Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. Pascal, Pensees (1670) section 6, number 347*

In this year’s Winter edition of The Skeptic, the quarterly magazine of The Australian Skeptics [Inc], a contributor has a lot to say about academia and teaching — much of it challenging and most of it robust – particularly about standards of reasoning and argument.

Jef Clark describes himself as one “who teaches teachers how to teach [and] masquerades as an academic at Griffith University” in Brisbane; he is also the co-author of Humbug! The skeptics field guide to spotting fallacies in thinking, a handbook of logical thinking (more details available at www.skeptics.com.au ).

He reckons that students now are less exposed than they were formerly to critical analysis of the logic of thought, discussion and debate; in particular, they lack knowledge and awareness of what he terms “the seven deadly sins”:

(i) begging the question;
(ii) false analogy;
(iii) false dichotomy;
(iv) straw man;
(v) poisoning the well;
(vi) special pleading; and
(vii) unfounded generalisation.

“Common fallacies were common knowledge”, he claims, “and once attention had been directed to the fallacy, further explanation was rarely needed. Almost every week, I see or hear public statements by academics on social, cultural and political issues which betray a lack of clarity of thought and quality of reasoning.”

Clark’s references to these types of dodgy reasoning follow a much fuller treatment in the previous edition of The Skeptic [Summer 2004]. Here, for the benefits of polemicists, commentators and other argumentative types, are his definitions and explanations of various types of False Reasoning.

(A) False Analogy: this “occurs when an advocate presents and example of a phenomenon and implies that the example either proves or compellingly illustrates something about another phenomenon”. An argument against stricter gun control laws might claim that because people are killed by cars, motor vehicles should therefore be subjected to same sorts of controls as guns are, and no-one would accept them for cars, so why should they for guns ? The weakness is that the analogy ignores the vital distinction that cars and guns have different purposes. Argument from historical parallels can suffer from this, as the French discovered with their Maginot Line; the anti-Iraq War case based on similarities with the Vietnam War needs to take notice of differences as well as similarities, and which of the two are the more significant.

(B) False Attribution: “[t]his flaw in reasoning occurs when an advocate appeals to a marginally relevant, irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or even non-existent source to support a claim. . . . The initial response to a seeker after truth to apparent dissembling of this kind should be a courteous request for a specific citation. . . . In making the request, the point should be made that ‘going directly to the source’ is always more reliable than a second-hand report”. Scientists from a particular discipline may be rather less qualified or credible outside their own fields; much of the reliance on celebrity cheer-leading is weakened by their views being no more relevant than any ordinary Jo/e’s. Much of the stuff on the Internet is said to be in this category.

(C) False Cause / Correlation Error / Post hoc ergo propter hoc: “[t]his flaw is the result of the common human tendency to associate events which occur in sequence and to assume that there is a causal link. . . . There are two possible levels of false association: 1. The relationship being simply apparent rather than real (eg ‘co-incidence’). In this case the error is a false cause because there is no causal relationship. 2. There may be an actual link, but the claimed ‘direction’ of cause and effect is in error. In this case the flaw is a correlation error because the cause and effect are reversed, or indirectly related”. If, co-incidentally, your car breaks down three Mondays in a row, it’s tempting to become irrationally superstitious about the first day of the week; a visitor from the Stone Age might reasonably conclude that turning indicator lights on cars are the cause of the car’s turning; such situations were once stock-in-trade for comedy sketches involving bwanas, kiaps and sahibs V natives.

(D) False Compromise: “The advocate asserts that because he or she doesn’t understand or accept the opponent’s views, in fairness the two should agree to ‘split the difference’ and agree on a middle position. Such an approach to addressing an issue is more about mollifying the parties . . ., rather than arriving at the truth of the matter”. Two parties agreeing to a compromise wording is often unsatisfactory to both, and the fact that it is a compromise should be made public. A “more intellectually respectable alternative” is a statement by the parties making “it clear that they came to different conclusions as a result of their study. . . . This approach is common in public documents . . . where a ‘minority report’ is commonly included when consensus could not be reached”. Note: avoiding false compromises is no justification for refusing or denigrating valid ones.

(E) False Dichotomy / Black-and-white reasoning / polarisation: “The advocate presents an issue as ‘black and white’ when it is in reality ‘shades of grey’. The reasoning put forward is unjustifiably ‘all of nothing’ rather than subtle or measured”. Much of the argument about forestry and forests in Tasmania seems to be carried on in this way: if Gunns don’t get their way in this patch of ground, it and every other industry will pack up and leave; if that patch of ground is handed over to Gunns, we won’t have a tree left on the Island. Benefits for one region in this Australia’s most decentralised State are often seen in other regions as deliberate slights. In education, there is the utterly false and quite silly claim along the lines of ‘we don’t teach facts – instead, we teach pupils how to think’ as if they are mutually exclusive.

(F) False Dilemma: “This is the error of portraying one choice as necessarily excluding another, even though there is no necessary connection. For example, an advocate might make the following statement: ‘They should solve world poverty before they try to put humans on Mars’. While this may sound superficially plausible, the unstated and bizarre implication is that the advocate believes that if money were not expended on a Mars expedition, it would be diverted to the alleviation of poverty. This is clearly false”. Arguments about government budgets are often full of false dilemmas: more money on men’s health, for example, or on roads, or on child care must necessarily mean less for women’s health, or for fixed rail transport, or the elderly.

(G) False Positioning / Caricature / Straw Man: “The advocate attacks a weakened, exaggerated, over-simplified or otherwise false or distorted form of the opponent’s argument rather than the real one. Commonly, the advocate presents a simplified caricature of the opponent’s argument, then demolishes this ‘straw man’, which is nothing more than a falsely constructed target of the advocate’s own invention”. Political debate [or what passes for it] is riddled with caricature: the dole bludgers, the bloated capitalists, the fat-cat bureaucrats, the grossly over-paid suits, the trade union officials on the political make, the rabid right, loony left. The interesting thing is that such caricatures appeal only to the converted; they are unlikely to modify opposing ideas, but simply confirm impressions that their advocates are not worth listening to. Gunns and timber workers are arboricidal maniacs with a Texas chainsaw mentality; Dr Brown and the environmentalists are either loopy tree-huggers or eco-fascists bent on destroying the Australian Way-of-Life. This sort of mindset is usually far too ready to ignore the cultural fact that the things which unite Australians or Tasmanians are far more extensive and deep-rooted than those which divide them. Nor, of course, should the existence of single-issue fanatics or extremists at either end of any spectrum be denied or ignored.

If Jef Clark’s students emerge from his courses at Queensland’s Griffith University as knowledgeable, articulate and logical seekers after truth, and if, despite there being only three “Jef Clarks” found in a recent self-administered Google search, there are other Jef Clark equivalents among our teacher-trainers, then the future for rational enquiry on this Island is assured.

And, whatever our views on Gunns and gumtrees, we will all benefit.

* L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant.

Leonard Colquhoun 7248