How to Think Straight: An Introduction to Critical Reasoning
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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 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 phī) 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” (Schopenhauer 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” (Sowell 1986a, 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.
*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).
2.1 Some examples in chapter 1 were, for good reasons given, trifling and even frivolous. Yet nothing could be more wrong than to carry away the impressions either that logic itself is trifling or that arguments cannot refer to matters of life and death. During World War II one of the soldiers of the doomed German Sixth Army outside Stalingrad wrote in what was to be his last letter to his wife: “If there is a God, you wrote to me in your last letter, then he will bring you back to me soon and healthy. . . . But, dearest, if your words are weighed now . . . you will have to make a difficult and great decision. . . .” (Schneider and Gullans 1965, p. 59).
2.2 The soldier was right. For if from any hypothesis, in this case that of the existence of (a certain sort of ) God, you can validly deduce some consequence, in this case that a particular soldier will return “so
on and healthy”; and if the consequence thus validly deduced is false, then it follows necessarily that the hypothesis itself must be false, too. So the wife, when she hears the news of the death of her husband, will indeed “have to make a difficult and great decision.” She will have to decide whether simply to abandon the hypothesis or whether instead to reinterpret it so that it does not entail the kind of consequences which she had thought to be validly deduced therefrom.
2.3 In the one case she will argue: Since If there were a God, then he would ensure that my husband would return safe from the wars and since My husband will not return safe from the wars, then it follows necessarily that There is no God. In the other case she will, as we all must, accept that this last argument is valid. But she will now deny the truth of the conditional proposition, which functions as the first premise of that argument: If there were (is) a God, then He would (will) ensure that my husband would (will) return safe from the wars. What will be called continuing to believe in God will, therefore, involve for her both a fresh interpretation of the meaning of the word “God” and a correspondingly revised understanding of the nature of the Being to whom that word is by her intended to refer. Previously she must have been construing it in such a way that it followed, from a statement that There is a God and given the implicit acceptance of certain here unstated assumptions about the nature of that Being, that He will ensure my husband’s safe return. But now she has come to interpret the same word “God” in such a way that this inference is invalid: there is, that is to say, no contradiction involved in, at one and the same time, both asserting these premises (properly understood) and denying the in fact false conclusion.