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

Fallacies - 1

Fallacies are one of those critical thinking topics that could easily be discussed on this blog from now until Election Day.

Partly this is because there are so many different kinds of fallacies and, as mentioned previously, fallacies are one of the most fun topics to discuss in any class on logic, rhetoric or general critical thinking since they let you create all kinds of entertaining examples, from Groucho Marx wondering how an Elephant got into his pajamas, to Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Junior’s complicated doublespeak that led to my very favorite “If-by-Whiskey” fallacy.

There are a number of sites that exhaustively document these and other fallacies, and if you’re an audio-learner, I recommend the short audio lessons available here and here (which are a bit robotic in their delivery, but get the job done). 

But for purposes of preparing ourselves for the political argumentation that will be coming at us shortly from all directions, I’d like to focus on just a few specific fallacies that are commonplace during campaign season.

Before listing them, keep in mind that fallacies can be broken into two general categories, the first being Formal Fallacies that represent an error in the form of an argument (usually some sort of faulty logic) which can be flagged as fallacious regardless of content.  For example, the argument “All mermaids are female.  Gwen is a female.  Therefore Gwen is a mermaid.” is fallacious, regardless of whether mermaids exist.

A second category of informal fallacies actually cares about the content of the argument, not just its structure.  For example, the argument “Atoms are extremely small.  The universe is made of atoms.  Therefore the universe is extremely small.” is an informal Fallacy of Composition, assuming as it does that the qualities of a part of the whole (atoms) can be applied to the whole (the universe).

Typical fallacies you hear in political speech are Appeals to Authority, Appeals to Emotion, and Argument to Moderation.

Starting from the top, not all appeals to authority are fallacious.  For example, we prefer a surgeon take out our inflamed appendix and an auto mechanic fix our faulty brakes and would have a problem if those two specialists decided to trade jobs for the day.  And given the complexity of issues we have to deal with in an election cycle in areas such as the economy or war and peace, it’s appropriate that we look to professional economists, political scientists and historians to provide us information that would be hard to discover on our own.

But as we have seen in the past, every political candidate has their team of able economists (for example) ready to explain why their economic theories are correct (despite the fact that their opponent has an equally able economics team ready to support an opposite set of ideas).  Clearly, all of these experts cannot be right, which means we cannot rely solely on their authority to inform our choices over which economic vision to support.

So far, we have not identified the fallacious use of authority but simply pointed out that even the wisest and most talented group of experts cannot and should not be taken as the final word on any subject.

Appeals to authority reach the level of an informal fallacy when we are required to take the word of such authorities on faith (with politicians asking us to substitute their expertise for our own judgment or empirical evidence).   And they reach the level of a formal fallacy when the expert providing his or her opinion is speaking outside of his or her area of expertise, or in extreme opposition to a consensus in their field.

For example, a leader claiming that his or her team of PhDs in history and diplomacy provides them with enough expertise to make key decision on war and peace without further input would be committing an informal fallacy since there is every chance that this team, no matter how well informed, could be wrong.

But if a mathematics professor or linguist (no matter how brilliant in their field) starts making statements regarding international affairs, those opinions should be given no more (and certainly no less) weight than any other non-expert in the field, unless you want to be found guilty of committing a formal fallacious Appeal to Authority.  For people brilliant enough to see the world in ways we cannot are also brilliant enough to see the world in ways that are not true (an erect powerful defenses around why we should accept a picture of reality that we instinctively know isn’t right).

In our complicated world, we need experts and specialists to help us understand complex situations and inform and even make decisions we as individuals are not equipped to make on our own.  But that does not mean that levels of expertise alone should be used to sway our opinions on important matters. 

Next Up – Appeals to Emotion and Appeals to Moderation