Conclusion: Nothing is wrong with you.
What’s Wrong with This Argument?
“You don’t have many black people in New Hampshire,” a bigot said to me. “You’d think differently about them if you had to live with them.” It’s a standard-issue hasty generalization. Similarly, an argument that begins “You have no right to argue…” will often precede the fallacy “because you’re not black.” A legitimate answer: “No, I’m not. But we’re talking about race relations, not one person’s relations.”
But a logical chasm lies between the negative tests and perfect health. The proof doesn’t support the conclusion. Never mind that you happen to be doubled over in pain and seeing spots; the doctor has no data of illness, so you must be well. The only way to respond to this illogical argument, other than throwing up on his shoes, is to suggest more examples.
Common Fallacy
THE FALLACY OF IGNORANCE: If we can’t prove it, then it must not exist. Or if we can’t disprove it, then it must exist.
YOU: Then you must have tested for everything.
DOC: Well, not everything…
YOU: Did you test for beriberi?
DOC: You don’t have beriberi.
YOU: How do you know?
DOC: There hasn’t been a case of beriberi in the United States since—
YOU: But you didn’t test for it. So I could be the first.
DOC: It is possible, though unlikely, that you may have one of several other diseases.
YOU: So what should we do?
DOC: We’ll run some more tests.
You often see the same fallacy in reverse among unscientific types.
What Makes This a Sin
Again, there’s a disconnect between the proof and the choice. The examples—or lack of them—don’t support the choice.
BELIEVER: Dude, I believe in extrasensory perception and UFOs because scientists have never disproved them.
PROPER RHETORICAL REPLY: They never disproved that the moon can talk, either.
BELIEVER: You think it can?
PROPER RHETORICAL REPLY: Never mind.
Common Fallacy
TAUTOLOGY: The same thing gets repeated in different words. Logicians call this fallacy “begging the question,” but “tautology” is a better term.
Fourth Deadly Sin: The Tautology
One of the most boring fallacies, the tautology, basically just repeats the premise.
FAN: The Cowboys are favored to win since they’re the better team.
The proof and the conclusion agree perfectly, and there lies the problem. They agree because they’re the same thing. The result is a tautology, a favored fallacy for political campaigns.
CAMPAIGN WORKER: You can trust our candidate because he’s an honest man.
PROPER RHETORICAL REPLY: I don’t trust you, so that makes your guy seem twice as shady.
What Makes This a Sin
Another disconnect. The proof doesn’t support the choice, because the proof is the choice.
To most people, “begging the question” means asserting a conclusion without stating the premise. “The Republicans will win the White House next election” begs the question of who will get the nomination. “Whoever wins that election will become president”—that’s a tautology.
The tautology may seem like a harmless if knuckleheaded sin, but it can be used deliberately to lead you astray. I once lived in a town with a road that a developer named Vista View. It had a view of a vista: a rubble-strewn parking lot. Was the developer ignorant, or sneaky enough to conjure the vision of a vista (to coin another tautology) in your head? The comedian Alan King loved to tell how his lawyer used a tautology to talk him into doing a will. “If you die without a will,” the lawyer warned, “you’ll die intestate!” Only later did King realize that “intestate” means “without a will.” “In other words,” the comedian said, “if I die without a will, then I’ll die without a will. This legal pearl cost me five hundred dollars!”
Fifth Deadly Sin: The False Choice
Fallacies come in a number of flavors, but all of them suffer from a breakdown between the proof and the conclusion, either because the proof itself doesn’t hold up or because it fails to lead to the conclusion. Let’s review the push poll that tries to exploit that confusion.
POLLSTER: Do you support government-financed abortions and a woman’s right to choose?
Common Fallacy
MANY QUESTIONS: Two or more issues get squashed into one, so that a conclusion proves another conclusion.
Here you have a conclusion being used to prove another conclusion. It’s a “When did you stop beating your wife?” kind of fallacy called many questions, in which two or more issues get merged into one. If I want people to think you beat your wife, I imply it by asking “when.” I skip the first question and ask the second one. Similarly, the pollster’s abortion survey presumes a single answer to two questions—that opposing government financing of abortions necessarily makes you pro-life.
What Makes This a Sin
There may be nothing wrong with the proof, and the proof may lead to a choice, but the problem is that you’re being given the wrong number of choices.
PROPER RHETORICAL REPLY: I support a woman’s right to choose government-free abortions.
A related fallacy arises from a false choice. Suppose your company plans to produce a new line of lingerie for cats.
What’s Wrong with This Argument?
“What did the president know, and when did he know it?” That famous Watergate question committed the fallacy of many questions. “When did he know it” implied Nixon’s guilt by assuming he knew something about Watergate in the first place. Two issues are at stake here: First, did the president know anything, and if so, what? Second, if he knew something, when did he know it?
MARKETING DIRECTOR: We can appeal either to the cat fancier or to the general consumer. Since we want to target our market, we obviously should limit sales to cat shows.
Proof: What’s the reason? “We want to target the cat fancier.”
Conclusion: What’s the choice? “We should focus on cat shows.”
Common Fallacy
FALSE DILEMMA: You’re given two choices when you actually have many choices.
The reason fails to prove the conclusion, because it doesn’t tell you whether shows are the best place to target the cat fancier. This is the fallacy of the false dilemma: the marketing director gives you two choices when you really have a slew of them. You could also sell the cute little catnip-impregnated negligees and garter belts in department store lingerie sections, on eBay, or at house parties.
What’s Wrong with This Argument?
“You Can Help This Child, or You Can Turn the Page.” This ad raised a bundle for charity, but it was a false dilemma. You may have helped the child already by putting money in the church collection plate.
PROPER RHETORICAL REPLY: Do cat fanciers do anything but go to shows?
Choices aren’t the only things that get fallaciously limited. So do proofs.
Common Fallacy
COMPLEX CAUSE: Only one cause gets the blame (or credit) for something that has many causes.
LAWYER: My client’s motorcycle helmet failed, leaving him with a permanent, devastating headache. This jury should find the manufacturer grievously at fault.
The proof checks out: helmet failed, guy has a headache. But did the helmet’s failure cause the headache? Was it the only cause? The name for this fallacy is complex cause: more than one cause is to blame, but only one gets the rap.
PROPER RHETORICAL REPLY: Should the helmet have had a label warning against driving a hundred miles an hour while cracking open a beer and talking on a cellphone? Because tha
t’s what the plaintiff was doing.
What’s Wrong with This Argument?
“If you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich?” This commits any number of fallacies, including complex cause. Lots of things can make you rich, and being smart is not a sufficient cause—not in my experience.
Sixth Deadly Sin: The Red Herring
Common Fallacy
RED HERRING, AKA THE CHEWBACCA DEFENSE: It switches issues in midargument to throw the audience off the scent.
At some vague point in history, some bad guys theoretically used strong-smelling smoked herrings to throw dogs off their scent. Hence the name of this fallacy, in which the speaker deliberately brings up an irrelevant issue. But since no one even knows what a red herring is, a more common name is sneaking into the lexicon: the Chewbacca defense, named after a South Park episode. A record label sues one of the show’s characters for harassment after the man requests credit for a song the label plagiarized. The company hires Johnnie Cochran, who launches into the same argument that, South Park claims, he used for O.J.
What Makes This a Sin
Here the problem may not be with the proof or the conclusion at all. The problem is that they’re the wrong argument—a distraction from the real one.
COCHRAN: Why would a Wookie, an eight-foot-tall Wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case!…And so you have to remember, when you’re in that jury room deliberatin’ and conjugatin’ the Emancipation Proclamation [approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
The show satirizes the rhetorical red herring that Johnnie Cochran held in front of the jury’s noses: the glove that the prosecution said O.J. wore to kill his wife and her lover. “If the glove doesn’t fit, the jury must acquit!” Nice Chewbacca defense. He hijacked the murder trial and made it revolve around one piece in a very large and confusing body of evidence. (The South Park Cochran’s defense—and the one the real-life Cochran actually used in the O.J. trial—also qualifies as a complex cause.)
You would think that lobbyists go to some secret red herring school, because they base whole careers on it. Take the TV industry. The number of sex scenes on television doubled over a seven-year period, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, and there are now five sex scenes per hour on 70 percent of all network shows. And that’s not even counting Netflix. Instead of admitting that every network is turning into the Porn Channel, industry flack Jim Dyke, executive director of the misleadingly named TV Watch, argued against government interference.
DYKE: Some activists will only see another opportunity to push government as parent, but parents make the best decisions about what [TV] is appropriate for their family to watch and have the tools to enforce those decisions.
Sneaky Tactic
THE STRAW MAN: A version of the red herring fallacy, it switches topics to one that’s easier to fight.
Dyke uses the straw man tactic, which ignores the opponent’s argument and sets up a rhetorical straw man—an easier argument to attack. The interview was about TV’s disgusting stats; rather than hire lobbyists to fend off legislation, the industry might consider policing itself. Instead, the lobbyist switches topics to “government interference.”
PROPER RHETORICAL REPLY: Can you say that naked?
Seventh Deadly Sin: The Wrong Ending
LIBERAL: Affirmative action is needed because campuses are so white.
The proof is fine: college campuses remain predominantly Caucasian. But does it support the choice? No. The real argument is over whether affirmative action works. The premise only proves that a problem exists—assuming you think that a WASPish campus and uneducated minorities are a problem.
POSSIBLE REPLY: Affirmative action is mostly needed to assuage our guilt.
Common Fallacy
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE: If we allow this reasonable thing, it’ll inevitably lead to an extreme version of it.
One of the fallacies that result from the sin of the wrong ending is called slippery slope: if we do this reasonable thing, it’ll lead to something horrible. You hear it a lot in politics. Allow a few students to pray after class, and one day gospel ministers will be running our public schools. If Congress bans assault rifles, pretty soon jackbooted feds will be shooting hunters out of tree stands. But politicians aren’t the only slippery-slope culprits.
What Makes This a Sin
The proof may be okay, but it leads to the wrong conclusion.
PARENT: If I let you skip dinner, then I’ll have to let the other kids skip dinner.
This argument is so weird, you wonder why so many parents use it. Letting one kid skip will not cause you to dismiss the other kids. What law of parenting says that every rule has to apply equally to every child? Come on, Mom and Dad, show a little logical backbone.
But the most common kind of reason-conclusion confusion mix
TRY THIS IN ANY ARGUMENT
One of the best replies to the slippery slope is concession. Seem to take your opponent’s premise seriously, and solemnly oppose it. “I am adamantly against shooting hunters out of tree stands.” The slippery slope has a built-in reductio ad absurdum. It practically ridicules itself.
es up cause and effect. Suppose your town cut education funding dramatically and student test scores plummeted the following year.
EDUCATION ADVOCATES: Budget cuts are ruining our children!
Where’s the reason, and what’s the conclusion? Figure it out by inserting “because”: “Because the district cut the budget, our children are being ruined.”
Common Fallacy
THE CHANTICLEER FALLACY, AKA POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC: After this, therefore because of this. The reason (“This followed that”) doesn’t lead to the conclusion (“This caused that”).
Now you know the reason: the district cut the budget. Does the reason prove the conclusion? Did the budget cuts cause the bad grades? You see no proof of that. In fact, I doubt that scores would fall so soon. The education advocates in this case commit the same fallacy as Chanticleer, the rooster in the French fable who thinks his crowing makes the sun come up. The fallacy’s official name is post hoc ergo propter hoc—after this, therefore because of this—but I call it the Chanticleer fallacy. Another example:
COLLEGE ADMINISTRATOR: Our newsletter is a big success. After we started publishing it, alumni giving went up.
The boost in giving followed publication of the newsletter. Does that mean the letter made giving go up? Not necessarily. Nonetheless, this fallacy is rampant in academia, which explains why alumni get showered with stupid college mailings.
PROPER RHETORICAL REPLY: Congratulations! But the percentage who gave declined. Did the newsletter cause that, too?
Babies instinctively commit the Chanticleer fallacy.
TRY THIS BEFORE YOU HIRE SOMEONE
Scan a résumé’s list of accomplishments for possible Chanticleer crowing; then probe for them in the interview: “It says here that profits rose by 48 percent the year after you were hired. So you think your work as a stock boy made all the difference?”
BABY (internal babbled monologue): I kicked and got milk! I’ll kick again and get more!
So do governments, with potentially disastrous results.
GOVERNMENT (external babbled monologue): We ran up the debt and the economy improved! We’ll increase the debt more and the economy will get even better!
And so do superstitious types.
JEREMIAH: That hurricane wiped out a whole city. See what happens when
you allow gay marriage?
Crow on, Chanticleer, and fill your lungs to the glory of the sun. But don’t let it go to your head.
The Tools
Samuel Butler, a seventeenth-century author, loved neither logic nor rhetoric. He wrote a poem abusing an imaginary philosopher who was good only at splitting hairs.
He was in logic a great critic, Profoundly skill’d in analytic;
He could distinguish and divide
A hair ’twixt south and south-west side.
There are scores of hair-splitting logical fallacies; I focused on the ones that infest politics and your daily life, and grouped them into seven sins. My list of seven logical sins can be boiled down still further, to just three:
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 21