreciation of the available evidence may happen sometimes to lead to false conclusions, no man who is indifferent to argument and to evidence can claim to be concerned for truth. Abraham Lincoln was profoundly right when he wrote, chiding the editor of a Springfield, Illinois, newspaper: "It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him." It is also true that to tolerate contradiction is similarly to be indifferent to truth. For people who, whether directly or by implication, knowingly both assert and deny one and the same proposition show by that behavior that they do not care whether they assert what is false and not true, or whether they deny what is true and not false. 1.19 To grasp this point is to raise a perennial personal challenge. Like all such personal challenges, it should be seen as being at least as much a challenge to me and to us as it is to you and to them. For whenever and wherever I tolerate self-contradiction, then and there I make it evident, either that I do not care at all about truth, or that at any rate I do care about something else more. It was thus precisely because to affirm the premises of a valid deductive argument while denying the conclusion is, by the definition of "valid deductive argument," to contradict yourself, that Socrates used to demand: "We must follow the argument wherever it leads." 1.20 The same personally challenging point, that contradiction must be intolerable to anyone who really cares about truth, can, with the help of a little demonstration, be made more elaborately. Anyone inclined to bridle against such logic-chopping can without serious loss skip the next four paragraphs. The promised, or threatened, demonstration was apparently first mounted in the 1200s of our era either by Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1300) or by one of his pupils. (It is, by the way, ultimately to the uninhibited polemics of the philosophical opponents of the great Duns Scotus that we all owe our word "dunce." There must be some moral here!) 1.21 The demonstration goes like this: First, take as your personal premise a contradiction of your choice. I take for mine the conjunction of the two propositions: (1) The Declaration of Independence was made in 1776; and (2) The Declaration of Independence was not made in 1776. Now choose, equally freely, any false proposition. I choose: Elvis Presley is alive and well. Next, take one half of the initial contradiction as a separate premise. From The Declaration of Independence was made in 1776 it follows that The Declaration of Independence was made in 1776 and/or Elvis Presley is alive and well. 1.22 Thus, given that for whatever x may be, x is true, then for the same value of x and for any value of y it follows necessarily that x and/or y is true. The only, but sufficient, justification for employing the symbols x and y -- rather than the awkward verbal alternatives something, the same something, something else, and the same something else -- is that the point can thereby be made more briefly, more clearly, and more elegantly. The object is, as it always should be, to promote understanding. What needs to be understood is that so far it has been shown that, from my arbitrarily chosen contradictory premise, it follows that The Declaration of Independence was made in 1776 and/or Elvis Presley is alive and well. So far so unexceptionable, and altogether unexciting. 1.23 But now we consider the second half of the initial contradiction: The Declaration of Independence was not made in 1776. Taking this as one premise and the conclusion reached at the end of paragraph 1.21 as the other, it becomes impossible to avoid the false conclusion that Elvis Presley is alive and well. For to deny this while asserting these two premises would be to contradict oneself 1.24 We thus have an absolutely general and absolutely compulsive demonstration that from any contradiction which you like to choose, any other proposition, equally arbitrarily chosen, follows necessarily. By the same token, the negation of that other, arbitrarily chosen, proposition must also follow, equally necessarily. We can by the same method also deduce the opposite conclusion: Elvis Presley is not alive and well. Both every proposition and its negation thus follows from any contradiction. Hence, if contradiction is tolerated, then, in a very literal sense, anything goes. This situation must itself be totally intolerable to anyone who has any concern at all to know what is in fact true and to avoid either saying or implying what is in fact false. If all this seems pedantic, recall Bertrand Russell's mischievous definition of a pedant: "A person who prefers his statements to be true." 1.25 Generally, therefore, when someone with pretensions to be a thinker either denounces the restrictions of logic or remains unmoved by charges of self-contradiction, we know what to think. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) understood as well as any man that the saints and the prophets may speak of mysteries. Yet, having a grip on logical fundamentals, Aquinas never forgot that there can be no place for self-contradiction in any authentic quest for truth. Thus, in considering the omnipotence to be attributed to his God, he took account of what is in modem terms the distinction between logical and other senses of "impossibility." A suggestion is said to be logically impossible if that suggestion contains or implies a self-contradiction, or is perhaps otherwise incoherent and unintelligible. But a suggestion that is not in this sense logically impossible may be ruled out by the actual laws of nature and hence be factually impossible. As Aquinas put it in the Summa Theologica: "Whatever does not imply a contradiction is, consequently, among those possibilities in virtue of which God is described as omnipotent. But what does imply a contradiction is not subsumed under the divine omnipotence..." (I Q25 A3). You cannot, he might have said, transmute some incoherent mixture of words into sense merely by introducing the three-letter word "God" to be its grammatical subject. 1.26 One place where this distinction and this insight is indispensable is in the discussion of what theists call "The Problem of Evil." This is the theists' problem of trying to show that they are not contradicting themselves in maintaining both that there is, as indeed there is, much evil in the Universe and that the Universe is the work of an all-powerful, all-good God. It is not a bit of use to appeal here to what are, the Universe being as it happens to be, factual impossibilities. The only hope for the theist is to try to show that it would be logically impossible to have the actual goods without the actual evils, as it is, for instance, logically impossible to have the good of forgiveness without the evil of an injury to be forgiven. It is logically impossible because it is self-contradictory to speak of forgiving a nonexistent injury. For the theist it must be almost blasphemous to argue here, along lines I once saw indicated by one of a series of posters described as constituting The Wayside Pulpit: "If it never rained, there would be no hay to make when the sun shone." 1.27 The most fundamental kind of confusion about contradiction is an intellectual malpractice that Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) derived from their study of the enormously influential German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). This is the malpractice of thinking of contradictions not only as occurring in discourse, but also as involved in the interactions of physical objects. Thus, in the essay On Contradiction supposedly written by Mao Tse-tung, we can read: "The supersession of the old by the new is the universal, forever inviolable law of the world.... Everything contains a contradiction between its new aspect and its old aspect, which constitutes a series of intricate struggles.... At the moment when the new aspect has won the dominant position over the old aspect, the quality of the old thing changes into the quality of the new thing. Thus the quality of a thing is mainly determined by the principal aspect of the contradiction that has won the dominant position." 1.28 A contradiction in this regrettable usage is thus not a verbal contradiction, but a conflict or a tension in or between things or people. Once these categories are properly distinguished, the apparent justification for employing the same word in two utterly different cases disappears. To the extent that this usage helps to collapse or to confound a categorical distinction, it is to be deplored. This same usage encourages talk of fruitful or even nonantagonistic contradictions, contradictions that are welcome, or at least venial. (Mao Tse-tung himself continued, speaking of the "contradiction" between town and country: "But in a socialist nation and in our revolutionary bases such an antagonistic contradiction becomes a nonantagonistic contradiction; and it will disappear when a communist society is realized....") 1.29 But talk of fruitful (if not, perhaps, of nonantagonistic) contradictions may have quite a different source. The contradictions then referred to are genuine verbal or symbolic contradictions, and the fruit offered has to be picked by laboring to remove the contradiction. The vital point for us is that this fruitfulness presupposes the removal of the contradiction. It is only insofar as contradiction is recognized to be intolerable that the labors which may provide fruit can begin. 1.30 Consider, for instance, disagreements about whether or not some country is democratically governed. Very obviously the party who asserts that it is appears to be contradicting the party who asserts that it is not. But perhaps these two disputants are employing the key word "democratic" in different senses. For one of them the criteria for a democracy may be that the rulers should have been popularly elected into office and -- much more important -- that it should be possible in due course to vote them out. For the other one the criterion may be that favored by rulers describing their fiefs as people's democracies, namely, that these rulers are working to promote the best interests of those whom they rule. One by now rather ancient, yet still remarkably clear expression of this conception of democracy was provided by Janos Kadar, addressing the Hungarian National Assembly on May 11, 1957, one year after a Soviet army of intervention had installed him into office as prime minister: "The task of the leaders is not to put into effect the wishes and will of the masses.... The task of the leaders is to accomplish the interests of the masses." This statement may profitably be compared and contrasted with that made by Abu Zuhair Yahya, prime minister of Iraq in 1968: "I came in on a tank, and only tanks will get me out" (quoted in [Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, by Edward] Luttwak 1969, p. 146). 1.31 Because of the Hegelian or Hegelian-Marxist confusion involved in speaking of contradictions in things and because salutary challenges to resolve seeming but not actual contradictions may be preposterously misconstrued as reasons for rating actual contradictions as in themselves good, contradiction sometimes wins an undeservedly favorable press. Similar confusions and misunderstandings often get an understandably bad press for logic. 1.32 The first of these misunderstandings hinges on a failure to distinguish two senses of the word "logic." One is primary. It is the sense in which the word has been employed in this chapter up till now. The other is secondary and derivative. This is the sense in which it is true to say that Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.), in the works grouped into what was later called the Organon, created "Logic" as an academic discipline. These two senses are most conveniently distinguished by printing the word with an initial capital whenever it is used in the second sense. 1.33 The general mistake here is that of expecting any study of that kind to be either necessary or sufficient to improve the practice to which it is directed. The musicologist does not through his musicology become a better executant. Nor does being a great performer immediately qualify one to be a musicologist. The particular point about "Logic" and "logic" was made in the late 1600s by John Locke (1632-1704) in his Essay concerning Human Understanding: "God has not been so sparing to men to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational; ... " (IV [xviii 4). 1.34 On the contrary: "Logic," as the theoretical study of the forms and principles of argument, could only begin among and be pursued by people possessing a good practical capacity to separate valid from invalid arguments. In fact, its first strong and extensive development was among the ancient Greeks and, in particular, among the supremely argumentative Athenians. (For a lively and instructive study of the peculiarities of these Greeks, which made possible the origination of so much that was essential to the development of our modern world, see Alan Cromer's Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science [1993], especially chapters 4-6.) The present book, which is intended to help people to improve their thinking, is not an essay in theoretical Logic. It is instead an exercise in logical coaching. Such an exercise may be beneficial even though neither the coach nor the coached have or acquire any familiarity with the calculi of Logic. But it could not even begin, much less be beneficial, unless all concerned possessed at least some minimal competence in discerning soundness in argument. Without that you could not even understand the coaching. 1.35 The second and much more important reason why logic gets a bad press is that it is confused with various things which have nothing to do with it. Consider, for instance, the contrast and the possible conflict between two opposite approaches to politics and to society. On the one side are those who, like Plato (c. 428-c. 348 B.C.E.), want, as he put it in his dialogue The Republic, "to start with a clean canvas." A good example of this approach was provided by the Jacobins during the great French Revolution of 1789. They replaced all the previous subdivisions of France by eighty-three Departments, all roughly equal in area and each with its own administrative center. They also introduced a new calendar of twelve months with freshly minted names, and all the months were divided into three decads of ten days each. (A special arrangement was made to accommodate the surplus five days.) And so on. On the opposite side are those, like Aristotle, who prefer to start from wherever they are, seeing improvement as a matter of natural growth and development. Reformers of the first kind are likely to long for utopia and to have a penchant for wholesale operations. Reformers of the second kind do not expect anything to be perfect and believe that whatever progress can be made has to be made piecemeal. They understand, with the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), that "out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made." 1.36 Especially in the context of thinking about the French Revolution of 1789, the first great social revolution of the modern period, Edmund Burke (1729-1797)* is often seen as representative of the second approach. This approach is sometimes believed by English people to be characteristically English, although Burke himself was born and educated in Ireland. By contrast, the Abbé Sieyès,** who contrived to survive when so many of the other revolutionaries were killed, is seen as representative of the first approach, an approach which is in the same circles seen as characteristically French. Neither of these approaches is as such either logical or illogical, although particular spokespersons on one side or the other may well be logical or illogical. But when confronted with the argument of the Abbé Sieyès against legislative second chambers, his supporters are apt to applaud his famous apothegm as a fine specimen of Gallic logic while his opponents decry it upon exactly the same ground. What he said was: "If the second chamber agrees with the first, it is superfluous, whereas if it disagrees with it, it is obnoxious."
* Burke was a member of the U.K. Parliament, most famous for his hostile and horrified Reflections on the Revolution in France. (He had been and remained sympathetic to the very different American Revolution.) ** The Abbé Sieyès is most famous for his answer to the question: "What did you do in the Revolution?" His reply was: I survived." But one might mention his pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? (1790).
1.37 It is not for us here to decide whether this statement is especially Gallic. We do, however, need to notice that it certainly is not especially logical. If someone accepted the two conditional propositions so dogmatically asserted, then it would, of course, be illogical for that person to refuse to allow that any second chamber agreeing with the first must be superfluous and that any second chamber disagreeing with the first must be obnoxious. Yet there is no intellectual or other merit in simply asserting these drastic propositions. By doing so you make the totalitarian assumption, without providing any supporting evidence, that all dissent from any decision made by the first chamber must be immediately and automatically overridden. This is an assumption which no one has any business to make tacitly and without supporting argument. When such a brilliant refusal to examine the case for the opposition is presented as a model of logic, then there is every excuse to be suspicious. But it is not in this interpretation that we are laboring to make ourselves more logical. 1.38 We have shown why contradiction ought to be unacceptable and that logic is connected, albeit indirectly, with truth. It should now be less misleading to insist again upon the fundamental difference between questions about validity and questions about truth. To fix this in mind we need one or two dull, undistracting, naggingly unforgettable examples. Consider as premises the two propositions: All philosophers are lifelong bachelors and King Henry VIII of England was a philosopher. Both are false. But if they were true, then it would follow necessarily that King Henry VIII of England was a lifelong bachelor. Anyone who asserts the two false premises, yet denies the conclusion, would certainly be committing a self-contradiction. So now, since few people have less claim to have been lifelong bachelors than King Henry VIII, who was married six times, we have an example of a valid argument from false premises to a false conclusion. 1.39 Next, suppose that we substitute for the original second premise: President James Buchanan was a philosopher Then, again, both premises will be false. The conclusion will be that President James Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor. Applying the same test as before, it is obvious that this is derived by a valid deductive argument. But this time the conclusion is true. Thus, we now have an example of a valid argument from false premises to a true conclusion. 1.40 Someone says: All Christians believe in an omnipotent and personal God, and Mother Teresa believed in an omnipotent and personal God. If we assume that these two propositions are true, are we entitled, taking them as our premises, to deduce the conclusion: Mother Teresa was a Christian? No, of course we are not. Certainly the conclusion is true. Yet the argument, considered as an argument, is, equally certainly, invalid. To make it valid, the first premise would have to be changed to read not All Christians, but All and only Christians. So the example offered, without that essential amendment, constitutes an example of an invalid argument to a conclusion which happens nevertheless to be true. 1.41 Suppose that some people have difficulty in appreciating that such an argument must be invalid, as indeed many people may have since they happen to know that its conclusion is in fact true. Then the natural and appropriate response is to summon up parallels to enable those who have this difficulty to appreciate that neither this nor any other argument of the same form can possibly be sound. You might as well argue, we might say, that given that All swans are white (which they are not), and given that President William Clinton is white (which, in terms of race, he is), then it follows necessarily that President William Clinton is a swan (which will scarcely do). Or, again, you might as well argue that given that All Communists claimed to be opposed to racism and given that Dr. Martin Luther King claimed to be opposed to racism, then it follows necessarily, Dr. Martin Luther King was a Communist. 1.42 When we produce such parallels, we are trying to bring out the invalidity of all arguments of one particular form: the form, that is, and whatever it is, which is shared by both the original specimen and all the genuine parallels which could be deployed. The main practical reasons why parallels have to be summoned is that people are put off by what they know or believe about particular propositions in particular arguments. Because we know or believe that the proposed conclusion is true, we become less alert to the possible weakness of the inference by which it is supposedly derived. 1.43 If, therefore, we want to assess someone else's critical acumen, then the best way to do this is to attend to their responses to arguments apparently justifying the conclusions which are most congenial to them. And when, as we should do frequently, we try to test our own critical acuteness we ought to notice how we ourselves respond to wretched arguments which appear to justify the no doubt often very different conclusions which appeal most strongly to us. 1.44 A measure of symbolization is by now necessary. But before proceeding to that, something needs to be said about the word "racism," which has become as much a term of abuse as "democratic" is of praise. For unless the disputants in any debate as to whether some person or policy is or is not racist agree upon at least some rough and ready working definition of the key term, then in the most literal sense they simply do not know what they are talking about. Two points may usefully be made at this stage. 1.45 First, if you want to abominate racists as wicked, then the word "racism" will have to be defined as referring to a kind of bad behavior, presumably that of advantaging or disadvantaging individuals for no other and better reason than that they are members of one racially defined set rather than another. By the Axiom for Sets, formulated by Georg Cantor (1845-1918), the sole essential feature of a set is that its members have at least one common characteristic, which may be of any kind. The reason for introducing the word "set" here is that it does not carry the unwanted implications of such alternatives as "group" or "class" or "community." 1.46 The alternative hypothetical is that if, whether explicitly or implicitly, one defines the word "racism" as involving no more than the holding and/or expressing of beliefs in the existence of differences on average across one racially defined set as opposed to another, then the definition makes racism not a kind of bad behavior but a sort of disfavored belief. The crucial distinction here is between beliefs that all members of some racially defined set possess some characteristic and beliefs that some characteristic is on average more or less commonly possessed across one racially defined set than across another. 1.47 This is important. For from propositions expressing beliefs of the latter sort nothing can be validly inferred about the possession or nonpossession of the characteristic in question by any particular individual member of the racially defined set in question. You cannot, for instance, validly infer the height of any particular individual member of some human set from a proposition stating only the average height across that set. So even if some or many propositions of this kind are found to be true, their truth could not constitute a reasonable objection to our trying to discover every individual's merits or demerits directly, and then proceeding to treat him or her accordingly. The policies for which such discoveries really might carry upsetting implications are policies to secure the representation of various racially defined subsets of a population in various areas of activity and achievement in proportion to their numbers in that entire population. (For a leading lawyer's critique of attempts to enforce such policies by law, see [Forbidden Grounds: The Case against Employment Discrimination Laws by Richard A.] Epstein 1992.) 1.48 Returning now to the business of symbolizing, what the fallacious arguments of 1.40 and 1.41 have in common is the following form: Given that All so-and-so's are such-and-such and given that That is a such-and-such, then it follows necessarily that That is a so-and-so. It is a very short and a space-saving further step to replace "so-and-so," "such-and-such," and "That" by letters. If you are going to do this, now and or later, then it is also a good idea to introduce the further notational refinement of distinguishing the subjects (the "so-and-so's") from the characteristics attributed to these subjects (that of being "such-and-such") by employing capital letters from the Latin alphabet for the former and lower-case Greek letters to symbolize the latter. Thus: If All As are ø (pronounced phi) and if That is ø, then it follows necessarily that That is an A; which, of course, it does not. 1.49 So much for the key notion of the form of an argument. Here and elsewhere all the particular specimens of any general class may be described as the several tokens of that same single type. ("Token" and "type" are a useful pair of labels that are well worth remembering.) The particular type or form of argument of which we have just been considering some tokens is fallacious. It has an unfortunately unmemorable traditional name: The Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle. 1.50 In the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy and of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, some favored the nickname "The Un-American Fallacy." This was a backhanded tribute to McCarthy and those members of his committee who were inclined to deduce that a person must be a Communist from the evidence that he possessed some characteristic perhaps shared by all Communists, but certainly not peculiar to them. This particular nickname is long since obsolete. Yet we still need to consider the point suggested by the pessimistic German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), although discounting his false and nasty insinuation that every defect from logical perfection is studied and designing: "It would be a good thing if every trick could receive some short and obviously appropriate name, so that when a man used this or that particular trick, he could be at once reproached for it" ([The Art of Controversy by Arthur] Schopenhauer [translated and edited by T.B. Saunders] 1896, p. 18). 1.51 In the present context, the word "fallacy" does not refer to just any intellectual error. It is confined to one particular sort of such errors, that of mistaking an invalid argument for a valid one. This needs to be emphasized, since there is a common usage in which any misconception may be described as a fallacy. Thus, in the years immediately subsequent to the conclusion of World War II, many people in many countries were inclined to believe that any unwelcome large-scale events must be the effects of the explosion of atomic bombs. Those who held this belief to be mistaken could and did say, in accordance with this common usage, that it was a fallacy. 1.52 If it were only a matter of what is acceptable to dictionary makers as established and, hence, correct English usage, then the unbelievers could have rested their case for employing the word "fallacy," rather than the almost equally wounding "misconception," upon the undoubted propriety in these dictionary terms of the label "the Pathetic Fallacy." This label refers to the mistake of attributing to things which are not alive the feelings, dispositions, and reactions which can characterize only living things, in particular, people. But, in our stricter sense of the word "fallacy," neither this nor the putative misconception about the cause of those unwelcome large-scale events is a fallacy. The fallacy involved, if fallacy there was, must have been not the conclusion, but in the supporting argument. Having once mentioned The Pathetic Fallacy, if only incidentally, it is as well to seize the occasion to point out that the temptation to make mistakes of this kind lies in the fact that "Perhaps the simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way" ([Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas] Sowell 1986, p. 97). But so very often in fact it did not. 1.53 In the case of the atomic bomb explosion hypothesis there very obviously was a fallacy involved, namely the fallacy of arguing that, simply because one series of events occurred after another series of events, the second series must have been caused by the first. This fallacy has been known traditionally -- retaining the Latin, which was employed for all teaching and learning in the universities of medieval Europe -- as the fallacy of arguing post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this). Until and unless someone is able to suggest a better English alternative, let us call it the Whatever-follows-must-be-the-consequence Fallacy. 1.54 The prime reasons for insisting upon the stricter usage of the term "fallacy" are efficiency and economy. We have in our rich language other words which can be used for just any kind of mistake or misconception. For a start there are the words "mistake" and "misconception." If we oafishly misemploy our verbal chisels as verbal screwdrivers, we thereby unfit them for the job to which they are best suited. So what do we use for a chisel when a chisel is what we need? 1.55 Compare another topical example far removed from our immediate interests. Those who have enjoyed such classic gangster movies as The Roaring Twenties (1939) will remember that the word "hijack" was first introduced to refer to the forceful seizure of what was already stolen or in some other way contraband. There is surely nothing to be said for the current abusage, which makes "hijacking" an unappealing substitute for the good old word "piracy" -- so romantically redolent of the Caribbean in an earlier century. It thus leaves us without any handy single word to distinguish the true present-day analogue of the original Prohibition phenomenon. Is not the case of forcible seizure by one criminal firm of a consignment of illicit drugs belonging to another, equally criminal competitor such an example? 1.56 It is for similar reasons that I have been following and shall continue to follow stricter usages of many other everyday terms. Such stricter usages are required even in making and maintaining the fundamental distinction between questions about truth or falsity and questions about validity or invalidity. Nor is there any call to go slumming in order to unearth examples of what we need to avoid. In his Discourse on the Method, René Descartes (1591-1650), who is by common consent recognized to have been the Father of Modern Philosophy, formulates his proposed doubt-proof, rock-bottom certainty as an argument: "I think, therefore I am." Yet he still affirms that this argument is something that he "'clearly and distinctly conceives to be true" (Part IV). Allowance must of course be made in Descartes's case for the fact that he was writing in the early 1600s. But that is a reason why we have to do better. (By the way, the usual practice is to omit the definite article before the word "Method" in translating the title of this work from the original French. But that is wrong since Descartes clearly saw himself as developing and proclaiming the one and only correct method -- his.) 1.57 Some other illustrations of the need for care in the employment of key terms have been given already. Care is also always required about knowledge and refutation. To say that someone knows something is to say more than that he claims to know it or that he believes it most strongly. It is to say also both that it is true and that he is in a position to know that it is true. So neither the sincerity of his conviction nor the ingenuousness of his utterance guarantees that he really knew. That is why the sarcastic tone enters our voices or why we write the key word between disclaiming quotation marks -- in "sneer quotes" -- when a man who has claimed to know turns out to have been wrong: "He 'knew' which horse was going to win the Kentucky Derby, but he 'knew' wrong." Nor in pointing out the falsity of the proposition that he asserted to be true is one necessarily challenging his integrity. It is most probably not that he was lying, just that he was honestly -- and perhaps very expensively -- mistaken. 1.58 To say that spokespersons for individuals or organizations refuted charges laid against those individuals or those organizations is to say much more than that they denied these charges and apparently believed that what they were saying was the truth. Rather, it is to say that they deployed sufficient evidencing reasons for believing that the charges were in fact false. If you do not want to say as much as that, then you should take the trouble to be noncommittal. You ought in that case to say only that these spokespersons claimed to have refuted the charges in question. 1.59 The same desire to husband resources of vocabulary, to preserve vital distinctions, should make us stingy in our application of the term "prejudice." Often it is treated as roughly equivalent to "opinion" or "conviction," albeit with powerful pejorative overtones. In this all-too-common abusage I have my opinions and my convictions, but you and he merely have prejudices -- so called by me for no better reason than that they are yours or his and not mine. The word "prejudice" becomes a valuable extra item in the vocabulary of anyone striving to be more rational only when, and insofar as, it is employed scrupulously to pick out just those beliefs -- whether right or wrong -- that are either formed prior to proper consideration of the available evidence or else maintained in defiance of it. 1.60 It is obscurantist and demoralizing to apply the word "prejudice" in order to abuse other people's opinions, or even all strong convictions, simply as such. The judge who instructs the jury to consider carefully and without prejudice all and only the materials actually presented in court is not asking them to refuse to bring in a decisive verdict. Nor is there anything whatever wrong with anyone's opinions or with strong convictions, as such. What is obnoxious, and what merits all the abuse in the arsenal, is the willful maintaining of preconceptions against the weight of the evidence. But to do that is not an always incurable feature of the human condition. Nor is it the exclusive prerogative of other people. 1.61 Another occasionally useful distinction is that between the sense and the reference of some word or expression. The sense is the meaning and the reference is the object or objects to which the word or the expression refers; that is, the referent or the referents. The standard illustration for clarifying this distinction is provided by the expressions "the morning star" and "the evening star." The senses or meanings of these two expressions are obviously different. And when they were first introduced into the English language no one knew that they both have the same referent, namely the planet Venus. To emphasize this distinction between sense and reference, the useful convention is: when we are talking about the sense or meaning of some word or expression, to escort that word or that expression with quotation marks. But as long as words and expressions are being given their workaday employment of referring to referents, they remain unescorted. Another relevant convention is similarly to escort words and expressions with quotation marks when what is being talked about is neither their senses nor their referents, but the sounds made by their pronunciation, or indeed anything else but their meanings or their referents. For instance, we may in this way truly and clearly describe the words "cuckoo" and "sizzle" as onomatopoeic. We shall observe these conventions throughout this book and recommend readers always to do the same. 1.62 It is in terms of the distinction between sense and reference that we can explain the nature of what has traditionally been labeled the Masked Man Fallacy. It consists in arguing that because someone knows (or does not know) something under one description; therefore, they must know it (or therefore they cannot know it) as the same thing when it is considered under another description. So we cannot validly infer from the fact that someone was acquainted with what was called "the morning star" that they knew that it is identical with what was called "the evening star." Nor could we validly infer from the fact that someone was acquainted with a man who always wore a mask that the same person knew the identity of the man thus concerned to conceal his identity. |
| top |