Scroll down and check out the fallacy examples and the comments, when you get a chance. So far all the ones I've looked at are good examples, and the students seem to be well under way to explaining the fallacies. But I'd say they're not yet quite done.
In the comments to the examples, I have gone ahead and been critical. I'm hoping that all students will read some of these to get a closer idea how I'm evaluating the fallacy assignments.
Also, those who have posted are welcome to amend their explanations or add to them, of course.
Showing posts with label fallacies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fallacies. Show all posts
Monday, May 21, 2007
CAPTAIN'S LOG STARDATE 05202007
Hello, folks. This is a very long blog entry. Those who attended class on 5/20/2007 will find it mostly repeats what we stated in class. However, it does deal with specific assignments that some of you have found unclear, and some of it deals in depth with the issue of fallacies because I think that may be part of the unclarity in the fallacy assignment.
I thought some would like these concepts written, so here they are:
Fallacy | Fallacy Assignments | Blogging
The entry begins as follows:
A few of you missed a fairly eventful class today. We were gassed and had to leave. More precisely, building maintainance made me dismiss class just after 10 because an apparent natural gas leak in the building had created a hazard.
I hope we got some clarity about assignments and times before we left. (Please tell me if we did not!) But I want to go over things here to make sure.
VA DAY WEEKEND 5/27
Next week is Veterans' Day Weekend. However, the MtSAC holiday is on Monday. We will meet on Sunday, 5/27. Anyone with special considerations may contact me about attendance issues, but since our debate team session got gassed out today, next week will be crucial for many debate teams, and I hope everyone can attend.
ASSIGNMENTS
Blogging -- The blogging assignment involves about 25-30 entries over the course of the semester. This number should not be taken as an exact requirement, but as a general guideline. The following apply:
Debate Assignments
The second round of debates will take place the last week before finals. Anyone who does not know his or her debate assignment or what alternative assignment he or she is doing should contact me.
Something unforeseen has happened with the debate topics, and I want to let everyone know about it as soon as possible. As you know, I have insisted that each debate topic at least start with 4 people to be considered viable. I do this to assure that debaters will actually have opponents. At the same time, I have also said that anyone prefers to complete an alternative assignment instead can do so, no questions asked. I did not see until today that these rules could give rise to an inconsistency.
What happened was that a student working on an alternative assignment spoke with a student signed up for another debate, and both decided to work on the alternate assignment, or at least decided that they would prefer to do so. Before speaking with me, the student leaving a debate team checked with teamates and verified that four active people remained in the debate. Of course, under the rules as I laid them out, both are completely entitled to do so.
But then, since they had two people that wanted to do an alternate assignment on the same topic, they agreed that the assignment they really wanted to do was a debate. Now, I cannot very well criticize an alternative assignment that resembles the original assignment more than the standard alternative does.
I went ahead and approved the project because it does seem like the best way for these students to proceed. But I am uncomfortable because I know that many of you did not get your first debate choices because I insisted that there be 4 people to a debate, and if I take that rule away, many students will not have a debate partner to work with during class sessions. To make matters worse, I know people have started researching debate topics, the groups had no time to meet today because of the gas, and it seems quite likely that some students may not show up next week (something that often happens when there's a long weekend).
I have to think about how to amend the rules, but at this point, all I want to do is get people placed on their work in as clear, just, and rewarding a way as I can.
Therefore, if anyone wants a change, please email me as soon as possible. Please also bear in mind that I cannot let people abandon teams if the teams will no longer have enough debaters to debate and to discuss issues. If I do, I'll be forcing students to lose or waste the research that they have spent hours accumulating and organizing. I won't do that.
Fallacy Assignments
The requirements for the fallacy assignments are these:
I believe that most of the other difficulties with the fallacy assignment have to do with the nature of fallacy itself. I'm going to write out how to handle the fallacy assignment, but the explanation will include an explanation of fallacy itself, just like I might write for a textbook.
So draw a deep breath and be fresh if you can before you keep reading.
Fallacy Assignments and Fallacy
Here's a step-by-step method for completing the assignment.
In class discussion, several students mentioned concern that live fallacy examples do not seem to cleanly fit the fallacy categories we have discussed in class. That is to be expected: the categories are a kind of shorthand. They are usefully descriptive, but they are not discretely definitive. That is, they "overlap." For instance, I can describe the animal in front of me as a dog, I may also describe it as tall, skinny, furry, brown, or friendly, and no one will be surprised that it is also a dog. However, if I definitely state that it is a dog, I cannot reasonably say that it is also a cat. Despite their misleading grammatical form, the categories for logical fallacies work better as descriptors like "large" or "furry" than they do like categories like "dog" or "cat."
There's another potential difficulty in categorization. Since a thought invariably consists of connections between various other thoughts, each of those thoughts and each connection itself may involve distinct fallacious operations.
BECAUSE OF THESE PROBLEMS, STUDENTS WILL NOT BE MARKED DOWN FOR CLASSIFYING ANY GIVEN FALLACY DIFFERENTLY THAN THE INSTRUCTOR. Also, they WILL be required to explain how the fallacy works even if they do classify the fallacy in a way that the instructor finds meaningful and useful.
Now, since students have asked persistently about categories, I conclude that many are dealing with fallacies primarily as a question of matching statements to fallacy-category, possibly without first attempting to rigorously analyze their examples. This is a mistake in method, but it also appears to indicate a misconception about what logic and fallacy are.
The Nature of Logic
Many people think of logical as just meaning reasonable or sensible or even common-sense. But that's not what the word means to philosophers or logicians, exactly. Different philosophers have described it very differently, but I'll take logic to refer to certain thought-actions that humans make in trying to use our finite brains to understand a world that's ultimately far beyond our scope. These operations are generally classified as either deduction or induction, two other categories which we will find break down somewhat on examination as well. I will describe each, first quickly, then in more detail, to show some of the underlying resemblances and processes.
Deduction
Deductions use 2 statements, or premises, to determine a third. That third may then become one of the premises for a future deduction. Here's a simple example:
Notice how this works. Now, you all know students over 25 years old, so you know the statement is incorrect. Pointing out a 26-year-old student refutes the statement, but it does not by itself explain the fallacy as required by the fallacies assigment.
Here the ultimate claim, the conclusion, is that John is under 25 years old. Now, there's some good logic here. How can we say that the deduction is good even though the conclusion is bad? Because the definitions of the words and the ways they relate do not allow us to conceive of a single universe in which #1 and #2 are true while the conclusion is false.If John were a student and all students were under 25, then John would be under 25. The statement is false because premise #1 is itself false, but we'll attend to that later; meanwhile, there's more to say about terms.
Notice that the logic here seemed pretty airtight. That may be partly because the words seem simple, and we think of them as meaning one thing. This is misleading. The complex things we do in response to a single word have blown by us so fast that we weren't aware of what we were doing. Looking at a more complex word may be simpler.
A recent NY Times article referred to the "fractious" leaders of Iraq. Now, if I look the word up in WordWeb, I get "Stubbornly resistant to authority or control" or "Easily irritated or annoyed" or "Unpredictably difficult in operation; likely to be troublesom." So I think part of what the Times' reporter wanted to imply was that these Iraqis were unreasonably resistant to US command. However, when I ask a classroom full of intelligent, educated readers what fractious means, I immediately get notions of fractions, fragments, and so forth. Now, this isn't altogether strange or altogether incorrect. One might notice that people who are chronically unable to get along may also be called "divisive," and the relation between division and fractions is obvious. So the Times' article states that the Iraqi leaders are uncompliant, but suggests as well that they're divided and divisive, that they cause what could be whole to be fragmented. Let's look a little farther about how this impression comes about.
Many of the words we use each day are difficult to define. That's because we don't really use them the way they exist in a dictionary. A dictionary does not create words; the writers of a dictionary just attempt to describe them. I'd call that a noble effort, but when we use the words, we're really referring to an extensive and varied network of personal experiences and thoughts that relate to other times we have heard or read the word used.
These associations may be summoned more or less directly, strongly, or consciously. Hopefully a visual metaphor will help to explain this. If you look at an object more or less straight ahead, you can tell me many things about how it looks. If I ask you about soemthing that takes place at the very edge of your perpherial vision, you will probably turn and fix both eyes on it to answer. We are only partly aware of our periphery; that is, we focus less processing on it; or, again: we don't pay much attention to it.
When we hear a word and its associations are summoned, we don't know which aspects of the association the speaker intends until the sentence completes and locks in which meanings are intended, that is, which associations seem consistent with the rest of the sentence. To some extent, we may revise this judgment with future paragraphs and future sentences and so forth.
Now, here's what all this has to do with deductive logic. The process involves repeatedly checking characteristics and insisting on consistency. That is, what's implied by the associations with one term cannot exclude the all the possibilities determined by the other. There must be some range of mutual possibility, or we call the statement a contradiction: it does not "make sense."
So, these are the judgments we bring to bear at each step of a "deductive" process. We compare the immediate implications of each statement; then, we judge whether any of the implications that seem definitively a part of these statements must be considered as mutually exclusive. Also, generally, we examine the case in the reverse: given the implications of the two statements, can one be untrue at the same time taht the other is true? By breaking the rapid, global, often untraceable judgments of intuition to the test of these more obvious connections between concepts, we put our theories and hypotheses to one kind of test: If we believe two things that are contradictory, we can conclude as surely as anything in our human perception that one is wrong.
However, language and concepts are tricky, and things can appear logical that really are not so. Here's another example.
Not only is this not necessarily correct about Joe, similar reasoning has been used, ridiculous as it is, to support all manner of prejudice. Leaving the social issues aside, let's look at the mechanics of the fallacy.
We probably call Joe white because he's caucasion, not because he's albino. The word white does not refer to the visual aspect of snow, as it seems to in the first premise. Also, pure and clean does not mean the same thing with reference to colors, snow, or color symbology that it does if we're talking about Joe. As if that weren't enough, even the word is changes. Joe is white by category; white is pure and clean by description, albeit a somewhat metaphorical description. The relationship described by the word is, then, is different in each case.
So deductive fallacies can happen when there's some shift of meanings in the terms themselves, if there's some misuse or shift of use in the operators, the words that determine relationships between the premises (and, or, and not are common).
Deductive conclusions also tend to be false when the original premises or assumptions are false. I'll repeat my stock example and add another that a student supplied today:
In either case, an apparently logical process yields results that clearly do not describe the world we live in. What happened?
Well, clearly, each case has an inaccurate premise. That premise may have come from an earlier bad deduction. It may just be there because the speaker is deliberately lying or thoughtlessly repeating something he or she heard somewhere. But it may also be there because the speaker has made an inductive error, a bad generalization from experience. These also are fallacies.
Induction refers to a complex and not-wholly-understood process by which people take in and assemble sensory impressions, creating categories and expectations of that. Let's assume that in the above example, a speaker has only met male doctors. Before 1970 or so, or in certain parts of the world today, it would have been quite possible to meet a fair number of doctors and, through some coincidence, to have met no female doctors. So, although it may seem a little far-fetched to contemporary californians, the speaker may have generalized from experience. If the person has only heard the word doctor refer to male people, that person may conceive of male or masculine as part of the charactistics implied by or associated with the word doctor.
While studying for a doctorate, I got a library card from UCI to use the big university libraries near my home. Shortly afterward, a pollster from UCI called, and when I had answered her questions, she said she would send something out to reward me for my time. I gave her the address, and she asked why I used the library, I said I was studying for a doctorate. Soon a package of stickers arrived; they each read "William Crandall M.D.", with a cute little anteater on each.
Clearly, she reasoned something like this:
Doctor's are physicians.
Bill Crandall will be a doctor.
Bill Crandall will be a physician.
When I saw the stickers, another deduction came to mind:
People who lead other people to believe they are doctors are criminals.
I somehow led her to believe I am a doctor.
Oops.
Most inductive fallacies occur because the test population differs from the population to which one applies the conclusions, but a few happen because one neglects similarities that do exist. In either case, the critic should look for manipulation of the test population. Some evidence may be neglected, or the population may be signficantly different, or someone may use a few examples of a broad and varied class to conclude about many many different examples of that class.
In all these cases, students should notice that multiple categories of deductive fallacy might be used to classify the same mistake. For instance, someone who thinks that no female doctors exist appears to have little experience with doctors. So we might call that an insufficient sample and say that the person has rushed to judgment or jumped to a conclusion or used a hasty generalization. On the other hand, given the plentiful instances of contradictory information in this case, if the speaker is over 5, one might strongly suspect that this is a case of exclusion: that is, the test population concludes no female doctors because the speaker refuses to believe that any of the women he has met are "real" doctors somehow; therefore, the plentiful counterexamples go ignored. Of course, any population that has been pruned by such exclusion cannot possibly truly represent the general population described by one or another word.
Now, let's look at some of the complexities that induction may hide.
We've been talking about a "population," applying that word to groups or sets of things or actions or people or even abstract qualities. What determines what of all we see and feel falls into one "population" or another? Clearly, this is a question of our personal and internal organization of concepts. To some extent, this organization becomes public by our shared use of a more or less common language: by words. So if I define the word doctor as being a physician, I can apparently work at UCI amidst quite a few "Doctors of Philosophy" and not come across any counterexamples: A "doctor of literature" isn't a doctor any more than a "greenhouse" need be painted green.
Now, at first these considerations may appear trivial. We all know we use words differently at different moments in different contexts. But remember what we said about words themselves earlier on. A word, as we use it, is not that clean amputee, the dictionary-defined term. It is a trace-work of more and less occulted associations focused and brought forward or hidden by context. But context is ever-shifting. And it's hard to define. Where does the context of a word stop? Does it stop at the end of the sentence? Partly, but only partly. We can use a pronoun instead of a noun in one sentence, and if the noun is in the previous sentence, everyone will likely know what the pronoun refers to. Does it end at the end of a paragraph? If it did, essay structure would not mean much. Does it end at the end of a book? Not when one book refers to another. And where does the context end if the word is on the Internet, where part of the context onscreen at a single moment may be coming from Africa, and another part from Taiwan? And then, how does the context of what's onscreen change when I comment on it verbally in class?
Along with all the other categories these difficulties apply to, they apply to categorizations of logical fallacies. So, ultimately, you will not be graded on the categorization you choose for a given fallacy. You will be graded on the consistency and appropriateness of your description of the mal-formation of the statement you choose to examine.
I thought some would like these concepts written, so here they are:
Fallacy | Fallacy Assignments | Blogging
The entry begins as follows:
A few of you missed a fairly eventful class today. We were gassed and had to leave. More precisely, building maintainance made me dismiss class just after 10 because an apparent natural gas leak in the building had created a hazard.
I hope we got some clarity about assignments and times before we left. (Please tell me if we did not!) But I want to go over things here to make sure.
VA DAY WEEKEND 5/27
Next week is Veterans' Day Weekend. However, the MtSAC holiday is on Monday. We will meet on Sunday, 5/27. Anyone with special considerations may contact me about attendance issues, but since our debate team session got gassed out today, next week will be crucial for many debate teams, and I hope everyone can attend.
ASSIGNMENTS
Blogging -- The blogging assignment involves about 25-30 entries over the course of the semester. This number should not be taken as an exact requirement, but as a general guideline. The following apply:
1) Entries may be about anything that may have anything to do with anything whatsoever that the class is about, has been about, should be about or could be about.
The class is about thinking, so if you're thinking about it, it's relevant; if you're wondering whether it's relevant, it is. A few weeks ago I might have said that anything's relevant except gossip about Anna Nicole Smith or Michael Jackson or Britney Spears, but since the paparazzi issue has now become a debate topic, gossip is obviously relevant. Who would have known?
2) Long, involved entries and entries that show a lot of thought may count for effort. The instructor is the judge, however.
3) Confused entries are better than no entries. Confused entries in which the confusion is thoroughly articulated DO show a lot of thought and effort and will receive credit for that. There is no requirement that blog entries be finished work. Blog entries may contradict debate positions or essays without causing any problem whatsoever. The main thing to bear in mind about blog entries is DO IT. Don't wait until you feel you know exactly what's going on. The instructor does NOT expect finished work on the blog.
4) Fallacies posted to the blog DO count as blog entries.
5) Comments other fallacies that other people post DO count as blog entries, as do any other comments. (Of course, the instructor will grade analysis of fallacies of fallacies for the fallacy assignment differently than entries that just count for the blog, as I will explain later in this entry. Further information may be gotten from the discussion of fallacy itself, below.)
6) Drafts or draft-excerpts of work you are preparing for other assignments in this class or for other classes can count as entries if posted to the blog.
Debate Assignments
The second round of debates will take place the last week before finals. Anyone who does not know his or her debate assignment or what alternative assignment he or she is doing should contact me.
Something unforeseen has happened with the debate topics, and I want to let everyone know about it as soon as possible. As you know, I have insisted that each debate topic at least start with 4 people to be considered viable. I do this to assure that debaters will actually have opponents. At the same time, I have also said that anyone prefers to complete an alternative assignment instead can do so, no questions asked. I did not see until today that these rules could give rise to an inconsistency.
What happened was that a student working on an alternative assignment spoke with a student signed up for another debate, and both decided to work on the alternate assignment, or at least decided that they would prefer to do so. Before speaking with me, the student leaving a debate team checked with teamates and verified that four active people remained in the debate. Of course, under the rules as I laid them out, both are completely entitled to do so.
But then, since they had two people that wanted to do an alternate assignment on the same topic, they agreed that the assignment they really wanted to do was a debate. Now, I cannot very well criticize an alternative assignment that resembles the original assignment more than the standard alternative does.
I went ahead and approved the project because it does seem like the best way for these students to proceed. But I am uncomfortable because I know that many of you did not get your first debate choices because I insisted that there be 4 people to a debate, and if I take that rule away, many students will not have a debate partner to work with during class sessions. To make matters worse, I know people have started researching debate topics, the groups had no time to meet today because of the gas, and it seems quite likely that some students may not show up next week (something that often happens when there's a long weekend).
I have to think about how to amend the rules, but at this point, all I want to do is get people placed on their work in as clear, just, and rewarding a way as I can.
Therefore, if anyone wants a change, please email me as soon as possible. Please also bear in mind that I cannot let people abandon teams if the teams will no longer have enough debaters to debate and to discuss issues. If I do, I'll be forcing students to lose or waste the research that they have spent hours accumulating and organizing. I won't do that.
Fallacy Assignments
The requirements for the fallacy assignments are these:
1) Include 10 fallacies.
2) Explain in each case how the fallacy works, that is, how the media object constitutes a fallacy. If it's useful to classify the fallacy to do that, that's fine; classify it. If it's not useful to classify the fallacy, it's not absolutely necessary as long as you show how it is indeed a fallacy.
3) The presence of the blog itself has made a difference in the requirements of the fallacy assignment because if I give students credit for commenting on fallacies that other students upload to the blog, students are not doing all the work they have in the past. On the other hand, if I insist that each student find his or her own ten fallacies and not use any from the blog, everyone has to make sure they do not find the same fallacy. That causes unacceptable problems and useless hardship. Therefore, this is my FINAL DECISION:
STUDENTS WILL GET FULL CREDIT FOR COMMENTING ON FALLACIES ON THE BLOG, REGARDLESS OF WHO POSTS THE ORIGINAL FALLACY.
The only thing that matters is that the analysis be good and thorough.
I believe that most of the other difficulties with the fallacy assignment have to do with the nature of fallacy itself. I'm going to write out how to handle the fallacy assignment, but the explanation will include an explanation of fallacy itself, just like I might write for a textbook.
So draw a deep breath and be fresh if you can before you keep reading.
Fallacy Assignments and Fallacy
Here's a step-by-step method for completing the assignment.
1. Find a statement or presentation that strikes you as mistaken or misleading.
2. Figure out what it says, implies, or otherwise means. This amounts to doing something like a Toulmin analysis.
a) What's the real claim?i)What visual or auditory clues does it have?
ii) What's stated?
iii) What's implied?
iv) How are these qualified?
b) What are the reasons? For instance, at some level, every ad says "Buy our product." But what will become interesting is why one supposedly should buy. Sometimes the reasoning is faulty.
c) The reasons should be supported by some kind of grounding. Sometimes the grounding is incorrect.
d) The grounding needs to properly warrant the reasons that support the claim. If the logic between them does not work, that's a problem.
3. Decide what part of the media-object's argument you object to.
4. Figure out why you object. How is the argument badly formed.
5. Explain your objection and why the object is malformed.
6. Turn in ten such explanations with their examples.
In class discussion, several students mentioned concern that live fallacy examples do not seem to cleanly fit the fallacy categories we have discussed in class. That is to be expected: the categories are a kind of shorthand. They are usefully descriptive, but they are not discretely definitive. That is, they "overlap." For instance, I can describe the animal in front of me as a dog, I may also describe it as tall, skinny, furry, brown, or friendly, and no one will be surprised that it is also a dog. However, if I definitely state that it is a dog, I cannot reasonably say that it is also a cat. Despite their misleading grammatical form, the categories for logical fallacies work better as descriptors like "large" or "furry" than they do like categories like "dog" or "cat."
There's another potential difficulty in categorization. Since a thought invariably consists of connections between various other thoughts, each of those thoughts and each connection itself may involve distinct fallacious operations.
BECAUSE OF THESE PROBLEMS, STUDENTS WILL NOT BE MARKED DOWN FOR CLASSIFYING ANY GIVEN FALLACY DIFFERENTLY THAN THE INSTRUCTOR. Also, they WILL be required to explain how the fallacy works even if they do classify the fallacy in a way that the instructor finds meaningful and useful.
Now, since students have asked persistently about categories, I conclude that many are dealing with fallacies primarily as a question of matching statements to fallacy-category, possibly without first attempting to rigorously analyze their examples. This is a mistake in method, but it also appears to indicate a misconception about what logic and fallacy are.
The Nature of Logic
Many people think of logical as just meaning reasonable or sensible or even common-sense. But that's not what the word means to philosophers or logicians, exactly. Different philosophers have described it very differently, but I'll take logic to refer to certain thought-actions that humans make in trying to use our finite brains to understand a world that's ultimately far beyond our scope. These operations are generally classified as either deduction or induction, two other categories which we will find break down somewhat on examination as well. I will describe each, first quickly, then in more detail, to show some of the underlying resemblances and processes.
Deduction
Deductions use 2 statements, or premises, to determine a third. That third may then become one of the premises for a future deduction. Here's a simple example:
Premise #1: All students are under 25 years old.
Premise #2: Joe is a student.
Conclusion: Joe is under 25 years old.
Notice how this works. Now, you all know students over 25 years old, so you know the statement is incorrect. Pointing out a 26-year-old student refutes the statement, but it does not by itself explain the fallacy as required by the fallacies assigment.
Here the ultimate claim, the conclusion, is that John is under 25 years old. Now, there's some good logic here. How can we say that the deduction is good even though the conclusion is bad? Because the definitions of the words and the ways they relate do not allow us to conceive of a single universe in which #1 and #2 are true while the conclusion is false.If John were a student and all students were under 25, then John would be under 25. The statement is false because premise #1 is itself false, but we'll attend to that later; meanwhile, there's more to say about terms.
Notice that the logic here seemed pretty airtight. That may be partly because the words seem simple, and we think of them as meaning one thing. This is misleading. The complex things we do in response to a single word have blown by us so fast that we weren't aware of what we were doing. Looking at a more complex word may be simpler.
A recent NY Times article referred to the "fractious" leaders of Iraq. Now, if I look the word up in WordWeb, I get "Stubbornly resistant to authority or control" or "Easily irritated or annoyed" or "Unpredictably difficult in operation; likely to be troublesom." So I think part of what the Times' reporter wanted to imply was that these Iraqis were unreasonably resistant to US command. However, when I ask a classroom full of intelligent, educated readers what fractious means, I immediately get notions of fractions, fragments, and so forth. Now, this isn't altogether strange or altogether incorrect. One might notice that people who are chronically unable to get along may also be called "divisive," and the relation between division and fractions is obvious. So the Times' article states that the Iraqi leaders are uncompliant, but suggests as well that they're divided and divisive, that they cause what could be whole to be fragmented. Let's look a little farther about how this impression comes about.
Many of the words we use each day are difficult to define. That's because we don't really use them the way they exist in a dictionary. A dictionary does not create words; the writers of a dictionary just attempt to describe them. I'd call that a noble effort, but when we use the words, we're really referring to an extensive and varied network of personal experiences and thoughts that relate to other times we have heard or read the word used.
These associations may be summoned more or less directly, strongly, or consciously. Hopefully a visual metaphor will help to explain this. If you look at an object more or less straight ahead, you can tell me many things about how it looks. If I ask you about soemthing that takes place at the very edge of your perpherial vision, you will probably turn and fix both eyes on it to answer. We are only partly aware of our periphery; that is, we focus less processing on it; or, again: we don't pay much attention to it.
When we hear a word and its associations are summoned, we don't know which aspects of the association the speaker intends until the sentence completes and locks in which meanings are intended, that is, which associations seem consistent with the rest of the sentence. To some extent, we may revise this judgment with future paragraphs and future sentences and so forth.
Now, here's what all this has to do with deductive logic. The process involves repeatedly checking characteristics and insisting on consistency. That is, what's implied by the associations with one term cannot exclude the all the possibilities determined by the other. There must be some range of mutual possibility, or we call the statement a contradiction: it does not "make sense."
So, these are the judgments we bring to bear at each step of a "deductive" process. We compare the immediate implications of each statement; then, we judge whether any of the implications that seem definitively a part of these statements must be considered as mutually exclusive. Also, generally, we examine the case in the reverse: given the implications of the two statements, can one be untrue at the same time taht the other is true? By breaking the rapid, global, often untraceable judgments of intuition to the test of these more obvious connections between concepts, we put our theories and hypotheses to one kind of test: If we believe two things that are contradictory, we can conclude as surely as anything in our human perception that one is wrong.
However, language and concepts are tricky, and things can appear logical that really are not so. Here's another example.
White is pure and clean.
Joe is white.
Therefore, Joe is pure and clean.
Not only is this not necessarily correct about Joe, similar reasoning has been used, ridiculous as it is, to support all manner of prejudice. Leaving the social issues aside, let's look at the mechanics of the fallacy.
We probably call Joe white because he's caucasion, not because he's albino. The word white does not refer to the visual aspect of snow, as it seems to in the first premise. Also, pure and clean does not mean the same thing with reference to colors, snow, or color symbology that it does if we're talking about Joe. As if that weren't enough, even the word is changes. Joe is white by category; white is pure and clean by description, albeit a somewhat metaphorical description. The relationship described by the word is, then, is different in each case.
So deductive fallacies can happen when there's some shift of meanings in the terms themselves, if there's some misuse or shift of use in the operators, the words that determine relationships between the premises (and, or, and not are common).
Deductive conclusions also tend to be false when the original premises or assumptions are false. I'll repeat my stock example and add another that a student supplied today:
All students are under 25
Joe is a student
Therefore, Joe is under 25.
All doctors are men.
My mother's a doctor.
My mother is a man.
In either case, an apparently logical process yields results that clearly do not describe the world we live in. What happened?
Well, clearly, each case has an inaccurate premise. That premise may have come from an earlier bad deduction. It may just be there because the speaker is deliberately lying or thoughtlessly repeating something he or she heard somewhere. But it may also be there because the speaker has made an inductive error, a bad generalization from experience. These also are fallacies.
Induction refers to a complex and not-wholly-understood process by which people take in and assemble sensory impressions, creating categories and expectations of that. Let's assume that in the above example, a speaker has only met male doctors. Before 1970 or so, or in certain parts of the world today, it would have been quite possible to meet a fair number of doctors and, through some coincidence, to have met no female doctors. So, although it may seem a little far-fetched to contemporary californians, the speaker may have generalized from experience. If the person has only heard the word doctor refer to male people, that person may conceive of male or masculine as part of the charactistics implied by or associated with the word doctor.
While studying for a doctorate, I got a library card from UCI to use the big university libraries near my home. Shortly afterward, a pollster from UCI called, and when I had answered her questions, she said she would send something out to reward me for my time. I gave her the address, and she asked why I used the library, I said I was studying for a doctorate. Soon a package of stickers arrived; they each read "William Crandall M.D.", with a cute little anteater on each.
Clearly, she reasoned something like this:
Doctor's are physicians.
Bill Crandall will be a doctor.
Bill Crandall will be a physician.
When I saw the stickers, another deduction came to mind:
People who lead other people to believe they are doctors are criminals.
I somehow led her to believe I am a doctor.
Oops.
Most inductive fallacies occur because the test population differs from the population to which one applies the conclusions, but a few happen because one neglects similarities that do exist. In either case, the critic should look for manipulation of the test population. Some evidence may be neglected, or the population may be signficantly different, or someone may use a few examples of a broad and varied class to conclude about many many different examples of that class.
In all these cases, students should notice that multiple categories of deductive fallacy might be used to classify the same mistake. For instance, someone who thinks that no female doctors exist appears to have little experience with doctors. So we might call that an insufficient sample and say that the person has rushed to judgment or jumped to a conclusion or used a hasty generalization. On the other hand, given the plentiful instances of contradictory information in this case, if the speaker is over 5, one might strongly suspect that this is a case of exclusion: that is, the test population concludes no female doctors because the speaker refuses to believe that any of the women he has met are "real" doctors somehow; therefore, the plentiful counterexamples go ignored. Of course, any population that has been pruned by such exclusion cannot possibly truly represent the general population described by one or another word.
Now, let's look at some of the complexities that induction may hide.
We've been talking about a "population," applying that word to groups or sets of things or actions or people or even abstract qualities. What determines what of all we see and feel falls into one "population" or another? Clearly, this is a question of our personal and internal organization of concepts. To some extent, this organization becomes public by our shared use of a more or less common language: by words. So if I define the word doctor as being a physician, I can apparently work at UCI amidst quite a few "Doctors of Philosophy" and not come across any counterexamples: A "doctor of literature" isn't a doctor any more than a "greenhouse" need be painted green.
Now, at first these considerations may appear trivial. We all know we use words differently at different moments in different contexts. But remember what we said about words themselves earlier on. A word, as we use it, is not that clean amputee, the dictionary-defined term. It is a trace-work of more and less occulted associations focused and brought forward or hidden by context. But context is ever-shifting. And it's hard to define. Where does the context of a word stop? Does it stop at the end of the sentence? Partly, but only partly. We can use a pronoun instead of a noun in one sentence, and if the noun is in the previous sentence, everyone will likely know what the pronoun refers to. Does it end at the end of a paragraph? If it did, essay structure would not mean much. Does it end at the end of a book? Not when one book refers to another. And where does the context end if the word is on the Internet, where part of the context onscreen at a single moment may be coming from Africa, and another part from Taiwan? And then, how does the context of what's onscreen change when I comment on it verbally in class?
Along with all the other categories these difficulties apply to, they apply to categorizations of logical fallacies. So, ultimately, you will not be graded on the categorization you choose for a given fallacy. You will be graded on the consistency and appropriateness of your description of the mal-formation of the statement you choose to examine.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Fallacy Assignments
I will make several entries here today and perhaps tomorrow to clarify fallacy assignments.
The first announcement I will make is that students WILL receive FULL CREDIT towards their 10 fallacies as well as their blog entries for comments on fallacies that other students post. To receive full credit, the student must analyse the fallacy thoroughly.
The first announcement I will make is that students WILL receive FULL CREDIT towards their 10 fallacies as well as their blog entries for comments on fallacies that other students post. To receive full credit, the student must analyse the fallacy thoroughly.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Is this a fallacy?
When I was writing my Midsummer Night's Dream essay, I came across this one quote in which Egeus states:
"I beg the ancient privilege of Athens,/As she is mine, I may dispose of her:/Which shall be either to this gentleman/Or to her death, according to our law/Immediately provided in that case." (Act I, Scene i.)
To me, this statement seems like a false dilemma. Egeus presumes fewer options by saying that he either can let his daughter marry Demetrius, or have her die. He doesn't consider other options such as letting Hermia marry Lysander. What do you guys think?
"I beg the ancient privilege of Athens,/As she is mine, I may dispose of her:/Which shall be either to this gentleman/Or to her death, according to our law/Immediately provided in that case." (Act I, Scene i.)
To me, this statement seems like a false dilemma. Egeus presumes fewer options by saying that he either can let his daughter marry Demetrius, or have her die. He doesn't consider other options such as letting Hermia marry Lysander. What do you guys think?
Friday, April 27, 2007
I think this is a fallacy because...
Ok I am going to give this a shot - I am not sure I fully understand, but here it goes....First, this is a "false analogy" fallacy because it compares shampoo (a manmade material) with nature.
Second, I am not sure which fallacy it would fall under, but the "urge of nature" is not a thing that is definable in common terms. One person's idea of the urge of nature would be different than another's. To be honest I dont even know what the "urge of nature" means to me, it is a confusing and ambiguous statement.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Fallacies
Here's a garden stroll through fallacy.
Teaching fallacies has some problems. Human logic is something that humans have not succeeded utterly in describing, and categories for fallacies vary somewhat from person to person and text to text. However, since students will collect fallacies for an assignment, let's go through some examples. Just please take the facile categories with a grain of salt, and remember too that this list is not exhaustive. Also, the presence of a fallacy in an argument does not mean that the point the argument intends to support has no validity; it just means that a hole exists in the supporting argument.
Fallacy finds with comments would make great blog entries, by the way.
Inductive fallacy -- Induction involves generalization from experience or experiment. One observes a sample population, then judges that certain things will be true in general that seem to have been true in the sample population. Obviously, problems occur insofar as the population experienced differs from the population to be judged:
False Analogy - two actions or things taken as similar do not resemble each other in some significant aspect: "Students have to work, and mules have to work: If you want either to do well, you need to put a carrot in front of them and a stick behind them."
Hasty Generalization - a conclusion is drawn about a wide range of things using a small range of examples. "Joe the quarterback failed his English class. Football players are sure lousy students!"
Unrepresentative sample- The thinker generalizes from a sample that in some ways does not represent the majority of instances of the class of things under discussion.
Exclusion - The thinker ignores relevant information. "Jim has been here all semester, so he'll be here tomorrow" (even though he's running a fever of 103 degrees and his car burst into flrmes while he was driving to his mother's to complain because she turned him in to the IRS.
Slothful induction - The thinker ignores a significant pattern in the data."I get too busy at the end of each semester, but it's not bad planning: It's just that things happen that I don't expect."
Fallacies of Deduction -- These may take valid premises, but misapply them so that conclusions might not be correct. In these, the errors or abuses involve misuse of operators or shifts in the meaning of terms.
Fallacies of Distraction These deductive fallacies misuse an operator to relate premises to premises or premises to conclusions in ways that are not valid.
False dilemma - The thinker presumes fewer options exist than might. "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists," or "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."
Complex Question - Two distinct statements are treated as though they were coterminous or inseparable. "So you think it's OK to reduce welfare and let that small child starve?" "Won't you support our troops and authorize the new defense budget?" One must establish that one factor genuinely is consequent upon the other.
Slippery Slope - One idea is related to one or a series of similar (or not so similar!) ideas, which are usually less acceptable. "If we allow same-sex marriages, pretty soon we'll have to honor marriages to multiple partners, then to sheep or pigs." Here, unless the speaker can invent some reason to equate same-sex marriage with polygamy and bestiality, the argument lacks validity.
Argument from Ignorance - Because a proposition cannot be or has not been disproven, the thinker claims it's proven true. "You can't prove God does not exist, so obviously She does." Note that this argument works equally well -- or equally poorly -- in reverse: "You can't prove God does exist, so obviously She does not."
Changing the Subject - Some invalid use of operators involves applying the argument to something that's not relevant, or applying something that's not relevant to the argument.
Ad hominem - Even a valid attack against a person's character has no necessary relation to the correctness of that person's idea. "You say pot hurts my studies, but you do seem to like your whiskey sours." Notice that if one person makes an argument based on authority ("It's true because Joe says so!"), the personal attributes of the authority may have some provisional relevance ("Well, Joe's specialty is in another field!")
Style over Substance - Graceful or graceless argument does not itself render an idea true or false. "How can you believe Bush? The guy can't say three words without putting his foot in his mouth." "But that's just why I trust him: He's so down-to-earth and anti-intellectual." (Check out newspaper coverage of possible presidential candidates for '08 for a river of style over substance arguments.)
Appeal to Authority - People pretend authority; real authorities disagree. Even Aristotle claimed that flies have four legs. (BTW, just because this is listed as a fallacy does not mean you'll get away with no references in research papers!)
Appeal to Motives - Just because one might want something to be true or false bears no relation to whether or not it is.
o Prejudicial language - People sometimes hold a thing true of false because it's couched in complementary or nsulting terms. "Hey, it's just common sense."
o Pity - I'd feel so bad were this not correct that you must believe that it's so. "I'm working so hard on this CD for this class that you'd better like it."
o Force - If you disagree, woe unto you.
o Popularity - a position is held to be true because it's popular or supported by someone popular or held to be popular or because one may become popular. Ads with some young lady draped over the hood of a car or a basketball player selling sneakers are cases in point.
Cause and Effect Fallacies These tend to just miss the point -
Coincidental correlation - One thing happened after another, so the first must have caused the second: "Leonard can command the Sun. He said, 'I command that the sun shall rise tomorrow,' and lo, it did."
Joint Effect - Two effects of one cause are treated as cause and effect: "The violence in Afghanistan was caused by the war there."
Reverse cause-effect - Cause is treated as effect, and vice-versa. "I'm a lousy writer anyway, so I don't bother to proofread my papers."
Complex Cause - Significant causes are ignored, as though only one cause were crucial.
Insignificant cause - One cause heralded as vital is not: "The maraschino cherries on these sundaes are probably fattening; maybe I'll have them leave the cherry off my second."
Teaching fallacies has some problems. Human logic is something that humans have not succeeded utterly in describing, and categories for fallacies vary somewhat from person to person and text to text. However, since students will collect fallacies for an assignment, let's go through some examples. Just please take the facile categories with a grain of salt, and remember too that this list is not exhaustive. Also, the presence of a fallacy in an argument does not mean that the point the argument intends to support has no validity; it just means that a hole exists in the supporting argument.
Fallacy finds with comments would make great blog entries, by the way.
Inductive fallacy -- Induction involves generalization from experience or experiment. One observes a sample population, then judges that certain things will be true in general that seem to have been true in the sample population. Obviously, problems occur insofar as the population experienced differs from the population to be judged:
False Analogy - two actions or things taken as similar do not resemble each other in some significant aspect: "Students have to work, and mules have to work: If you want either to do well, you need to put a carrot in front of them and a stick behind them."
Hasty Generalization - a conclusion is drawn about a wide range of things using a small range of examples. "Joe the quarterback failed his English class. Football players are sure lousy students!"
Unrepresentative sample- The thinker generalizes from a sample that in some ways does not represent the majority of instances of the class of things under discussion.
Exclusion - The thinker ignores relevant information. "Jim has been here all semester, so he'll be here tomorrow" (even though he's running a fever of 103 degrees and his car burst into flrmes while he was driving to his mother's to complain because she turned him in to the IRS.
Slothful induction - The thinker ignores a significant pattern in the data."I get too busy at the end of each semester, but it's not bad planning: It's just that things happen that I don't expect."
Fallacies of Deduction -- These may take valid premises, but misapply them so that conclusions might not be correct. In these, the errors or abuses involve misuse of operators or shifts in the meaning of terms.
Fallacies of Distraction These deductive fallacies misuse an operator to relate premises to premises or premises to conclusions in ways that are not valid.
False dilemma - The thinker presumes fewer options exist than might. "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists," or "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."
Complex Question - Two distinct statements are treated as though they were coterminous or inseparable. "So you think it's OK to reduce welfare and let that small child starve?" "Won't you support our troops and authorize the new defense budget?" One must establish that one factor genuinely is consequent upon the other.
Slippery Slope - One idea is related to one or a series of similar (or not so similar!) ideas, which are usually less acceptable. "If we allow same-sex marriages, pretty soon we'll have to honor marriages to multiple partners, then to sheep or pigs." Here, unless the speaker can invent some reason to equate same-sex marriage with polygamy and bestiality, the argument lacks validity.
Argument from Ignorance - Because a proposition cannot be or has not been disproven, the thinker claims it's proven true. "You can't prove God does not exist, so obviously She does." Note that this argument works equally well -- or equally poorly -- in reverse: "You can't prove God does exist, so obviously She does not."
Changing the Subject - Some invalid use of operators involves applying the argument to something that's not relevant, or applying something that's not relevant to the argument.
Ad hominem - Even a valid attack against a person's character has no necessary relation to the correctness of that person's idea. "You say pot hurts my studies, but you do seem to like your whiskey sours." Notice that if one person makes an argument based on authority ("It's true because Joe says so!"), the personal attributes of the authority may have some provisional relevance ("Well, Joe's specialty is in another field!")
Style over Substance - Graceful or graceless argument does not itself render an idea true or false. "How can you believe Bush? The guy can't say three words without putting his foot in his mouth." "But that's just why I trust him: He's so down-to-earth and anti-intellectual." (Check out newspaper coverage of possible presidential candidates for '08 for a river of style over substance arguments.)
Appeal to Authority - People pretend authority; real authorities disagree. Even Aristotle claimed that flies have four legs. (BTW, just because this is listed as a fallacy does not mean you'll get away with no references in research papers!)
Appeal to Motives - Just because one might want something to be true or false bears no relation to whether or not it is.
o Prejudicial language - People sometimes hold a thing true of false because it's couched in complementary or nsulting terms. "Hey, it's just common sense."
o Pity - I'd feel so bad were this not correct that you must believe that it's so. "I'm working so hard on this CD for this class that you'd better like it."
o Force - If you disagree, woe unto you.
o Popularity - a position is held to be true because it's popular or supported by someone popular or held to be popular or because one may become popular. Ads with some young lady draped over the hood of a car or a basketball player selling sneakers are cases in point.
Cause and Effect Fallacies These tend to just miss the point -
Coincidental correlation - One thing happened after another, so the first must have caused the second: "Leonard can command the Sun. He said, 'I command that the sun shall rise tomorrow,' and lo, it did."
Joint Effect - Two effects of one cause are treated as cause and effect: "The violence in Afghanistan was caused by the war there."
Reverse cause-effect - Cause is treated as effect, and vice-versa. "I'm a lousy writer anyway, so I don't bother to proofread my papers."
Complex Cause - Significant causes are ignored, as though only one cause were crucial.
Insignificant cause - One cause heralded as vital is not: "The maraschino cherries on these sundaes are probably fattening; maybe I'll have them leave the cherry off my second."
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