by Antony Flew
5.47 The third thing to notice in connection with the second sort of meaning is the phenomenon of Persuasive Definition. The phenomenon was first discussed extensively, and this label introduced, by the philosopher C. L. Stevenson. He distinguished between descriptive and emotive meaning using “emotive” in an extremely comprehensive, ragbag sense. Persuasive Definition consists in the attempt to annex either the favorable or the unfavorable emotive meaning of a word to some different descriptive meaning. Adolf Hitler was engaged in persuasive definition when on behalf of his National Socialist German Workers’ Party he proclaimed: “National Socialism is true democracy.” So were those supposedly at the opposite end of the political spectrum, who christened the Soviet zone of Germany “The German Democratic Republic” and argued for their description (see paragraphs 1.30 and 4.9).
5.48 Perhaps the best explanation and illustration is a passage C. L. Stevenson quotes from Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936):
“But if you want to be free, you’ve got to be a prisoner. It’s a condition of freedom—true freedom.” “True freedom!” Anthony repeated in the parody of a clerical voice. “I always love that kind of argument. The contrary of a thing isn’t its contrary; oh dear me no! It’s the thing itself but as it truly is. Ask any diehard what conservatism is; he’ll tell you it’s true socialism. And the brewer’s trade papers: they’re full of articles about the beauty of true temperance. Ordinary temperance is just gross refusal to drink; but true temperance, true temperance is something much more refined. True temperance is a bottle of claret with each meal and three double whiskies after dinner. . . . What’s in a name?” Anthony went on. “The answer is, practically everything, if the name’s a good one. Freedom is a marvellous name. That’s why you’re so anxious to make use of it. You think that if you call imprisonment true freedom, people will be attracted to the prison. And the worst of it is you’re quite right.” (Quoted in Stevenson 1945, pp. 214–15)
6.1 The older and wiser geisha of traditional Japan are said to have lived by the maxim: “Where figures are deficient, grace and charm must come to the rescue.” But where figures, in another sense, are more abundant neither grace nor charm can substitute for critical alertness. Consider, for instance, the statement that 70 percent of the people currently serving sentences in the prisons of Ruritania have served one or more previous terms. Does this mean that Ruritania is afflicted with a recidivism rate of 70 percent; that is, that 70 percent of those sentenced for the first time come back for more? And if so, are we further entitled to infer that, at least in Ruritania, the threat of prison is as a deterrent largely ineffective?
6.2 A moment’s thought will show that the correct answer to both questions is “No.” Consider the second question first. Suppose that 70 percent of those sentenced for the first time do come back for more and let us assume also—perhaps too optimistically—that Ruritania’s courts never convict the innocent. Then we certainly may, indeed we must, conclude that most of those sentenced for the first time (70 percent, to be precise) are not deterred from committing a second offense. This is a sad, bad business: a series of prison terms is no way to fill a lifetime. But nothing has been said to preclude the possibility that the existing Ruritanian penal arrangements, whatever their faults, are successfully deterring many others who do not offend but, but for the existence of these arrangements, would offend. The mistake is to overlook that the Ruritanian prison population, precisely because it contains all and only those serving terms of imprisonment, is not a fair sample of the whole adult population of Ruritania.
6.3 Now consider the first proposed conclusion. Given that 70 percent of those currently serving sentences have been in prison before, can we conclude that 70 percent of those imprisoned for the first time come back for more? No, we cannot. Our information is inadequate to support any such conclusion. If we want to know what proportion of first-term convicts eventually graduate into second-term convicts, then we shall have to investigate not the term distribution in the present prison population, but the recidivism pattern revealed by past and future prison records.
6.4 Consideration of this item from the fictitious annual returns of the equally fictitious Ruritanian Department of Justice was intended to show how easy it is to go badly wrong in an important matter by misconstruing even one solitary figure. The lesson should be the more salutary since in this imaginary case we cannot attribute our misinterpretations of the data to the deceitful wiles of someone else. For we were not even entertaining the possibility that the single statistic provided might be itself unreliable. Obviously the possibilities of error will increase with any increase in the quantity and complexity of the statistics available; obviously, too, to broach the question of the reliability of the figures offered is to open up a new dimension of difficulty and maybe duplicity. But people do often exaggerate the importance of the intention to hoodwink others as a cause of the misinterpretation of figures which, if properly understood and correctly interpreted, are quite sufficiently accurate. For most of us, as we shall see, are fully capable of drawing incorrect conclusions without either ourselves or anyone else intending that we should do so.
6.5 Certainly a scandalous amount of hocus-pocus with statistics is executed in the frequently fulfilled intention of deceiving other people about what various figures, which are in themselves uncorrupted, do really prove. But there is also an abundance of self-deception, as well as a deal of error which is not the result of bad faith on anyone’s part. Since this book is for those who want to improve their own thinking, it is right to concentrate upon our own intellectual lapses and self-deceits. It would no doubt be more agreeable to pillory such notorious public enemies as dishonest advertisers and demagogic politicians. But better thinking, like charity and overpopulation, begins at home. Nor should we forget that demagogues, precisely because they do as such court popularity, would have no incentive to twist and misinterpret the data were there no public eager to applaud shabby maneuvers in support of comfortable prejudices (see paragraph 1.58).
6.6 Another thing that first example was intended to suggest is that there is in our time no escape from figures. The only choice is whether to misinterpret them or whether to interpret them correctly. It is not only that again and again the best evidence is quantitative, although this is both true and important. It is also that many of the most disputed contemporary issues are themselves essentially quantitative. For instance, questions about pollution and about conservation are in practice nearly always questions about how much contamination or how much culling is tolerable. (See paragraph 7.43 for yet another kind of important, essentially quantitative question; namely, that of the poisonness or otherwise of different substances.) For example, we hear that the additional radiation risk consequent upon the commissioning of a new atomic power station in a certain place would be about the same as that already arising from the natural background in that same place. Reassured by the thought that what is natural must be all right—a thought that will have to be subjected to severe critical examination in chapter 7—we fail to notice that this statistic could equally correctly and no less honestly be presented as showing what would surely be felt to be an equally alarming doubling of what had been or would have been the previous risk.
6.7 To appreciate the significance of one statistic, we often need to deploy some others as benchmarks. To know whether we ought to be alarmed or reassured in the present case we shall need to discover what the natural radiation risk was in the area in question and the factor by which a doubling of the radiation index increases the risks. The answers to these questions, too, will have to be specified in figures. Then, to understand how seriously we ought to be worried we shall need to make comparisons, which will be equally quantitative, with other more familiar dangers: those, say, of being a casualty in a road accident or those of birth defects that are not consequences of radiation exposure. No one who is intelligently concerned to produce actual improvements, rather than simply to acquire a reputation for caring, c
an afford to accept the irrational if perhaps endearing advice once given by the editor of an Anarchist daily newspaper in Spain: “Let us have no more of these miserable statistics, which only freeze the brain and paralyze the blood” (quoted in Brenan 1943, p. 155n.).
6.8 The truth is that it is impossible for human beings or for the members of any other species of living things to live at all without thereby becoming exposed to risks. The reason why people in several of what are certainly the richest, most healthy, and most long-lived human societies which have ever existed appear to be so extraordinarily worried about perceived dangers to their lives and to their health is, surely, that the constant and perhaps exponential growth of human knowledge is necessarily producing ever more knowledge of the innumerable risks to which we may be exposed? Since it is impossible for us either to know all the risks to which we may possibly be exposed or to live without being exposed to any risks at all we have either individually or somehow collectively to make decisions about which risks to identify and to try to diminish or to escape. (For an examination of more and less rational reactions to this inescapable human predicament, see Douglas and Wildavsky 1983).
6.9 Consider again the case of the doubling of the radiation risks in some area by the commissioning in it of a nuclear power station. Our understanding of these particular risks will be transformed totally by the knowledge that almost everything is to some minute degree naturally radioactive and that the risks, if any, from such minute amounts of radioactivity are negligible. Thus, the Nobel laureate Rosalyn Yalow testified to the U.S. Congress that: “As an adult, living human being, my body contains natural radioactivity: 0.1 microcuries of potassium-40 and 0.1 microcuries of carbon-14. According to the current rules of the NRC . . . if I were a laboratory animal who had received this amount of radioactivity as ‘by-product material’ and died with the radioactivity still in my body, I could not be buried, burned or disposed of in the garbage” (quoted in Efron 1984, p. 409). It was facts of this sort that induced the late Petr Beckmann, author of The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (1976) and founding editor of Access to Energy, to issue bumper stickers bearing the legend “Ralph Nader Is Radioactive.”
6.10 The first essentials for appreciating the significance or lack of significance of statistics of the sort with which the media confront the general public are in no way technical. What is needed first, and most, and all the time, is an unspecialized critical alertness. This is what we show when we refuse to draw wrong conclusions from the news that 70 percent of the present prison population of Ruritania have already served one or more previous terms or that the commissioning of a nuclear power plant in some area will result in a doubling of the former and natural amount of radiation in that area.
6.11 Another simple, but to many misleading, example is provided by those who cite statistics supposedly showing that the traditional nuclear family is already an anachronism. Only some 26 percent of households, they say, consist of two-parent families and their children. This sounds small. No doubt, too, it is substantially smaller than the percentage would have been a century ago when both the average number of children in each household was larger and the average age of adult death was lower. But what makes this figure of 26 percent so grossly misleading is that it excludes both the households of all who are not yet and perhaps never will be parents and the households of all parents whose children have grown up and left home. To appreciate this requires no familiarity with the notion of statistical significance nor any ability to make Chi-square tests, although it would be desirable to introduce both these things into the compulsory element of everyone’s education. What is required is only common sense—sometimes, it would seem, a somewhat scarce commodity.
6.12 Another simple but more important example is the figures supposedly showing that women earn less than men. The actual figures reported, of course, vary from year to year and from country to country. But all those which I have myself come across during the last twenty years have indicated that the earnings of women were between only 59 percent and only 75 percent of the earnings of men. Always these figures have been presented as revealing a situation considered to be self-evidently scandalous. If these percentages were percentages of what men were being paid for the same numbers of hours of the same kinds of work, then the situations in the countries concerned would indeed be self-evidently scandalous. But in countries of the kind in which such statistics are regularly compiled, published, and widely discussed it is by now probably illegal and in any case practically impossible for employers to pay women less for the same number of hours of the same sort of work.
6.13 Of course, even where there are such laws it is likely that there will be at least some evasion and some breaches of these laws, and much more evasion and more breaches in some countries than in others. But by far the greater part of the explanation of such substantial percentage differences must surely lie in the effects on women of childbearing and child raising. These activities result in women averaging fewer hours of work in the year (as part-timers) and fewer years on a given job than men. Add to these causes the facts that there are physically demanding and well-paid fields which women seldom enter—mining, lumberjacking, and construction work, for example. There are also other less physically demanding well-paid fields in which a strong mathematics background is required—something which is even rarer among women than among men. Even with all of this it seems that, at least in the United States, the really big difference in income is not between men and women but between married women and everyone else. (See, for instance, Sowell 1984, chapter 5.)
6.14 You may want to remove some or all of these and various other differences—of these and various other inequalities—between men and women. But you will, I hope, not want to claim that the inequalities in earnings which are the results of marriage and motherhood are as self-evidently unfair and scandalous as they certainly would be were they the results of employers paying women less for the same number of hours of the same kinds of work than they were paying men. If it is for any reason thought desirable to reduce these particular inequalities, then this reduction will presumably have to be achieved by the provision of substantial state subsidies for mothers who are caring for their own children and/or by the maintenance of a National Child Care Service. Such policies would obviously have substantial tax implications, which is neither to assert nor to imply anything about their acceptability.
6.15 Finally, it is also worth noting two other important inequalities between the life situations of men and women, inequalities rarely mentioned in this kind of context. For the last several decades the suicide rate among American men has been more than three times that among American women, whereas in all First World countries we find that however much the life expectancy for men rises, it never catches up to equal that for women. One shudders to think of the policies which might be formulated to remove or reduce these two inequalities! (Levin 1987 and Goldberg 1993 can be strongly recommended to feminists eager to face and to attempt to overcome a powerful intellectual challenge.)
6.16 These days the sorts of inequalities most regularly discussed and researched are those of income and wealth. These discussions and also the researches to which they refer are often vitiated by distorting malpractices. For instance, it will not do, notwithstanding that it is done daily, to compare one person’s weekly wage with another person’s annual salary. To do this is to cheat. It is to misrepresent one of the two terms in the chosen comparison by a factor of fifty-two.
6.17 Again it will not do, notwithstanding that this too is done daily, to compare one person’s take-home pay after tax and all other stoppages and subtractions with someone else’s gross income. This malpractice is especially deceitful in countries with more or less fiercely progressive taxation on incomes. For it is a defining characteristic of any system of progressive taxation—as opposed to proportionate taxation or to poll taxation—that it should diminish the real differences, net of tax, between any extremes of gross income. To leave t
he impact of progressive taxation out of account must be, therefore, to exaggerate the differences in spendable income net of tax. The cheat is compounded when, as here, the effect of taxation is neglected in only one of the two terms of the comparison.
6.18 These are strong words condemning flagrant misdemeanors. Such condemnation is likely to stir up a storm of defenders: “What do you expect a labor union leader to say?” Well, we ought all to expect (prescriptive) labor union leaders, and everyone else, to present an honest case honestly argued; although I am afraid experience has taught us that this is not always to be expected (descriptive) either of labor union leaders or of many other people—sometimes including, perhaps, even ourselves (see paragraphs 5.14 and 5.19).
6.19 Those same defenders may state: “But you can understand why people think up these twisted comparisons and cherish them.” Certainly, we all can. But the point was precisely and only to bring out that and how they are twisted, and thereby to make such malpractices fractionally less frequent and less welcome. We all know too why people cheat on their tax returns. But that is not in itself an objection to the endeavors of the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make such cheating less common. We have here a fresh species within the genus Subject/Motive Shift (see paragraphs 4.3, 4.13–4.14, and 4.17–4.18). Let it be simultaneously both christened and pilloried the But-you-can-understand-why Evasion.
6.20 One possible and very salutary response to misrepresentations, and one which is appropriate to them all and not only to those of the kinds so far considered, is to point out that, in general, unsound argument and outright misrepresentation should tend to discredit the causes which they are recruited to serve. If spokespersons have to multiply the actual difference by fifty-two in order to seem to justify their indignation, then the uncommitted critic should surely be inclined to conclude that the present position is nothing like so obnoxious as these spokespersons have been trying to make out. If controversialists deliberately misrepresent the positions of their opponents or knowingly employ fallacious arguments against them, then those opponents are fully entitled, and would be well advised, to insist that this misbehavior constitutes a tacit and reluctant admission that their own actual position is one which the misbehaver is altogether unable validly to refute.