Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  Persuasion Alert

  I bring in Homer Simpson so often because The Simpsons satirizes America’s social fallacies; its humor relies on twists of logic. You couldn’t find a better set of examples in Plato.

  HOMER: In America we stopped using corporal punishment and things have never been better. The streets are safe. Old people strut confidently through the darkest alleys. And the weak and nerdy are admired for their computer programming abilities. So, like us, let your children run wild and free, because as the saying goes, “Let your children run wild and free.”

  The passage is doubly notable, for its logical use of commonplaces and its bold unconcern for the facts. If you want your streets to be safe and your nerds to be cherished, Homer says, don’t hit your kids. (Whether Australians actually want their nerds to be cherished and whether safe streets are an outcome of unhit kids lie beyond our discussion at the moment.) Homer dangles before them the Advantageous Prize that every rational persuader should offer, and he struts confidently through the dark alley of his own ignorance.

  For many of us, the most frustrating thing about an argument is the feeling that we don’t know enough about an issue. As important as facts are for an argument, they’re not always at your command. Here’s where logos comes to the rescue. It allows you to skip the facts when you have to, focusing instead on rational strategy, definition, and other subtle tactics.

  Logos also works well in defense, since you don’t have time to fact-check every argument. What do you say to a kid who swears she has finished her homework? How should you respond to a television commercial that attacks a candidate’s war record? Is there any way to listen to talk radio and separate fact from fiction? The nastiest political ads, the most underhanded sales pitches, and the stupidest human mistakes all rely on our ignorance of logic.

  Persuasion Alert

  Hyperbole is an incredibly useful figure (to coin a hyperbole); to make it easier to swallow, start small and work your way up—budget and diet, life and death, and the future of humanity. One Ivy League slogan—“God, man, and Yale”—got it backward. But perhaps they thought otherwise.

  Bad logic wastes time, and it ruins our health and our budgets. Children use it to torture their parents (“All the other kids get to”). Parents respond with bad logic (“If your friends told you to go jump in a lake…”). Doctors kill patients with it (“There’s nothing wrong with you; the tests came back negative”). It can make you fat (“Eat all of it—children are starving in Africa”). Candidates base their campaigns on it (Bernie Sanders: “Not me. Us.”). We even wage wars over bad logic (“If we pull out now, our soldiers will have died in vain”). Push polls—fake surveys with loaded questions—are bad logic (“Do you support government-financed abortions and a woman’s right to choose?”). These are no mere logical punctilios. We’re talking credit lines and waistlines, life and death, the future of human existence!

  Excuse the hyperbole—which, by the way, is not necessarily illogical, despite what you learned in school or on Star Trek. My own logical education before college consisted entirely of Mr. Spock, who led me to believe that anything tainted by emotion or values was “illogical” and that my status as an Earthling got me off the hook. Vulcans could be logical; the rest of us were hopeless. This was fine with me, because his kind of logic was a one-man date repellant. But in rhetoric—and among some branches of formal logic—emotions do not a fallacy make. Mr. Spock, it turns out, was no philosopher. He was just a stiff.

  The elementary logic taught in school is a step up from Star Trek, but it fails to apply to many real-life situations. One reason is that, while rhetoric helps us understand how humans communicate, formal logic has little use on this planet. Strictly logical argument, called dialectic, is mathematical and formulaic. While it trains the mind and can help you learn to spot fallacies, dialectic is too rule-bound to help you in daily conversation. In fact, some arguments that count as fallacies in formal logic are perfectly kosher in rhetoric.

  In this chapter, we’ll deal with formal logic—not formulaically, but in a way you can actually use. In Chapters 15 and 16, we’ll get into specific fallacies and rhetorical fouls that bollix up our arguments.

  Socrates and Sports Cars

  Meanings

  The Gospel of John, written in Greek, begins, “In the beginning was logos”—in the beginning was the word. You could also translate the sentence as “In the beginning was the plan.” The early Renaissance philosopher and rhetorician Desiderius Erasmus chose “In the beginning was the speech.” Erasmus, who uncovered many of Cicero’s writings in old libraries and monasteries, thought it perfectly natural for the Creator to talk, or even persuade, the world into being.

  You can already see that logos means more than just logic. Bible translators interpret it as “word.” But the Greeks also applied logos to logic, conversation, delivering a speech, and all the words and strategy that go into an argument. The tools of logos let you apply facts (if you have them), values, and attitudes to a particular problem.

  Rhetorical logic works differently than the logic taught in philosophy classes, thank goodness. Rhetoric is much less boring, for one thing, and far, far more persuasive. While philosophy scorns public opinion, in rhetoric the audience’s beliefs are at least as important as the facts. For persuasive purposes, the opinion of your audience is as good as what it knows, and what it thinks is true counts the same as the truth.

  To show you how rhetorical logic works, I have to give you a brief—very brief—summary of the philosophical kind of logic, starting with that torturous device, the syllogism. You may have suffered from syllogisms sometime during your education. They’re a widely used introduction to logic, and almost entirely useless in day-to-day conversation. Aristotle himself seemed committed to make the syllogism as boring as possible. Here’s an example he himself used to illustrate it:

  All men are mortal.

  Socrates is a man.

  Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

  Many syllogisms have this “Well, duh” quality to them, but they make more sense if you see them thrown up on a screen. Marketers use a kind of syllogism all the time in Venn diagrams—those interlocking circles in PowerPoint presentations. Suppose the automotive designers at Ford came out with a new muscle car called the Priapic, designed to appeal to testosterone-challenged men ages twenty-five to forty. What’s the size of the potential market? The Priapic marketing team pulls the stats and projects them as circles at the next managers’ meeting. The biggest circle contains the annual number of car buyers, the second circle contains all twenty-five- to-forty-year-old men, and the third shows the number of households with incomes that can afford a Priapic. The target is the overlap between youngish men and affluent households. The three circles form a syllogism: things slotted into categories to reach a conclusion.

  Similarly, you could convert Aristotle’s syllogism about Socrates into a Venn diagram. Make a big circle representing all mortals, place the circle for men inside it, and then a dot for Socrates within the men’s circle. The market size of male mortals named Socrates totals one. Logicians call this sort of reasoning “categorical” thinking. Most political labeling falls under this kind of logic, with candidates trying to shove one another like sumo wrestlers into unflattering Venn circles. All Democrats are tax-and-spend liberals; my opponent is a Democrat; therefore, my opponent is a tax-and-spend liberal.

  A second kind of syllogism comes from “if-then” thinking:

  If most men ages twenty-five to forty read “lad” magazines, and

  If ads in these magazines sell lots of cars,

  Then we should advertise the Priapic in lad mags.

  That’s formal logic. Start with something true, follow it with another truth, and you reach a conclusion that also must be true. The rhetorical version works a little differently, since it concern
s decisions instead of “the truth.” Assumptions or beliefs—commonplaces—work just as well as facts. Our Priapic marketers could use the commonplace “Babes go for guys with the newest sports cars.”

  If babes go for Priapic drivers, and

  If you go for babes,

  Then you should buy a Priapic.

  But that ad copy would appeal only to randy philosophy majors. Even the Greeks found syllogisms boring, because the middle line tends to be painfully obvious. One already assumes that the Priapic market is babe-prone.

  Aristotle made rhetorical logic zippier by streamlining the syllogism, ditching the middle line and leaving out the “if-then” part. The result is a neat little argument packet called the enthymeme. It takes a commonplace—a belief, value, or attitude—and uses it as a first step in convincing the audience.

  Let’s apply Aristotle’s enthymeme to the Priapic.

  Babes go for Priapic owners.

  You should buy a Priapic.

  Argument Tool

  ENTHYMEME: A logic sandwich that slaps a commonplace and a conclusion together. Enthymeme means “something in the mind.” It uses a commonplace—something in the audience’s mind—to support a choice.

  When a car ad portrays a pouty young woman, in other words, it simply employs Aristotle’s enthymeme. The car ad, the enthymeme, and the tired old syllogism all fall under deductive logic. It starts with a premise—a fact or commonplace—and applies it to a specific case to reach a conclusion. “All men are mortal” is a general concept. “Socrates is a man”—that’s the specific case. Conclusion: “Socrates is mortal.”

  Inductive logic works the opposite way, taking specific cases and using them to prove a premise or conclusion:

  Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and all others born more than a century and a half ago are dead.

  [The enthymeme would skip the obvious line “All of them were human.”]

  Therefore, all humans are mortal.

  TRY THIS WITH A PAPER OR MEMO

  Use an enthymeme to nail down your central argument. Choose a commonplace or commonly accepted axiom and link it to your conclusion. “To gain more point-of-purchase awareness, we should simplify our logo.” Now use that as an abstract on your title page.

  Deduction starts with the general and works to the specific: the premise proves the examples. Induction starts with the specific and works to the general: the examples prove the premise. Sherlock Holmes made deduction a household word when he applied commonsense principles—commonplaces—to his detective-story observations. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes guesses that poor, ingenuous Dr. Watson had been out in the rain (in London? No way!) and that he had an incompetent servant girl:

  Useful Figure

  The paralipsis (“leaving aside”) mentions something by saying you’re not going to mention it. It’s the not-to-mention figure, as in, “Not to mention the fact that you snore like a buzz saw in bed.” It makes you sound fairer than you are—denying you’ll kick a man when he’s down while digging a boot into his ribs.

  HOLMES: It is simplicity itself…my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey.

  Leaving aside that passage’s fetishistic tone, you can see Sherlockian deduction working the way the Aristotelian enthymeme does:

  If a shoe sole with scoring marks means careless scraping, and

  If such careless scraping must be done by an incompetent serving girl, then

  A gentleman with a carelessly scraped shoe has an incompetent serving girl.

  Like Aristotle, Holmes skips the middle line—careless scraping equals incompetent servant—because his snooty Victorian audience already knows that.

  Similarly, Annie could have used an enthymeme’s deductive logic to talk Kathy into voting for a Democrat.

  ANNIE: All politicians are alike when it comes to taxes; the only difference is that the Republicans won’t admit it. Given two politicians, I’d vote for the more honest one.

  Put it in a pair of syllogisms, and the logic works like this:

  If all politicians are alike on taxes, and

  If taxes are bad,

  Then all politicians are equally bad.

  But:

  If the Republicans lie about raising taxes, and

  If lying is bad,

  Then the Republicans are worse than the Democrats.

  Since Kathy presumably hates both taxes and lying, Annie can skip the middle line in each syllogism. Deduction is really quite elementary, as our smug detective would say. Take something the audience believes—a fact or commonplace—and apply that premise to a choice or conclusion that you want the audience to accept. Skip the part that goes without saying—taxes are bad, lying is bad—and voilà! An enthymeme.

  Deductive logic starts with a general premise and works toward the specific, applying a fact or commonplace (all politicians are alike) to a situation (the election). The premise is the proof. The choice you want your audience to make is the conclusion. Every logical argument has a proof and a conclusion.

  In deliberative argument, the conclusion is a choice—you can take your umbrella, or you can take your chances. The persuader bears the burden of proof; it’s up to her to back up the choice she wants you to make. She can prove her point in two ways:

  Examples. In this kind of argument, the evidence leads to either a premise or a conclusion. This is inductive logic. “Nine out of ten dentists recommend Dazzle toothpaste.” The dentists are the examples. They constitute the proof. If they think it works, you probably will, too. On the other hand, if the ad said, “Nine out of ten toothless convicts recommend Dazzle toothpaste,” you probably wouldn’t buy it. The proof wouldn’t stand up.

  Premise. This is part of deductive logic. A premise is something the audience knows or believes.

  So much for the proof. The conclusion in deliberative argument is a choice—what you want the audience to decide. Sometimes, though, you may find it hard to distinguish an argument’s proof from its conclusion. Here are two ways to spot the proof.

  If you already accept part of the argument, it probably constitutes the proof. Take “Eat your peas because they’re good for you.” You already know that peas are good for you, so that’s the proof. The choice is between eating your peas and not eating them. If you already planned to eat them, then you don’t have an argument in the first place.

  Another way to spot the proof is to look for the word “because.” It usually heads up the reason: eat your peas “because they’re good for you.” Arguments often imply “because” without actually stating it.

  Argument Tool

  PROOF SPOTTER: A proof consists of examples or a premise. A premise usually begins with “because,” or implies it.

  Here’s another one: “Vote Republican and keep taxes down.” If you have trouble finding the reason in this argument, restate it with “because” in the middle. If the sentence makes no sense with “because” in it, then someone may be pitching you a fallacy. In this case, though, it works fine: “Vote Republican, because Republicans will keep taxes down.”

  I think I’ll use the “because” technique to abuse a pollster.

  POLLSTER: Do you plan to vote Democratic and protect the middle class?

  This is a classic example of a push poll, that sleazy argument disguised as a survey.

  ME: You mean I should vote Democratic because that’ll help the middle class?<
br />
  POLLSTER: I’m not supposed to answer questions.

  ME: I only answer questions. You didn’t ask one.

  POLLSTER: Yes, sir, I did. I said…

  ME: You’re right. Actually, you asked two questions: Do I plan to vote Democratic, and do I want to help the middle class? Now, which would you like me to answer?

  POLLSTER: [Click.]

  Sometimes it’s actually good to use logic aggressively.

  Mozart Induces Hell

  Meanings

  If you have trouble remembering the difference between inductive and deductive logic, consider their roots. Induction comes from Latin for “to induce” or “to lead.” Inductive logic follows a trail, picking up clues that lead to the end of an argument. Deduction (both in rhetoric and in expense accounts) means “to take away.” Deductive logic uses a commonplace as a takeaway to apply to an example. If that still doesn’t work, skip the terms altogether and just use the argument tools you like.

  Rhetorical deduction goes like this: premise, therefore conclusion. You believe this, so you should do that. That is an enthymeme. In Annie’s case, I’m afraid that her enthymeme about all politicians being alike may not work. It has a problem with its commonplace: Kathy probably does not believe that all politicians are alike. She thinks that Democrats and Republicans are very different species. Annie will have to come up with some serious proof before she can sow doubts in Kathy’s mind.