The ancient Greeks relied heavily on logic for their research (though it’s a common but entirely false misconception that they prized it above observational evidence – discoveries like the antikithera device proves a level of engineering skill that could not have come without actually studying how things really worked sometimes) and very soon came to realize that what feels logical sometimes isn’t.
This led to what many consider their single most important contribution to human knowledge – they were the first to quantify logic, and draw up rules by which arguments could be studied to determine their validity. Aristotle’s six laws of deductive logic remains to this day the cornerstone of any philosophy course on logic and critical thinking.
It didn’t stop there though, as time progressed we discovered inductive logic (which is a basic foundation of all science) and also started discovering that there are some arguments that seem entirely logical, sounds logical – but simply isn’t. They just don’t prove anything. These arguments are called fallacies and they essentially reoccur in all debates and arguments over and over. Quite frankly they are a form of deception – often used deliberately but sometimes used out of ignorance. Knowing how to recognize them is a basic life skill. The use of a fallacy doesn’t prove an argument false, but it doesn’t prove it true either – in fact it ads no weight at all to it, and if there isn’t a better argument available it significantly reduces the trustworthiness of the argument. When an argument is justified on a fallacy – the best advice is to refuse to accept it unless better and truer evidence can be found.
The purpose of this post is to introduce you to some of the most common fallacies, and some of their most common uses around us – to hopefully allow you to spot some of them and not be deceived.
Ad hominem attack – The attack on the arguer.
This argument, despite being fallacious has become almost all of modern politics. The core of the fallacy comes in when your argument does not address your opponents points, but instead attacks the person you are arguing against. Essentially it’s a character attack – you try to convince the audience to reject your opponents argument because they shouldn’t like the other guy instead of considering whether his argument makes sense.
Julius Malema’s political rhetoric consists basically of nothing else but ad hominem attacks. He has never actually discussed whether policies make more sense than that of his opponents, what their historical success was or anything else to strengthen his arguments – he simply makes attacks on the character of his opponents. Every female politician whom he is in opposition to he accuses of sleeping around (that this sexist double-standard still influences people is shocking but we live in a society where apparently it does). That his accusations are generally unfounded and unproven is not the part we’re interested in though – it’s the fact that his accusations has nothing to do with politics or policy that make them fallacious.
Malema is a bit of an extreme example – but the reality is that virtually every political debate in the world today consists almost entirely of this fallacy and almost no discussion ever happens on whether the policies promoted actually make any sense. That this apparently wins elections is nothing short of tragic. In short, like it or not, I couldn’t care less who Jacob Zuma shagged last night – what should matter is whether his policies are good for the country or not, what his character is like has no influence on that question – and to suggest it does is a logical fallacy – a false argument.
Appeal to emotions.
This fallacy is a cornerstone of most marketing and much of politics. It consists of trying to trigger an emotional response in the audience to prevent them from actually considering the validity of your argument. When an insurance company shows you images of a happy family in a house being protected from some sort of tragedy, that’s a classic example. The advertisement tells us nothing about the quality of their service, the comparative value of their premiums or the level of their coverage. Instead it reminds us that we are at risk, triggers a fear response, reminds us that we love our families and want to protect them – then presents itself as a form of that protection, while this is indeed what they are selling, by getting our emotions involved they avoid ever actually discussing the relative merits of the protection they offer compared to their competitors. They hope that we’ll buy their product because we feel scared right now, that we’ll feel so scared we won’t risk taking the time to compare their product to other products in the market. This is one of the most deliberate and deciduous fallacies in the world today. Much of politics also revolve around this, a good example is the politician kissing a baby. Kissing a baby says nothing about the politician’s policies – it’s intended to make us feel affection for him as a person and vote based on that affection.
Argumentum ad consequentiam: Appeal to consequences.
This is a variant of the appeal to emotion but worthy of a separate mention. The core of the fallacy is to claim an argument is true or false based on whether the consequences of the argument is appealing or not. Most of the gay-marriage debate has consisted of this argument – at least from those opposed to it. Very little discussion has happened on the core of the pro-gay-marriage argument: that treating gay couples differently from heterosexual couples is discrimination.
Instead almost all the retorts are claims like “legalized gay marriage would destroy the foundations of society”. Whether this outcome is true or not, it’s a fallacy. It doesn’t answer the claim that preventing gay marriage is discrimination. Instead it assumes that it can’t be discrimination because it believes the consequences of it being discrimination (and correcting it) would be bad. That is bad logic, good logic requires you to address the argument made. If the argument is true – then you have to address it. If this has unwanted consequences, the best way of addressing those consequences is a separate argument entirely. In other words – we should be asking “if banning gay marriage is discrimination, and we make it legal, and it then has negative effects – how can we mitigate those effects ?” but we cannot use the claim of potential negative effects as evidence of whether gay marriage should be legal or not.
Appeal to authority.
This is a very common fallacy, it underlies much of religion and most of society in fact and it’s what frequently throughout history has pitted scientists against figures of authority. The heart of this fallacy is to claim that your argument is true because somebody else who is an authority said it is true. Sadly this even covers a significant portion of the legal system (much of legal precedent is based on “previous judges found” – and thus essentially assumes the truth of the argument based on the fact that those judges, authorities, agreed with it). In theory it isn’t quite that bad the idea is that you don’t have to repeat the argument every time when a previous judge has already ruled – unless you can present evidence that the previous judge did not have at his disposal. This and the appeal system is the legal system’s defense against being entirely run on this logical fallacy, but most of the rest of the world have no such defenses.
It occurs even among scientists, it’s one of the easiest fallacies to fall pray to. We assume that a figure of authority, or a specialist in the field knows more than we do – thus their conclusions are true, but their authority doesn’t mean they weren’t wrong, doesn’t mean they knew everything – the reason this is a fallacy is because it avoids whatever argument is presented and simply states that it cannot be true because a previous authority didn’t believe the conclusion. If we said that gravity works based on the square inverse law “because Newton said so” – we’re committing this fallacy, the fact is that gravity doesn’t work on the square inverse law, Einsteinian physics is essentially a description of why. Newtonian comes close enough for many practical uses but it’s just not true. If we had refused to accept Einstein’s research because of Newton’s position as a figure of scientific authority – most of the 20th century’s important discoveries could never have been made. In short, just because somebody is in charge – that doesn’t mean they are right. If it did, we wouldn’t need democracy. This fallacy is shockingly common in South African (and American) politics – how often has a politician declared “you cannot criticize the president because he is the president and to question him is unpatriotic) – that is the appeal to authority hard at work to deceive us.
Naturalistic fallacy.
Sadly despite how much I like the character of Gregory House for his love of reason- he commits this fallacy a few thousand times in every episode. The naturalistic fallacy is the assumption that things should be as they are. Much of the anti-evolution crowd’s arguments are naturalistic fallacies. Essentially saying “evolution can’t be true because it justifies people acting in some bad way” (bad way is often lust-fullness or animalistic behavior). This is the naturalistic fallacy. Evolution says humans are animals with animalistic basic urges. It doesn’t say we should act according to them. Science tells us how things are, it never says we can’t change them. In fact recognizing the source of something you don’t like better enables you to change them – denying the causes of things because you don’t like those things is an excercize in futility.
House commits this fallacy most obviously in “No more Mister Nice Guy” – he reasons that “niceness” is not an evolutionary survival trait – therefore it must be a symptom. Ultimately the episode proves him largely wrong – and he is wrong. Just because we didn’t evolve to be nice people – doesn’t mean we can’t be or shouldn’t be – knowing why we aren’t nice-by-default is useful knowledge that empowers us to act against our dangerous urges and act nice anyway (yes I know I’m using a fictional example – but it’s a very useful one because it’s so clear, we see the same argument all over all the time).
Straw man attack.
This is another very common fallacy. It is the fallacy of taking a part of the opponents argument out of context to form a weak argument then attacking this weak argument while ignoring the fact that the actual argument is valid. A common one in our society today centers around drug enforcement policy.
The basic debate goes like this:
A: We should legalize marijuana as it’s less addictive than many already-legal substances, relatively harmless and have known beneficial side-effects to health.
B: If we legalize drugs then society will collapse !
The point is that A never suggested legalizing all drugs (some people would but it wasn’t in this argument), she made a strong argument with factual premises. B never addressed any of them. B did not argue whether marijuana is relatively harmless, did not argue on whether it has health benefits and never debated that many legal substances such as alcohol, nicotine and caffeine are more addictive than marijuana. These premises may or may not be true but B didn’t address them at all – and usually doesn’t. B attacked a weakened form of A’s argument, which is only superficially similar (legalizing all drugs is a very different thing from legalizing one drug).
The marijuana debate world wide replays this scene over and over and every time B says it- it’s still a fallacy. The slippery-slope argument we so often hear is mostly a variant of the same fallacy. This version goes “we cannot allow X because it would lead inevitably to allowing Y and Z” where Y and Z are clearly unwanted results. In fact the slippery-slope argument is usually a straw-man fallacy – unless you actually prove that Y and Z really are inevitable consequences, even then it’s still often an appeal-to-consequences fallacy (fallacies often inter-mesh – making them harder to recognize – all the more reason to be vigilant if you wish to think critically for yourself).
Appeal to tradition.
This is one of the most pervasive and powerful fallacies in the world and forms a huge part of modern politics. The conservapedia website claims for example that the most important values of conservatives are “morals and tradition”. But the latter is a known fallacy. The fallacy essentially consists in it’s simplest form of saying “we’ve always done it this way/believed this – therefore it must be true”. Terry Pratchett regularly makes fun of it “ten thousand generations of dwarves couldn’t have been wrong, if it was wrong we wouldn’t have kept doing it all that time”. The implication is clear, another generation is about to repeat it unquestioningly based on the assumption that a previous one would have questioned it. The call to tradition is insidious, deceptive and incredibly dangerous because if there is one lesson printed throughout history it’s that “the way we always did it” is very rarely the right way.
Not long ago people defended slavery on the grounds that “slavery has been allowed for all of history” – making it’s ending take that much longer and cause several wars. Today hardly anybody thinks slavery was a good thing, but it was a human tradition for thousands of years, and long defended based on this fallacy. Nearly all of conservative politics today consists of this fallacy. It’s powerful because it soothes human’s natural fear of change. We want to believe the fallacy because it protects us from having to question the ideas we were raised with, provides a shelter from the changes in the world which we fear may harm us – the reality though is that it’s a paper-shelter that doesn’t protect us, it merely lets us hide from reality. It’s an ostrich-position that lets us hide our heads in the sand and cling to ideas that are provably false (even if they may have been true once in the past). Whenever tradition is brought up as an argument the only logical answer is to demand a better argument- proof that tradition wasn’t in fact wrong all along because it very often is.
This list and description is hardly exhaustive – Wikipedia has a much more complete list. This list instead is focused on those fallacies that we encounter daily on television, in the newspapers and in discussion -to help us recognize them and refuse to be tricked by them. So we can make clearer, more logical decisions. It is also based on fallacies we have simple, easy to recognize examples off – not abstract ones, things we hear daily to let us judge them better.
