Tag Archives: fallacies

Critical Thinking 10: False Dichotomy

Critical Thinking,

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 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 6: Fallacies and Cognitive Biases

Critical Thinking, Psychology,

There are a great many different fallacies and a great many different cognitive biases: probably enough to keep me going for years if I was to discuss one each week on this blog series. What I want to do here, though, is just to consider the question of what fallacies and cognitive biases actually are, and how they relate to each other. This is a contentious enough subject in itself.

A fallacy is normally described as a flaw in reasoning, or a type of mistake whereby people draw incorrect conclusions from the reasons they start with. This would be correct when applied to formal fallacies, but I think incorrect when applied to the more interesting and practically relevant informal fallacies. Here’s a simple example of a formal fallacy (one known as affirming the consequent):

Good Catholics attend mass regularly.

Bridget attends mass regularly.

Therefore Bridget is a good Catholic.

You might think this was quite a reasonable conclusion to draw from the reasons given. However, it is not a necessary conclusion. You don’t have to be a good Catholic to attend mass regularly, and it’s quite possible that Bridget is an uncertain enquirer, or a bad Catholic trying to keep up appearances, or a Religious Studies scholar doing field research into Catholicism. A conclusion that is not necessarily true is not valid, and thus a formal fallacy.

However, it may be reassuring to reflect that the vast majority of arguments we actually use in practice are formal fallacies. Many of them are inductive (see Critical Thinking 2), and even those that are not inductive may be deduction (like the example above) of a kind that is formally invalid but actually reasonably enough most of the time. Formal fallacies are thus of little interest from the practical point of view. Informal fallacies, on the other hand, tell us much more about unhelpful thinking, even though they may actually be formally valid in some instances.

Informal fallacies are just unjustified assumptions: for example, the assumption that some objectionable personal attribute in the arguer refutes their argument (ad hominem); or that there are only two choices in a situation where there is actually a spectrum of options (false dichotomy); or the assumption that using your conclusion as a reason provides an informative argument (begging the question). What is objectionable about arguments involving these moves often depends on the circumstances, and it requires thoughtful judgement rather than just applying black-and-white rules. But that’s also the indication that these fallacies actually matter in everyday life.

Informal fallacies are unjustified assumptions identified by philosophers. The only genuine difference between informal fallacies and cognitive biases, as far as I can see, is that cognitive biases are unjustified assumptions identified by psychologists and often tested through experiment. Psychologists may explain our tendency to make these particular kinds of unhelpful assumptions in terms of the physical, social and evolutionary conditions we emerge from, but in the end these kinds of explanations are less central than the identification of the bias itself. Usually cognitive biases can be ‘translated’ into fallacies and vice-versa. For example, the in-group bias (tendency to favour the judgements of your own group) is equivalent to the irrelevant appeal to the authority of the group (or its leaders), irrelevant appeal to popularity within the group, or irrelevant appeal to tradition in the group, all of which are recognised informal fallacies. The outcome bias, whereby we judge a past decision by its outcome rather than its quality at the time, involves an irrelevant appeal to consequences.

Philosophers and psychologists thus both have very useful things to tell us about what sorts of mistakes we are likely to make in our thinking, and insofar as their different contributions are practically useful, they tend to converge. I would also argue that this convergence of useful theory relates closely to the avoidance of metaphysics (see cognitive biases page). Despite the widespread idea that fallacies are faults in reasoning, they really have nothing to do with reasoning in the strict sense of logical validity. They are all about the unhelpful assumptions we often tend to make.

Exercise

See if you can identify  and describe the type of unhelpful assumptions being made in these video clips. You don’t necessarily need to know the formal titles of the fallacies involved to identify why they are a problem.

1.

3.

4.