Logic – 2

What do these two examples of syllogistic-style arguments have in common?

Husband: Honey, our children are hungry.  Feeding them your meatloaf would eliminate their hunger. Therefore, you should cook meatloaf.

Wife: But, honey, your second premise is faulty.  For feeding them your lasagna would also eliminate their hunger.  Therefore, you should cook tonight.

Candidate 1: Programs to help the poor are meant to decrease poverty.  But there is more poverty today than there was before these programs began.  Therefore, programs designed to fight poverty actually acccomplish the opposite.

Candidate 2: Your argument proposes a single cause for poverty.  But there might be many causes for poverty.  Thus, your argument is invalid. 

First off, both arguments consist of properly constructed syllogisms, and both are countered with effective challenges based on classic principles of logic.  Second off, they both sound completely idiotic since no human being in their right mind would actually talks this way.

These examples highlight one of the challenges with traditional logic which is designed to create a language and framework into which any argument (sound or unsound, based on reality or fantasy) can be fit.  And while it’s all well and good to know that the argument “All mermaids are female.  Gwen is a female. Therefore Gwen is a mermaid.” is fallacious (regardless of whether or not mermaids exist); here on earth mermaids don’t exist (as far as we know).  More importantly, people talk to and argue with each other using actual human language that can lose its persuasive power (not to mention its ethical underpinning) when it is boiled down to symbols and straight jacketed into “proper” logical syntax.

Now one can make the case that even the most complex arguments presented in the floweriest of language can be reworked into logical structures, and that these structures are a better basis of analysis than the original text.  But might there be a way to take a look at the actual conversations real people have with each other and place them into a framework that lets us look at them in context, without having to boil everything we say down to the question of whether A equals NOT A?

I mentioned that many new logical systems have been developed over the years and while some of them are mathematically complex and best suited for specific purposes (like the creation of computer software), some wrestle with the need to build a rigorous structure around arguments without turning interesting prose into quasi-mathematical symbols which might eliminate value found in the subtlety of the original language.

My favorite attempt to create this type of structure is the ToulminModel (developed by the British Philosophy Professor Stephen Toulmin) which proposes the existence of practical or substantial arguments (wonder why I like him?) that can be diagramed in the following manner:

In this model, the Claim is an assertion you are trying to prove, the Grounds consist of the information you bring to prove the claim and the Warrant supports your assertion that the Grounds should lead you to the Claim.

“What’s the big deal!” I hear you cry out.  Isn’t a “Claim” just a conclusion to a logical argument?  And aren’t “Grounds” just another way of describing your premises, with logic serving the role of the “Warrant” that links the two?

Actually, no, since Grounds in the case of a Toulmin argument might consist of facts (even axiomatic facts that logic requires everyone to agree to as the basis of any argument).  But they might be laws, regulations, social customers, literary references, or any other man-made (or even natural) “thing” that can provide support for the Claim. And the Warrant can make a logical connection, but it might also make an emotional or ethical appeal (all equally valid under Toulmin’s scheme).  And the fact that the Warrant requires Backing (a demonstration that the Warrant is sound and appropriate) adds an additional layer of rigor, even if this Warrant relies primarily on logic to link A (Grounds) to B (a Claim).

Toulmin also adds another nice feature: the Qualifier, that lets you present exceptions to your Claim. While qualifications can be implied in logical statements such as SOME As are NOT B, natural language cries out for us to specify which As we are talking about.  So the claim that “Freedom of speech is an unarguable good.” can be easily qualified as “Freedom of speech is an unarguable good, except in cases where it might lead to physical harm to someone else.” without diminishing the original point (or leaving us responding to an seemingly logical but actually illogical argument that “Since you don’t believe in free speech in all situations, you don’t really believe in free speech).”

Now Toulmin diagrams can get quite complex, especially once you realize that Grounds may be required to support a Warrant and that this means the Warrant can play a secondary role as another Claim (or Sub-Claim) that needs to be supported (with Grounds, Warrants and Backing) before it can be accepted and used to prove the ultimate Claim.

This might all sound a bit abstract, but as we’ll see once we start digging into actual political debates (i.e., arguments) Toulmin provides an important arrow in our quiver as we try think about the best way to think for ourselves during a Presidential election when many people would prefer that we not think at all.

Logic - 1

Let’s take a step back from faith and talk about something that we can all agree is a major component of critical thinking which is logic. 

Logic has been part of this discussion since it began.  Sometimes I talked about it as an element of an effective and successful argument (one in which conclusions follow logically from premises). I’ve also contrasted things that may or may not be a requisite for critical thinking (including imagination, emotion, and faith) to something that surely is (logic).  But what exactly do we mean when we talk of “logic?” 

The good news is that we do not need to fully answer this question and know everything about the answers in order to draw upon important logical concepts as needed as we analyze the upcoming Presidential election.  Like fallacies, logic consists of many different components and comes in many different flavors and an understanding of all of them is not required for some basic logical principles to help guide our thinking.

But we need to keep in mind that, unlike fallacies (which can be thought of as a long list of “broken” arguments, from which we are free to pick and choose which ones might be relevant for a particular argument or discussion) logic is a complete system (actually a set of systems).  In fact, fallacies are simply arguments that break the rules set up by one or more of these system.  So while we are free to use the tools of logic selectively to support a critical thinking exercise, if you want to go past the practical critical thinking project encouraged in this blog, a good first step would be a study of logic.

But what do we man when we talk about “studying logic?”  Two thousand, or one thousand or even one hundred years ago, the answer to that question was simple: studying the logical systems constructed and formalized by (surprise, surprise) Aristotle (i.e., “The Philosopher”). 

The notion that arguments can be written in specific syntax of statements such as “All A’s are B’s” “Some A’s are NOT B’s” and organized into sets of statements such as…

All A’s are B’s

All B’s are C’s;

Therefore all A’s are C’s

… (called a syllogism) is also derived from Aristotle’s formal logic which is part of “The Philosopher’s” complete logical system built into works referred to as “The Organon” (stop snickering out there).

Of course, the study of logic wasn’t set in amber 2400 years ago, but was developed, forgotten, rediscovered and supplemented over time.  The use of diagrams and illustrations (especially ones that could be reproduced using newfangled devices such as printing presses), helped create new ways of looking at logical statements and relationships that went beyond what ancient thinkers taught (or thought). 

The good news about formal logic is that one can become proficient at it by taking a single course on the subject (as I did years ago as an undergraduate), although one can dedicate one’s life to studying the topic deeply.  The bad news is that fewer and fewer people every get the chance to take such a course, despite the fact that an understanding of formal logic and rhetoric was once a requirement for being considered an educated person.

This is usually the point where some old timer chimes in about how much we’ve lost by giving up study of the classics in favor of “fad” topics such as sociology and quantum mechanics.  But this complaint misses two key points, namely:

* The reason classical subjects (like logic and Latin) are not taught today is that the explosion of knowledge brought about by the scientific revolution and modernity has created vast and exciting new topics to learn about and explore; but more importantly;

* There are other newer, heavily-mathematical, modern systems of logic (such as symbolic logic) that go way beyond what Aristotle ever dreamed of.  And in terms of sheer numbers, more people are taking classes in these modern logical systems than ever studied Aristotle’s creations (although study of these various logics – and their practical application – is more frequently referred to as “computer programming”)

These complex systems (and even large parts of the Aristotelian system) go way beyond what is needed to determine if a Presidential candidate has built his proposals on a strong logical foundation or a pile of sand. But it is worth looking at one modern logical system that is particularly relevant to something that formal and mathematical logic doesn’t always care about: normal human conversation.

Faith - 2

Continuing from where we left off, the first thing we need to recognize is that any debate that posits religion and science (or, more particularly, faith and reason) as irreconcilable rivals (or, at least, inhabiting totally different spheres) would make almost no sense to some of the greatest philosophers, theologians and – yes – scientists of the ages.

When Socrates went on trial for (among other things) blasphemy, he did not defend himself by declaring his monumental intellect to have superseded the might of the Gods.  Rather, he pronounced himself a pious man, even if his form of piety was as eccentric as every other aspect of his life and belief. 

While many have an image of the Middle Ages as a period of stifling religious orthodoxy which snuffed out the merest hint of an inquiring mind with accusations of heresy and the stake, in fact the world did not stop thinking for a thousand years between the fall of Rome and the birth of Galileo.  In fact, the embrace of Plato by first Millennium Christians and the rediscovery of Aristotle by second Millennium Christians and Jews led to some of the most rigorous logical proofs for (among other things) the existence of God.   And these proofs demonstrated the power of reason to the religious and not-so-religious, a process eventually leading to Enlightenment.

Even great scientists (although not necessarily the religiously ambiguous Charles Darwin) did not set out to prove that gospel was filled with fairy tales or that belief in God was an evolutionary quirk.  Rather, these were believing men whose brand of faith (sometimes referred to as “Natural Philosophy”) felt that since God had created a universe ruled by unbreakable laws, that it was their duty to discover those laws and, in the process, glimpse slightly more of the divine.

Now it is true that faith in such “Natural" science rubbed more-conservative believers the wrong way, implying as it did that God might not have flooded the entire world or stopped the sun in the sky (or, at least, that we should live by a science that ignores the possibility that such divine intervention could happen again at any time).  But those disputes, like most historic arguments over faith vs. reason, managed to produce at least a little light. 

Would that we could say the same thing about discussions of this topic today. 

Is it only me, or do most of our debates over religion in the public square or the role of church and state in contemporary American society seem to be about something else?  Now I’m in favor of a rigorous, even tumultuous debate on this subject in particular.  But are we really on the verge of becoming a woman-enslaving theocracy or wiping out all trace of religion in a frenzy of secular revolution?  Certainly such religious (and secular) excesses can happen and have happened, particularly over the last 100 years.  But are paranoid fantasies that such terrors are being repeated today in America really our most burning issues of faith vs. reason? Or have we reduced discussion of this important topic to something resembling a different medieval tradition: that of bear baiting (or, perhaps, elephant and donkey baiting)?

Most supporters of faith tend to fall back on claims of religion as a transmission belt for moral virtues, or claim that long-held traditions (while mysterious) might contain forgotten wisdom that even the most enlightened among us might not know enough to decode.

That last notion was raised in one of many important essays written on this topic by my favorite political philosopher Lee Harris.  In addition to helping us look at hot-button religious topics such as tradition and evolution (written largely to reconcile believers and non-believers), Harris also points out in this essay that in our debates over faith we might be making a fundamental mistake by confusing scientific reason for reason itself.

For example, can reason tell us if one religion is “better” than another?  Scientific reason certainly can’t, since in terms of science, any faith-based belief system is equally unprovable and thus equally invalid (or equally valid, if a scientifically minded judge is feeling generous).  But what if you had two faiths that were exactly the same in all respects except that believers in Religion A were content to live alongside unbelieving men and women of  reason (and even be ruled by them) while Religion B believed that all men and women of reason should be killed immediately?

Ancient thinkers would have no problem answering this question (and thus avoid what Harris calls “The Suicide of Reason”) for, to them, reason could be applied to any subject, including (or should I say especially) questions regarding the relationship between man and God(s).

That’s all I’ll say (for now) on the subject, but as the Presidential candidates take to the pulpit (figuratively and literally) over the coming months, it might be best if we find a way to discuss the relationship between them, us and the divine that goes beyond sneers, suspicion and selective outrage.

Faith – 1

In addition to the confessions I made earlier with regard to biases you should be aware before reading through the material on this site, I also have one more admission that will be relevant as we get into specific issues related to the upcoming Presidential election: I believe in God.

Now to some people (notably skeptics or critics of religion), such belief comes pre-loaded with all kinds of assumptions about the world, from acceptance that this God created the universe in six days (starting on October 23rd,4004 BC) to a willingness to believe that this deity can perform miracles at any time which turn the laws of physics on their head (implying that a belief in God must necessarily trump belief in science). 

Even if not taken to these extremes, there is a general sense among much of the public that any type of religious faith implies a willingness to suspend reason (which would have big implications for how you should treat a site allegedly dedicated to the teaching of critical thinking).

Perhaps such skepticism is warranted, given that most religious traditions take for granted that the answers to some unknowable questions lie in the supernatural.  But in my particular case, I’ve never experienced the need to make some sort of final choice between faith and reason.

This may be because my faith (at least to some) could be considered superficial.  I didn’t grow up in a Church (or in my case, a Synagogue).   My parents did not expose me to a religious education, nor was religion much of a topic of discussion when I was growing up (although our family did talk about many things).  My familiarity with sacred texts is embarrassingly limited, even if I have a certain grasp of religious history (at least with regard to Western faiths).

In fact, it only dawned on me that I believe in God when I and my wife (now in our own parenting years) chose to join a local synagogue and enroll our children in religious school.  While this might imply increased religiosity, it was really more of an example of “generation skipping” with regard to giving our kids a Jewish education (even through many peers in my temple are very open about their atheism). 

But as part of a synagogue, one invariably finds oneself attending services (even if it’s only a few times a year).  And during Jewish services (as with most other faiths), there comes a moment in the proceedings where everyone is asked to spend a few moments in silent prayer.  And when I was first asked to do this, I found myself praying with absolute sincerity.  This may hearken back to the one other time I took solace in silent prayer (in Junior High School, after a family tragedy).  Although perhaps I’ve simply always been a believer, and only recently started thinking about what this means. 

Anyway, the real question is whether or not faith (mine or anyone else’s) is relevant to either critical thinking or the US elections.  And in the case of the latter (the election) the answer is clearly yes.  Being a church-goer is as much a requirement for a Presidential candidate as being a family man (or woman).  While we may have once accepted the notion of a bachelor President, I can’t imagine a devout atheist gaining much traction in even the bluest Primary state (much less the general election).

Our fascination with the religious belief of our Presidential candidates (which applies not just to Christians – witness the interest in Joe Leiberman’s Orthodox Judaism when he was a VP candidate in 2002) will only be more acute this year, given that we are likely to have not one but two candidates whose religious affiliation have or will be the source of much speculation and controversy.

But in the context of what we’re doing at this site, the question we should ask is whether critical thinking can play any role in evaluating matters that intersect with faith.  And after taking a look at these questions (and, hopefully, providing some answers) you should be in a position to evaluate whether or not someone who may subscribe to such beliefs is capable of thinking critically about them.

Continued...

Fallacies – 3

Well the primary race starts today, as does the countdown to when we’ll be applying some of the critical thinking tools we’ve been reviewing to real, live candidates.  But while we still have the luxury to work with abstractions, let’s finish up this discussion of fallacies with a review of best practices regarding how to avoid falling for them.

All three of the major categories of fallacies that were highlighted as likely to come at us over the coming months (including fallacious Argumentsfrom Authority, Emotion or Moderation) have something in common: they all take advantage of our better natures which would normally be respectful of authority, open to moving appeals to the heart, and ready to avoid extremes.  Fortunately, this points to an effective way to avoid falling into rhetorical traps: by letting our better natures prevail.

Take Arguments from Authority, for example.  In a sense, the best way to avoid falling for this type of fallacious argument is to follow the advice on that old bumper sticker to “Question Authority.”  But by this I don’t mean we should be mindlessly skeptical of all authority figures.  Rather, we should be respectful of people with high levels of intelligence and expertise, but not defer to them in all situations.

For starters, if someone is giving advice outside their field of study, they should be respected no less (and certainly no more) than any other smart person talking outside of their discipline.  It is only if they demand to be taken seriously as an authority on a subject about which they have no special knowledge (even if they are held as extremely prominent within that other field) that we should smell a potential rat. 

And even people speaking within their field should never be given an absolutely free ride.  If an expert is at odds with the consensus of his or her profession, they could either be a far-seeing sage or a quack.  In either case, additional evidence is required by them, as is additional analysis by us. 

In fact, any evidence we receive from experts should not be taken as received wisdom, at least not by those who want to be take critical thinking seriously.  Yes, there are some subjects (such as quantum mechanics) where most of us are forced to take an expert’s word that certain non-intuitive and unobservable phenomena can be explained only by complex theories that take years to understand.  But how many political issues that we face during an election cycle are so complex that we cannot bring our own ability to research, learn and think to an evaluation that can include learning from (without unquestioningly deferring to) multiple experts on different sides of the same political issue?

There are similar common sense solutions to the other two fallacies on the table. As was already discussed, Arguments from Emotion are on shaky ground if they appeal to things like fear, greed and hate and if they appeal to emotion only (rather than finding the right balance of logos and pathos to earn ethos on behalf of the speaker).  And if the extremes someone is trying to position themselves between to convince us that they are sane and moderate bear no resemblance to actual, practical political options, chances are someone is trying to manipulate you.

The most difficult part of all these reasonable solutions is that they must be applied across the board: to candidates we support as much as those we oppose.  Otherwise, we end up looking like the Internet debaters I remember from the old Wild West days of Usenet who periodically published (OK, cut and pasted) long lists of fallacies, only to apply them solely to the arguments of their opponents (never to themselves).

The use of a critical thinking vocabulary as a political weapon can itself be considered a fallacy (perhaps a “Fallacy Fallacy” if applied to my Usenet example), one in which the tools of critical thinking are simply used to give a partisan argument unearned weight.  As we get closer to Election Day and passions begin to boil, it will become increasingly difficult to pass judgment on our preferred candidate when they appeal fallaciously to authority, emotion or moderation (or utilize some other rhetorical trick that we know to be problematical).  But being honest with ourselves is how we can keep our preferred candidates honest with us as well. 

Most importantly, such honesty is the only way we can keep our own minds truly independent and ourselves truly free.

Fallacies – 2

Of the dozens of fallacies one can bring into an argument, Appeals to Authority, Emotion and Moderation are three we should be on the lookout for during this (or any) campaign season, given how important they have become to modern, media-driven political discourse.

We’ve already talked about when an Appeal to Authority becomes fallacious, either in a Formal or Informal sense, and to a large extent we covered Appeals to Emotion in a previous discussion of logos, pathos and ethos. 

As I highlighted in the discussion of pathos, appealing to the emotions of an audience you are trying to persuade is not necessarily manipulative or illegitimate (i.e., fallacious).  Given the extent to which humans are emotional animals, and given that not all challenging questions can be resolved through reason alone, emotion can be a useful resource to draw on to navigate difficult choices.

But if you look at the list of Appeals to Emotion that are categorized as fallacies, they include Appeals to emotions such as fear, ridicule and spite, i.e., those “bad emotions” that should cause us to recoil whenever we feel them welling up in ourselves.  So someone trying to stir up these bad emotions in an audience (particularly as part of a political argument) should be looked upon as using the tools of rhetoric inappropriately.

While an Appeal to Moderation seems like a favorite of contemporary Presidential candidates aiming for the center in a national election campaign, the desire for moderation among a democratic electorate goes back quite far.

“Nothing in Excess” was written above the Oracle at Delphi with moderation being seen as an ideal by the founders of democracy in ancient Athens.  It’s no accident that Aristotle defined virtue as “Finding the mean between the extremes” (specifically with regard to action or emotion), since casting oneself as a moderate standing between extremist politician alternatives was as popular a campaign theme 2500 years ago as it is today.

Appeals to Moderation stray into the territory of fallacy when it comes time to define what constitute the extremes one is locating oneself between. 

To take an uncontroversial, non-political example, if I were to try to define what constitutes a moderate temperature, I might choose a temperature we can all agree is uncomfortably cold (say zero degrees Fahrenheit) and another one most people would agree is uncomfortably hot (say 100 F) and average the two, defining “moderate” as a cool but comfortable 50 degrees (at least for we New Englanders). 

But what if used this same formula but defined cold as Absolute Zero (approximately -459 F) and hot as the temperature on the surface of the sun (which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 F).  That would create a “moderate” temperature of 5260 degrees F, something that most of us (outside of certain astronomers and physicists) would agree as a ridiculous definition of “moderate.”

In the same way, Appeals to Moderation in politics can only be considered legitimate when the extremes are realistic, genuine and not self serving. 

For example, most Presidential candidates try to demonstrate they are willing to stand up to the extremes within their own political party, as well as the party of their opponents.  But a debate over taxes in which a liberal candidate claims he is standing against his political comrades who want to return to a 90% tax rate for the rich and rivals who want to eliminate taxes entirely to support a call for a 45% tax rate (the mid-point between the 90% and 0% extremes) is acting disingenuously since (in today’s political environment, at least) calls for both massive taxation and no taxation are not considered as mainstream, realistic positions.  Rather, this politician needs to find realistic “extremes” to center his or her proposals between, or find other arguments to justify tax rates at the 45% level.

Similarly, a candidate claiming that a proposal to criminalize the performance of an abortion by doctors is “moderate” because it stands between throwing pregnant women who want this procedure behind bars and giving abortions for free at every CVS is also creating false (or at least wildly exaggerated) definitions of the extremes in the abortion debate.  This represents another fallacious real-world example of an Appeal to Moderation.

What Appeals to Authority, Emotion and Moderation have in common is that they all try to leverage elements of the human makeup that can be used for good or ill. We need and would like to trust expert opinion, especially in the complex age we live in.  And emotion (at least good emotion like love, generosity and courage) and moderation are all virtues that should inform our decision making.

Fortunately, we have ways of determining when these appeals are legitimate or fallacious, all of which boil down to thinking for ourselves.

Next Up – Thinking Through Fallacies