Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference

by Bernard M. Patten

  The more passionately something is believed, the more likely it is wrong.

  The number of people who believe with passionate conviction that they understand the problem involved must indicate that most of them must be mistaken. Admittedly, there might be many reasons behind passionate convictions, but one of those reasons is the need to avoid the discomfort of uncertainty.

  p. 197 Principle: Few things are as simple as we would like them to be. The ability to reason decreases as emotions increase.

  From which follows:

  Lesson: Skepticism, though uncomfortable, is probably more useful than faith. Opinions on most subjects are seldom more than opinions. The more inflamed we become, the less able we are to think clearly.

  Emotional interest often makes it much easier for us to detect prejudice in other people than it is to recognize it in ourselves. Why do you think a man who suffers from leukemia told me that his doctor never told him what his problem was? How in the world could this guy report for weekly chemotherapy and still claim ignorance of the reason for the treatments? The poor soul refused to believe he might die because to face that fact was too much for him. That he is seriously ill is too unpleasant for his ego to handle. So he denies the illness by denying that he knows about it. He explains why he doesn’t know anything about his disease by blaming his physician for not telling him. Having prejudged the issue, he has forced the facts to conform to his emotional need. How easily do we see through his facade! We can see through others. But we are unlikely to realize that we deceive ourselves when our wishes for wealth or happiness or our dread of ruin and death lead us to believe propositions that, if true, would secure the objects we desire or avert the disaster we fear.

  What’s wrong with that? It doesn’t work.

  Does this sound familiar? Such wishful thinking doesn’t work because it is contrary to the truth, to the reality in which we are situated, and to the reality from which we cannot escape (for long) without significant risk to life and limb.

  For example, “My Enron stock has gone from thirty to six. I’ll just hold it until it comes back.” Did holding on to Enron work? No way, José.

  What does this selection from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew mean? “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, ‘Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye,’ and behold, a beam is in thine own eye. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

  p. 198 Yep, it is easy to see the defects in others, in what they believe and what they don’t believe, but to recognize the same process at work in ourselves would be to discard personal prejudice.

  Color prejudice is a partial selection and therefore unreasonable and wrong.

  Judging anyone from a single trait or quality partially selects the evidence and therefore is unreasonable. “The Irish are drunks.” “The Hispanics lazy.” “The Jews control the media.” Sweeping statements like those are bound to be wrong and, even if they were not wrong, they would require load on load of evidence to support them before we should accept them as true.

  Among the common errors of judging we find the color problem. There is no reason (apart from some very special considerations related to the increased sensitivity of white skin to sunlight and the decreased sensitivity of black skin to the same) to judge anyone merely on the basis of skin color anymore than it would make sense to judge, say, a presidential candidate on the basis of eye color or hair color. Color, any color of any body part, is just not relevant to the office of president.

  Color prejudice has caused lots of trouble. It may have played a role in the war that killed more Americans than any other war ever fought by the United States, the Civil War. Color prejudice certainly plays a role in the social upheavals that plagued the United States in the sixties. Of interest, the writers of the Declaration of Independence said that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Yet slavery continued in the United States for eighty-seven years. How come? The founding fathers were smart men. They must have spotted the contradiction right away.

  Yes and no.

  In a sense, they knew about the problem, but few subjects are more promising for the study of how the human mind refuses to get around prejudice than the color problem. Millions of Negroes were kept in slavery while their masters proclaimed the principles of liberty and equality for all men. This contradiction between ideal and practice naturally troubled sensitive consciences. Opponents of slavery pointed out that the Declaration of Independence said that all men, not just a few and not just the whites, were created equal. How would the slave owners get around this irrefutable point? Think for a second. If you were a slave owner, how could you rationalize owning slaves and yet still subscribe to the idea that all men were created equal?

  p. 199 Answer: Slave owners discovered that the phrase “all men” excluded Negroes because Negroes were, properly speaking (according to slave owners), not humans. Rather, Negroes were considered (by slave owners) a kind of subhuman species. In some cases, it was proclaimed (irrationally) that Negroes were intellectually and morally inferior to whites and completely uneducable. In other cases, it was proclaimed, (irrationally) that Negroes were children, even though they might grow old, and therefore Negroes required someone to take care of them. And by extrapolation, if Negroes were children, it was in their best interest to remain under the control of the masters, who were parental substitutes.

  Despite these ingenious arguments, a few obstinate eccentrics continued to challenge this racial theory. These challenges brought forth further arguments. When it was found that on the average, the Negro brain was forty cubic centimeters smaller than the average white brain, these measurements were alleged to establish the black man’s inferiority. Any problems with that reasoning?

  Besides the argument’s simplicity, the argument is based on the assumption that brain power and brain size are directly related. They are not. Alphonse Daudet, the French writer, had a brain that at autopsy weighed only half normal, about 750 grams. The weight of Albert Einstein’s brain was about 150 grams below average. Once the argument of brain size had served racist purposes, it would never have done to investigate the question more closely. Polynesians, Kaffirs, and Eskimos all have larger brains on average than European whites.

  To use an argument when it supports our preconceptions and reject it in another context when it fails to do so is known as special pleading. Watch out for special pleading, for it is an exceedingly common error in thinking. It usually arises in discussions in which the person advancing the argument claims some special exemption or special benefit for himself while denying that exemption or benefit to others.

  My argument that doctors should be tax exempt would be highly suspicious in light of the fact that I am a doctor and would benefit financially from tax exemption. Viewed in this cold light, the special pleading for tax exemption seems entirely self-serving and silly, yet our tax laws are riddled with all sorts of special exemptions (often known as loopholes) just as self-serving and silly. These special exemptions apply to individuals and corporations for political reasons, often in return for contributions to political campaigns.

  The trouble is that so many of these special exemptions are hidden p. 200 from the public. For instance, did you know that certain legislators receive payments from the government over and above their salaries that are in lieu of expenses? They need not account for these payments, which are not taxed on the theory (a rationale) that the funds were expended as legitimate expenses of office. In reality, the payments represent tax-exempt pay for public office holders, particularly those in Congress. The people in power have a deep affection for these payments in lieu of expenses and affectionately call them Lulus—payments in lieu of expenses, often those that were not spent for government business.

  The argument that such
payments are needed to attract qualified people to government or to permit the proper execution of the duties of office are arguments that, if not supported by relevant and adequate evidence, smack of special pleading.

  One of the major offenders in this area of crooked thinking is the United States Government. The government has constructed sets of special exceptions to what is otherwise the general law of the land. Thus, federal employees (including the members of the Senate and House of Representatives) do not pay Social Security taxes. They are excused from participation in the program because they have their own plans. Yet if I wished to be excluded from the Social Security system because I have another pension plan, force of law would prevent me. And if I insisted on not paying Social Security taxes, I would be sent to jail. Government office buildings are exempt from regulations that control the safety of nongovernment buildings. VA hospitals, among the least safe in the nation, are exempt from multiple rules that govern all other hospitals except the Indian Service, which, incidentally, is also run by an agency of the federal government, the Public Health Service. Until recently, the House and Senate was exempt from OSHA rules. Now they are only partially exempt. And so forth.

  Consider the following from page 1 of the New York Times, March 30, 2002: “The Pentagon is seeking an exemption to laws that protect endangered species and their habitats, saying that they interfere with training and weapons development.” Pause and think. Any evidence of special pleading? How would you counter this argument?

  Answer: This is a special pleading because the Pentagon is applying principles, rules, and criteria to others while failing to or refusing to apply them to itself. The Pentagon’s self-serving and silly argument that it should be exempt from environment protection laws is highly suspicious in light of the fact that the Pentagon would benefit from the p. 201 exemption and would be excused from past offenses in which it was out of compliance.

  How would you argue against such exemptions?

  “The equal administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government” is the motto engraved on the Second District Supreme Court building in New York City. If that is true and the government believes it, then special exception to laws would be a violation of equal administration. Hence, exemptions are wrong.

  The Pentagon has not provided relevant and sufficient evidence (in number, kind, and weight) for the need for the exception. Some people, myself included, would argue that the weapons programs, since they are so destructive to wildlife habitats, should not only not be exempt, they also should come under special scrutiny to make sure they conform to environment protection rules.

  This book is not concerned with arming you to attack fallacies. It is designed to help you reach the truth by reasoning things out. This book is not designed to help you attack the unclear thinking of others or win arguments. But special pleading by the government is so widespread and egregious that I will give you some tips on what to do to effectively counter arguments like this one.

  The most effective attack against special pleading is to accuse your opponent of applying a double standard, playing favorites, or being inconsistent. Each of these charges is commonly understood outside academic circles and has strong negative connotations, with which even the Pentagon will not wish to be associated.

  Another effective attack is to ask why such a special exemption is justified and then attack the reasons point by point, showing their absurdity.

  Sometimes, to help clarify the thinking on the issue, it helps to reduce the request for exemption to what is called standard form, that is, the form of a syllogism:

  Premise one: Environmental protection laws should in general be applied uniformly.

  Premise two: But because the work of weapons development is so important, and not like the work of any industry in the degree of importance, the Pentagon should be a special exemption to the environment rules.

  p. 202 Conclusion: Therefore, environmental protection should not be applied to the Pentagon.

  The Pentagon must agree with premise one because it is stated in the Constitution under the equal protection clause. Most people, including those in the Pentagon, would agree that premise two contradicts premise one, and therefore the conclusion that rests upon premise two must be wrong.

  The rich often advance arguments why they should be taxed less than the poor. The rich feel that they need the money to create jobs and to advance other important societal goals. CEOs believe they need a large salary because of the particular importance of the work they do, because their savings increase the wealth of the nation, and because their expenditures maintain full employment. Sometimes the argument is even more silly: that the money given to advance the prosperity of the rich will trickle down to others and will eventually reach the poor. Otherwise stated: Give money to the rich, and everyone benefits. Yet while advocating high salaries and benefits for themselves, many CEOs would argue that the wages they pay others should be kept low to advance the company’s bottom line, to protect stockholder value, to prevent inflation, and so forth.

  Couldn’t the argument be reversed and remain equally cogent? Give money to the poor, and everyone benefits. Pay high wages and more money in circulation will boost the general prosperity?

  How would you counter the following argument: “Money to the poor? No way. The poor will just spend it on beer and betting on horse races.” Besides the usual objections, the mutual inconsistency of propositions like this statement can be brought out by changing the context of the application. Have the rich person who propounded this absurdity admit the underlying assumption of his argument. Think for a moment and try to discover what is the assumption underlying the above argument.

  Got it? Great. Proceed to the next paragraph. Don’t get it? Then reread the statement. Doesn’t it imply that the poor should not be permitted to spend their money they way they wish? If that is true, then wouldn’t it be consistent to consider that the rich should not be permitted to spend their money the way they wish?

  Yep, that’s the way to nail a special pleader. Force them to apply their general assumption to the particular case that hits closer to home. In this instance, the real question is, “Are the poor entitled to spend their money the way they wish, even if they are spending it on beer and p. 203 horse racing? If the poor are not entitled to spend their money on such things, then how come the rich are entitled to spend their money on expensive French wines, foreign travel, yachts, private jets, luxury meals at the Four Seasons, diamonds and pearls, and so on?” If the general principle is that no one can spend their money on frivolous pastimes, then the general principle should apply to rich and poor alike. Otherwise, the principle is not generally applicable and therefore fallacious. Of course, the rich person who dislikes the poor spending money on beer will have strong objections to anyone preventing them from spending money on wine.

  Principle: Bad arguments are easy to detect when they involve money, personal interest, and power.

  From which follows:

  Lesson: If there are vested interests in a person’s argument, watch out. Most likely, the argument is wrong. Expose the interest and counter the argument by eliminating the interest for that person. After the vested interest is exposed and eliminated, most bad arguments will disappear.

  How would you approach this argument if it were offered by an oil company executive? “We should drill for oil in the Arctic wildlife refuge. That will assure our energy independence for decades to come, protect our freedom, and reduce gasoline prices.”

  The truth is that the oil companies stand to benefit greatly from such drilling. But the idea that they will profit greatly from the endeavor is not mentioned. The argument could be changed completely by asserting that since the drilling will take place on public land, the profits derived from the activity—all the profits, not just part of the profits—rightfully belong to the public and none of those profits belongs to the oil companies. Once the profits have disappeared, I’ll bet drilling advocates will, for the most p
art, also disappear. Their real interest was their own good and not that of the public.

  External reports issued by accountants are intended to provide financial information about the firm audited to outside individuals and businesses. The Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires publicly p. 204 traded firms to file external reports every ninety days and a more complete report every year. Because these external reports are necessary for obtaining loans, establishing credit, attracting investors, and recruiting key employees, most nonpublicly traded firms produce them as well.

  SEC requires three types of external reports: a balance sheet, an income statement, and a cash-flow statement. Those three reports constitute the company’s “financial statements.”

  The financial statements are reviewed, audited, and “certified” by accounting firms that are independent of the business being audited. The financial statements required by the SEC must meet what are called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or “GAAP” (pronounced “gap”) standards, which are the concepts, conventions, rules, and procedures that together make up accepted accounting practices. One of the main principles of GAAP is that the accountant should use methods that will never overstate the value of assets or income or understate the amount of a debt or expenditure.

  Enron listed its income but put its debt off the financial statements. Enron listed its cash flow into the business but concealed its cash flow out.

  If I were to list just my assets and none of my liabilities, the picture of my personal wealth would be skewed to present a more favorable view than was justified by the reality. If I listed just my debts and none of my assets, the picture of my personal wealth would be skewed to present a less favorable view than was justified by the reality. So by partial selection of the evidence, I could “prove” that I was rich or that I was broke. By the same token, by partial selection of evidence one can “prove” that religion is great or terrible, that science is wonderful or dreadful, or that a company is doing well or poorly.