Category Archives: Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking 11: Fallacies of Composition and Division

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The fallacies of composition and division are concerned with the relationship between the whole and the parts. If you attribute a certain quality to a part of something, it will not necessarily apply to the whole, and if you attribute a certain quality to the whole, it will not necessarily apply to the parts.

For example, supposing you are building a house. Each of the bricks weighs 2kgs. However, the house as a whole obviously does not weigh 2 kgs. You could pick up the bricks and throw them, but you couldn’t do that to the house, and so on. That is the fallacy of composition. For the fallacy of division you just need to turn this round. The house as a whole makes a good shelter from the rain – but that doesn’t mean that an individual brick makes a good shelter from the rain.

This example may seem obvious and absurd, but there are other instances where fallacies of composition and division are less obvious. It can even apply to colours. You might think it obvious that a whole made up of parts will be the same colour as its parts: but if the parts are blue and yellow, they may blur into green from a distance. A house that is white on the outside may also be built of bricks that are black on every side except the one that shows on the outside of the house. You might think that your body is alive, but it contains dead cells as well as live ones: what is true of the whole is not necessarily true of all the parts.Fractal_Broccoli

The reverse of either of these two fallacies is also fallacious. I can no more assume that parts necessarily do not share the properties of the whole as I can assume that they do.

One interesting application of this fallacy is that it seems to offer a good refutation of those who take either kind of metaphysical position on the mind-body problem, whether they are reductionists who think that our minds must be entirely material, or essentialists who think that the mind must be irreducible and essentially different from the body (for example, if it is a non-physical soul). Reductive materialists seem to be subject to the fallacy of composition: just because the components of the mind can all be understood as material objects, does not necessarily mean that the mind as a whole can be understood in that way. On the other hand, essentialists who want to insist that the mind is special and different are subject to the negation of the fallacy of division: just because the mind has certain special characteristics, such as consciousness, does not necessarily imply that its parts do not share those characteristics.

These fallacies can be similarly employed to point out the kind of mistake made whenever metaphysical conclusions have been drawn about a higher level of explanation being essentially different from or reducible to a lower one (in philosophy this is called supervenience). For example, whether life is or is not essentially different from mere chemical compounds, or whether reasoned behaviour is or is not essentially different from instinctual behaviour. I think we just have to live with the vagueness of these divisions in our ways of understanding the world, but it is too easy to rush into assumptions about rigid divisions.

To identify these fallacies in practice, you need to identify what the whole is and what the parts are. There may be good reasons in experience for believing that the whole either does or does not have the same characteristics as the parts, but a fallacy is taking place if it is being assumed that they necessarily have the same characteristics without further evidence.

Exercise

Are the following examples of the fallacy of composition or of division (or not)?

1. “Should we not assume that just as the eye, hand, the foot, and in general each part of the body clearly has its own proper function, so man too has some function over and above the function of his parts?” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

2. Manchester United are likely to lose this match. Two of their strikers and several midfield players have chronic injury problems, and are likely to put in a disappointing performance.

3. Communism in the Soviet Union was a failure. Universal state employment meant that nobody was motivated to make an effort in economic life, and it was the economy that destroyed the Soviet system in the end.

4. I’ve tried one strand of spaghetti and it’s cooked, so the whole pan must be ready.

Picture: Fractal (Romanesco) Broccoli: In Fractals the parts do have the same qualities as the whole!

Critical Thinking 10: False Dichotomy

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The false dichotomy (also known as false dilemma, or restricting the options) is a recognised fallacy that also has an obvious and close relationship with the Middle Way. A false dichotomy assumes that a judgement that is incremental (shades of grey) is absolute (black and white). However, the issue it raises is that of how we can tell false dichotomies from true ones. Is anything black and white?

Here is an example of a false dichotomy from a US comedy:

The assumption that one is either a good or a bad father is obviously false, and is used here manipulatively. Other examples of false dichotomies include George Bush saying “Either you are with us or you’re with the terrorists”, and the demand made in an Ulster pub, “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” Both of these example ignore possible third options that might involve some degree of agreement or disagreement with either side of the dichotomy: I might disapprove both of terrorism and of George Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, and I might disagree with both Catholic and Protestant beliefs whilst sharing to some extent the culture of each.

I would argue that the only true dichotomies are abstract. These consist in a merely logical distinction between a quality and its absence. “Are you Canadian or not?” and “Is the answer 1.25 or not?” are both true dichotomies in theory, so long as we are only dealing with the concept of a Canadian or the number 1.25. However, as soon as you apply these terms to experience, any dichotomy you apply becomes false. Stephen Harper may define himself as 100% Canadian, but given that Canada wasn’t settled by people of European origin before the 16th Century, he doubtless has ancestors (as well as other influences) that make that Canadian-ness a matter of degree. The number 1.25 applied to an actual object will also be approximate, depending on measurement that can never be perfectly precise. Any actual object in experience will thus be more or less 1.25 (metres, tons, or whatever).Black and white guinea pigs

In experience, then, all dichotomies are ultimately false. However, there are many that we would do well to accept in practical terms. In practice, either you catch a train or not: you cannot half catch it and remain alive. Iceland is either part of Europe or it isn’t, though the answer may depend on your definition of Europe. Perhaps it’s better to save up our objections to false dichotomies for the ones that really matter. The sort of time when it most seems to matter are when people in a certain group assume that because you’re different in some way you must be “one of them”. For example, scientific naturalists sometimes assume that if you question the ‘truth’ of scientific results, then you must be a dogmatic peddler of the supernatural. This is where it seems most important to make an effort to get across the mere possibility of the Middle Way.

The basic technique to spot a false dichotomy in practice is to ask yourself whether the two opposed qualities you’re dealing with could be translated into one quality and its negation. “Either you’re British or you’re French” is an obvious false dichotomy, whilst “Either you’re British or you’re not” may or may not be a dichotomy in practical terms, depending on how “British” is being defined. If it means possessing a British passport, it is in practice a true dichotomy, but if it is a matter of ethnic, geographical or cultural purity then it isn’t.

Exercise

Are these false dichotomies, either in thorough-going terms or in immediate practical terms?

1. Cats and dogs

2. There is no viable alternative to the company’s current employment policies.

3. Numbers that are not 15 are either larger than 15 or smaller.

4. Photographs are either colour or monochrome.

5. This dog is either dead or it is alive.

6. “The deadline is 12 noon on 15th June. Either meet it or lose your job!”

 

Index to previous Critical Thinking blogs

Photo: not entirely black and white guinea pigs by 4028mdk09 (Wikimedia Commons)

Critical Thinking 9: The Nirvana Fallacy

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This is not just a problem with Buddhism, nor with the rock band of that name, but an interesting and common fallacy, alternatively known as the Perfect Solution Fallacy or the perfect as the enemy of the good. Those subject to this fallacy reject an imperfect proposal merely because of its imperfection. They implicitly compare the imperfect to a perfect measure, and then reject the imperfect just because it doesn’t match up to the perfect, even if by any other criterion it is the best imperfect solution available. Since as finite beings we are never going to encounter a perfect solution to anything, this type of fallacy effectively blocks all solutions.

This kind of fallacy is often used to reject political proposals, which of course nearly always involve compromises. If the government introduces a new and generally helpful measure on, say, environmental protection, you will nearly always find a pressure group commenting through the media that this doesn’t go nearly far enough. Or if crime rates are reduced, they are still ‘too high’ because crime hasn’t been eliminated altogether.

My guess is that in practical terms, most people have learnt the limitations of the Nirvana Fallacy. Unless you’re a ‘perfectionist’, you’ve probably come to terms with the fact that when you cook a meal, for example, something may turn out just a little under or over-cooked, or slightly too sweet or too bitter. However, I’m still astounded by how much the Nirvana Fallacy affects our root thinking on larger matters that still do have a big practical effect on our lives in the longer term.

Religion is perhaps the most obvious of these. Theistic religions involve constant comparison with God, or with God’s supposed absolute commands. Even Buddhism involves the comparison with perfection that the name of the fallacy suggests, since Nirvana is said to be a perfect state. Hooked on belief in these pure ideals, it’s no wonder that we feel sinful or inadequate. A type of religion that makes constant reference to belief in perfection of any kind just institutionalises the gulf between perfect and actual, discouraging us from making incremental progress. Religion doesn’t have to necessarily take this form, but it often does.

The same applies to ethical thinking, even when this is not religious. Utilitarians tell us that, in theory, we should always act so as to bring the greatest pleasure to the greatest number, probably implying that (again in theory) we should give away most of our possessions and spend our lives in constant compassionate activity. In practice, of course, it is psychologically impossible for most people to do this, but there is still a common tendency to think that we somehow “ought” to act in such a way. Again, the effect of this kind of idealised thinking is to discourage actual moral advances, because nobody really takes ethics seriously in the way it has been conceptualised.Elizabeth_Lies thru a lens

Similarly, the pursuit of unattainable beauty not only tortures artists, but many young women who are never satisfied with their appearance. In this case we could argue that it is advertising and the marketing of beauty (with the help of photoshop) that implicitly puts forward the perfect as an enemy of the good, and prevents the recognition of genuine but imperfect beauty.

In terms of scientific evidence, too, the Nirvana Fallacy can be highly damaging. taking the form of a non-acceptance of imperfect evidence (through selective scepticism) because it is not perfect. Those who refuse to accept the clear but imperfect evidence for Anthropogenic climate change seem to be a particularly strong example.

So, this is an example of a fallacy that has become recognised in Critical Thinking, but involves so many habitual attitudes that I think only a whole revised attitude to life can address it. The Middle Way as a whole approach is needed to avoid the Nirvana Fallacy. We need to recognise the perfect being used as a measure whenever it crops up, and challenge it. The merely better is a much better measure than the perfect, as long as we accept the basic conditions of uncertainty that surround it.

Unlike with most other fallacies, I don’t think there are any justifiable resembling cases that need to be distinguished from the unjustifiable. Where perfection is used as a measure, the resulting judgements will be mistaken. That doesn’t stop us finding perfection meaningful, or even exploring its meaning creatively, but fallacies immediately arise when we use it as a basis on which to judge the imperfect. The only exception is the mere recognition of the absence of the perfect (i.e. scepticism), which does not involve using the perfect as a measure so much as deliberately avoiding doing so.

Exercise

Are the following examples of the nirvana fallacy? If so, why?

1. It is impossible to travel to the other side of the universe, because the universe is infinite.

2. I’ve had enough of your lies! When you told me the journey would take half an hour, it turned out to take three times as long. And you told me you’d repay that £100 you owe me months ago, but you’ve only paid £50 of it!

3. All our experience is imperfect. So we can never experience perfection. We must have got this idea of perfection from something perfect. The perfect being is God, so God must exist and have provided us with this idea of himself. (Summary of an argument made by Descartes).

4. The brain contains trillions of neural connections. However much we may try, we are hardly likely to ever gain a full understanding of such mind-boggling complexity.

 

Picture: ‘Elizabeth’, described as a ‘perfect beauty’ by ‘Lies thru a lens’ (Wikimedia Commons)

Critical Thinking 8: Ad hominem

Critical Thinking,

Ad hominem is a Latin phrase meaning ‘to the man’, and it is the label for a particular kind of fallacy in Critical Thinking. Sometimes this is known as “playing the man, not the ball”. It consists in an irrelevant appeal to the nature of a person to either support or dismiss their argument (usually to dismiss it). The following video gives some different types and examples:

The following video gives a great example from a US election campaign.

Here the argument is against Dan Quayle, comparing him unfavourably to Jack Kennedy even though he never claimed to be like Jack Kennedy, but merely compared his degree of experience to that of Kennedy. This is a kind of reversed guilt by association, dismissing Quayle’s argument about his suitability to stand in for the president through an irrelevant personal comparison.Sniper

However, there are some circumstances where it is relevant and appropriate to judge an argument by the character of the arguer. This is obviously the case if that person’s character is the subject of the discussion. So, if, for example, someone boasted in a job interview that they would make a good manager because they used to captain their school football team, it would not be ad hominem to respond that their criminal record undermined this claim by showing other characteristics that would not fit being a good manager. On the other hand, if someone said “The Scots won’t vote for independence: I saw a poll showing the majority were still against it” it would be an irrelevant personal observation to say “You’ve got a criminal record, so I don’t think you can offer any acceptable view of political matters.”

A person’s character may affect their credibility (which I discussed in Critical Thinking 7), but credibility gives an argument incrementally more or less weight. It never justifies the absolute acceptance or dismissal of an argument on the grounds of character. So, to spot an ad hominem, look out for sweeping dismissals (or occasionally, sweeping acceptances) without any incremental engagement with the complex inter-relationship between character and argument.

Exercise

Are the following fallacious ad hominems, or reasonable and relevant comments on character, or somewhere in between?

1. Harriet Harman has recently been in dispute with the Daily Mail over allegations that her past involvement with the National Council for Civil Liberties, at a time when the Paedophile Information Exchange was an affiliate of NCCL, meant that she was an “apologist for paedophilia”. Harman posted a tweet, in which she included a picture from Mail Online showing three bikini-clad girls (all under 18), and asked: “When it comes to decency and sexualisation of children, would you take lessons from the Daily Mail?”

2. ‘Gentlemen of the jury, because I have justice on my side, I am sure you will not be influenced by this gentleman’s pretended knowledge of the law. Why. he doesn’t even know which side of his shirt ought to be in front!’  Abraham Lincoln

3. David Cameron was elected promising “the greenest government ever”, but the number of international flights taken by the Prime Minister with his entourage is just as high as the number taken by his predecessors.

4. The baby boomer generation, who have benefitted massively from rising property prices without lifting a finger, have no right to tell younger people that they will have to work hard for a decent living.

5. George Osborne has a 2:1 in Modern History from Oxford. That hardly equips him to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post that obviously requires a profound grasp of Economics.

Critical Thinking 7: Authority and Credibility

Critical Thinking,

The Middle Way involves the avoidance of absolute authorities, but also the avoidance of the converse – dismissing all authority. In between we have the idea of justified authority that can be based on experience. Recognised fallacies in Critical Thinking, such as the irrelevant appeal to authority or the genetic fallacy, reinforce this need to avoid dogmatic extremes in thinking about authority. John_Caird_(theologian)Cognitive biases such as the authority bias also reflect psychological evidence of our tendency to uncritically obey authorities, especially reflected in the famous Milgram experiments.

The basic fallacy recognised in Critical Thinking in relation to authority is the irrelevant appeal to authority. This involves the assumption that an authority figure must be correct in whatever they claim, whether or not it is relevant to their particular expertise. Many adverts trade on this by using celebrities to endorse products that they have no particular expertise in. The following US commercial from the 1950’s is a classic example:

Nevertheless, because doctors are probably not a relevant authority to consult on which brand of cigarette to smoke, this does not imply that they do not have any authority. I am likely to rely on my doctor’s authority if he prescribes me a drug for a serious condition – not because I think him/her infallible, but because experience suggests that doctors are the best available source of information. The justification is largely second-hand, but no worse for that: the experience of most other people, that they have communicated to me, is that doctors are the best available guides to the complex field of medicine. To dismiss this authority on the basis of some mistakes made by doctors (even some serious ones) would be to make the reverse fallacy.

Another way of putting this more positively is that doctors have credibility. We are obliged to make judgements of credibility constantly, when deciding which books to read, which experts to consult, whose advice to heed etc, when (as often) we have no direct understanding of the issues. There are various criteria you can consciously apply to reflect on credibility: reputation, ability to gain information, vested interest, expertise, corroborating or conflicting information, and previously-known tendency towards bias. None of these are decisive by themselves, but they can be weighed together to try to reach a justified judgement.

It would be unjustified to give a huge weighting to one way of judging but ignore the others. For example, people often have some kind of vested interest in your acceptance of the information they offer (e.g. now, if you read this blog post, I have some vested interest in the shape of a vague hope that this will encourage you to buy one of my books in future). However, vested interest does not necessarily mean that the information should be treated with suspicion, or that the person’s motives are dominated by it, and if we dismissed everyone with a vested interest, we would never consult any experts about anything. Similarly, we often over-rate the effect of one well-known event on someone’s reputation: but if someone made a mistake or even committed a crime in the past, this might just as well be taken as a sign that they are likely to avoid that mistake in the future than that they will repeat it.

The authority bias, then, is like a single over-rated criterion of credibility. If, as in the Milgram experiments, you’re prepared to give painful electric shocks to others because a man in a white coat tells you to do so, you’re assuming that they have absolute authority because of their apparent expertise, and not considering the possibility of a problem with their moral judgement. Similarly, in a religious context, if you think that the fact that the book of Leviticus forbids homosexuality offers a relevant moral command for today, you are effectively taking the reputation of that religious text within a certain limited group and using this as your sole criterion for its credibility, whilst ignoring the lack of relevant expertise of the people who created the text, and the conflicts with other more recent sources of information.

Appeals to authority at their broadest are genetic fallacies – that is, the assumption that a claim is absolutely right because of where it comes from. This can apply to people, texts, governments, traditions, supposed intuitions and supposed observations. The basic problem is that wherever you think it has come from, you are still responsible for interpreting it and judging that it is justified and credible. If we take responsibility for our own judgements, the authority bias becomes much less likely.

Exercise

Do the following appear to be justifiable uses of authority? Why/ why not?

1. A father tells his three-year old daughter to stop slapping her sister. When she asks “Why?” he replies “Because I said so.”

2. A traditional Thai Buddhist buys a caged bird and releases it to gain merit. When questioned about this by a Western visitor, he explains that this is supported by Buddhist tradition and obeys the precepts of the Buddha.

3. A Member of Parliament votes against her conscience. When questioned by a constituent she explains that she was pressured by her party whip, and risked being de-selected by her party if she refused to vote with the party.

4. An amendment to the law in Afghanistan restores the right of a husband to use violence against his wife. The amendment is justified with reference to the Qur’an.

5. A disruptive student is told to leave the classroom by a teacher. The student refuses to leave, on the grounds that the teacher “Can’t just boss me around – I’ve got rights”.

6. A doctor gives advice on diet to an obese patient, which the patient refuses to follow. The patient points out that the doctor is overweight himself.

7. A husband had an extra-marital affair which was discovered, apologised for and forgiven a year ago. Since then his relationship with his wife has been good and trust seems to have been restored. However, now she is again suspicious about his fidelity (though the evidence is ambiguous). When the husband protests his innocence, she refuses to believe him, on the grounds that she was deceived before.