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.

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

Consistency

As the contours of the upcoming US election begins to take shape, we will be visiting the subjects of rhetoric and argumentation again and again in the context of analyzing candidate speeches, debates, ad campaigns and other forms of written, oral and even visual communications.

Even those not involved with the study of critical thinking tend to enjoy these subjects, especially since they involve verbal jousting (like what you might find in a courtroom drama) as well as the fun related to finding examples to illustrate various fallacies, my favorites being Woody Allen’s “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Thus, all men are Socrates” (a Syllogistic fallacy) and Grocho Marx’s “I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know” (an example of Amphiboly).

But before we start down that road, we should note an underlying human characteristic that informs our response to rhetoric and many other stimuli we are exposed to in our daily lives: an overwhelming desire for consistency.

Like cognitive biases, the desire for consistency (or, at the very least, a discomfort with inconsistency) seems to be hard wired into the human brain. Many logical arguments (from mathematical proofs to philosophical debates) satisfactorily terminate when it can be demonstrated that they end or lead to an inconsistency (such as A equals not A). Indeed, the Law of Non-Contradition is one of the foundational principles of all logic. And even our sense of humor seems to be built around the surprise associated with inconsistent behavior (such as the actions taken by a third man walking into a bar which does not jibe with the behavior of the first two).

In politics, this drive for consistency underlies the most powerful accusation one can hurl at an opponent or their supporters: that of hypocrisy. For while accusing an opponent of being a liar is considered poor form (and often rebounds on the accuser, making them come off as ill tempered and nasty), accusations of hypocrisy almost always leave the accused on the defensive and are thus powerful tools in the politicians rhetorical arsenal.

The foundations for an accusation of hypocrisy can take many forms, such as the politician who votes against school choice programs while sending his or her own children to expensive private schools or a finger-wagging moralist legislator (or preacher) caught in a extra-marital affair. But inconsistencies can also be subtler or exist in the “eye of the beholder” of just one person or group.

For example, an elected official’s failure to “live up to their campaign rhetoric” (by voting for something they vowed to vote against during the campaign season, for example) often underlies accusations of dread hypocrisy during the next campaign season which resonate with votes who tend to look for consistent behavior as a sign of strong character. But now we get into more complicated territory since campaign promises can be vague and open to interpretation, and legislation is often the result of compromise between competing goods, meaning a perceived inconsistency may be the result of incomplete information or an oversimplified (and sometimes self-serving) interpretation of events (i.e., “spin”).

The drive to see consistency in leaders (especially those whom we support) and inconsistency/hypocricy in others (especially those we do not support) also taps into discomfort with our own inconsistent behavior. This can include anything from ignoring the homeless person asking for a handout (despite our self-identification as being generous and caring) to cutting corners at work (despite our belief in our own dedication and commitment) to thinking inappropriate thoughts about a stranger’s attractive appearance (despite our self-awareness of being a happily married and committed spouse).

In other words, we seem to be looking for a political leader to demonstrate a level of consistency that we instinctively know first-hand is not possible by a member of the human species. This inconsistency in our own desire for consistency is even more complicated since anyone who has risen to the level of being able to run for President has no doubt had to make compromises along the way that the rest of us never have to confront.

Now a partisan voter has a simple solution to this problem: ignoring inconsistencies that can lead to accusations of hypocrisy on the part of candidates they like, but highlighting and dwelling on similar inconsistency/hypocrisy on the part of those they dislike.

But as critical thinkers, we are obliged to recognize (from first-hand experience) that any human being is made up of multiple interests, desires and motivations which can legitimately be in conflict without rising to a level of hypocrisy that would imply a significant character flaw. And we must also recognize that the political process (which is ultimately about compromise between different opinions, many of which represent competing goods) means that absolute consistency is not possible and may not even desirable for a candidate who must lead a nation of 300,000,000+ people who neither individually or collectively represent a single (or consistent) set of beliefs.