Plain Philosophy.

Mission: to translate all those amazing but hard-to-read, "my eyes are glazing over and I need some eye glue" theories into plain English.

[philosophytranslator]

And we’re back! (sorta)

John here.

Some of you might have noticed that the blog has been, well... Dead for a bit. You can pretty much blame my first year of Ph.D candidacy for that, as I have not had as much time to devote to the blog as I would have liked, and Kari has been busy trying to survive the hellscape that is the first year of graduate school.

Interestingly enough, despite our absence from the blog, we have managed to gather several dozen new followers, and the reblogs have held steady. What this says to me is that people are still interested in having philosophical terms translated into accessible language, and that we should keep at it.

That being said, as my semester is winding down, and winter break approaches, you can expect to see more content on the blog, as well as answers to questions that have been gathering dust in the inbox for some time. I can’t promise an immediate pick up in content, more like a trickle, but there will be new stuff coming very soon.

So, what can you do? Send us more questions!

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i have to make a proposal for my undergrad thesis in like a week or so, im majoring in philosophy and concentrating in feminism. i really wanna make an undergrad thesis abt intersectionality but im so confused what to make out of it... (1/2)

John has already written about intersectionality.

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the phrase "if you're neutral/passive you're helping the oppressor" something along that line.. wouldn't that be a false dilemma?

You know, Desmond Tutu said something similar, but his was more eloquent:

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Questions like yours are the reason why I decided to do the whole fallacy thing, because people like to apply fallacies to statements like that while ignoring the existential situation that gives rise to the statements themselves. Basically, people do the asshole thing that I warned about and take the argument out of the situation that produced it, and then try to treat it as fallacious.

Anyway, to answer your question, I’m going to explain the whole “existential situation” bit. To make this easy, an existential situation is the situation that makes whatever we’re talking about exist. Hence, “existential,” as in referring to existence. Now, in logic, we have shit like “existential assumptions,” which can lead to a fallacy called the “existential fallacy,” which I’m not going to talk about. Basically, what you need to know about “existential whatever” and logic is that all logical arguments function in an existential situation that makes them work.

What the heck does this have to do with your question? Well, the way that your statement becomes an example of a false dichotomy is if you ignore the existential situation that the statement comes out of, which is a common tactic when people try to present statements like that as fallacious. Okay, maybe an example might help: when people say things like that, they’re talking from within a situation where the oppressor organizes the culture that everyone is operating in. So the very nature of the culture helps make oppression happen; oppression is part of the situation.

Thus, oppression will act with or without the assistance of the people in the situation because the situation is what allows oppression to happen. So when people in a situation like that (which is pretty much every oppressed group in America to some degree) say things like “if you’re neutral, you’re helping the oppressor,” they’re basically saying that if you’re not doing something to change the situation or resist the oppressors, you’re actually helping the oppressor by allowing the oppression to continue either as part of the situation or through agents. Given the situation (or the world) that the argument is arising from, this isn’t a false dichotomy, it’s a statement of fact.

Let’s look at Tutu’s statement, especially the part “in situations of injustice.” Tutu has included the existential situation in his argument, which is something that isn’t included in your statement. Right, so “in situations of injustice,” not doing anything is basically allowing whatever’s happening to happen, which is functionally the same as helping the oppressor engage in the oppression. The existential situation is what prevents his statement from being a false dichotomy.

So yeah, before you go screaming about false dichotomies, remember that the situation that the argument comes from has to allow for solutions that are excluded by the dichotomy.

[philosophytranslator]

False dilemma: (either or – two choices); Alright, so why am I calling the “false dichotomy” a “false dilemma?” Wikipedia (or any other logic textbook) uses the two interchangeably, but I’ll quote the all knowing Wikipedia for proof:

A false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, false binary, black-and-white thinking, bifurcation, denying a conjunct, the either–or fallacy, fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, the fallacy of false choice, the fallacy of the false alternative, or the fallacy of the excluded middle) is a type of informal fallacy that involves a situation in which only limited alternatives are considered, when in fact there is at least one additional option 

So we can pretty much generate some really easy examples: “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” or “you’re either good or evil,” or “you’re either a republican or a democrat.” This one is pretty easy to see when people use it because basically they’re leaving out a middle option, or another possibility. Now, the image says “other viewpoints,” but it really should mean just “other possibilities,” because you can pose an argument where certain possibilities are eliminated.

So where do we see this? Debates over race, gender, and sexuality on tumblr and in the world are filled with this kind of thing. You could call bisexual erasure as a massive false dichotomy when it is based on the premise that you’re either gay or straight, or that a bisexual who is in a relation ship with someone of the same sex or gender is suddenly gay, or if they’re in a relationship with someone of a different gender or sex, they’re suddenly straight. This implies that there are only two choices as to how one identifies sexually.

Now, one of the more covert ways of doing this shows up in conversations about race and racial identity, when demands are made for an individual to identify with one part of their racial identity or another, as it presumes that they cannot identify with both cultures. Now, I know this is a hard pill for some people to swallow, but one can celebrate both of their cultural identities without surrendering association with another. To claim that one cannot stand in the middle is to commit the fallacy, which leads to one of the names of the fallacy, “excluded middle.”

Now, a false dilemma or dichotomy or whatever you want to call it, is not just two opposed viewpoints: it’s presenting a situation where the only alternative is one of two possibilities, while ignoring the fact that there are more plainly obvious possibilities. Like, the fallacy works only when someone argues that the two possibilities presented exhaust all other possibilities: if one of the alternatives is an actual alternative, then the statement is not a fallacy. Confused yet? Let me explain:

Either Chicago is in Illinois, or it is in California. Chicago is not in California Therefore, Chicago is in Illinois.

So this is valid and sound because Chicago being in California is not remotely possible, but it is a known fact that Chicago is in Illinois, so... yeah. However, this is different than saying “If you have a penis, then you’re a man; If you don’t then you’re a woman,” because there are other possible alternatives, and the presentation of these alternatives is not the creation of a false situation where both have to be true.

How not to be an asshole: Basically? Acknowledge the possibility of other possibilities? Pretty much, the entire issue is when someone uses an argument to create a situation where if one thing is true, the other must be false, or vice versa, while excluding other possibilities. If you’re going to narrow the possibilities, then you need to provide a reason for doing so, usually with a existential qualifier, something that changes the nature of the situation.

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Post hoc ergo propter hoc – fallacy of false cause. “After this, therefore because of this.” Basically, we’re talking about an argument where the conclusion is based on x causing y, when its really not the case that x causes y at all. So, we can look at this example:

“I had coffee, then the sun came up. Therefore, my drinking the coffee caused the sun to rise.”

It’s clearly not the case that the drinking of coffee causes the sun to rise (we all know some dude drives a chariot around which causes the sun to rise), but the imagined connection between drinking coffee and the sun rising is what makes the statement a fallacy. Basically, coincidence isn’t proof of a conclusion. Like all things in philosophy, this is also more complicated than it needs to be, so there are two versions of the fallacy.

Post hoc ergo proprter hoc: this is the assumption that because something comes before something else, the first thing causes it. Basically, something happening before something else is not evidence to say that the one thing caused the other. If this was the case then I could argue that my closing my front door caused cars to pass on my street. This is clearly not the case because the cars aren’t relevant to my closing the door.

Non causa pro causa: So, this one happens when the causes of something is not really the causes at all and the mistake is based on something other than the fact that something happened before the other thing. So, the correlation between hard work and financial advancement in American culture is an example of this because there are people in lower income areas who work their asses off and still end up going no where. It’s usually due to other factors and hard work (or daddy’s money) that get people places.

Oversimplified cause: I see this one all the time on tumblr and in pundits and everywhere. Basically, this happens when there are a whole bunch of causes for an event and someone picks a single cause as if it were the source of everything. Oversimplified social justice arguments are an example of this, as are attempts to blame a single factor for a group’s oppression. Respectability politics, for example, are pretty much oversimplified cause par excellence: by reducing racism to “people just need to be respectable,” the argument ignores all other causes for racism and further places the onus on the abused for their abuse.

Gambler’s Fallacy: Um, I don’t see much of this because usually it takes something really complicated to get this effect. It’s called the gambler’s fallacy because you’re literally gambling with what’s going to happen: a person flipping a coin five times and getting heads all five times, who then assumes that they’re going to get tails on the sixth, is committing this fallacy. Pretty much, if people assume that independent events in a game of chance are are related, they’re committing this fallacy.

How not to be an asshole: Remember, correlation does not prove causation; also, statistical correlations don’t really tell us much about what’s going on, only that a number of instances have occurred. So, pretty much, don’t assume a cause when you have no reason to do so; also, don’t eliminate a bunch of causes in favor of the one you like; finally, don’t gamble because it’s bad for you.

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Equivocation – Term with several meanings:

Arguments that commit the fallacy of equivocation use a word or phrase in the premises that has multiple meanings, and then use that word in a different meaning in the conclusion. Usually, this means the argument is invalid or has false premises. Okay, maybe an example is necessary:

“Congress makes laws and can repeal them. But the law of gravity is a law. Therefore, the law of gravity can be repealed by congress.“

Yeah, that’s a bullshit statement, but look, that’s how it works. “Law” is being used in two different senses in the statement: as something that is made by governments, and as how we assume the world to work. Both senses of the word are correct, but when used interchangeably in the argument, both are wrong. However, the reason why people might be able to slip this one under the radar is because the meaning of “law” and “law” are so similar that we may miss the equivocation if we’re not paying attention.

Equivocation is so simple, that it’s really hard to expand on it, but it’s also really hard to catch because it relies on shifting meaning. Like, if you pay close attention to politicians, you’ll find that they often engage in equivocation through changing the meaning of their words through the course of their speech. At the beginning, they may refer to “national security” as one thing, but mean something else by the end of the speech.

In all fairness, people working for positive causes do this too, often shifting the meaning of a word through their conversation so that it has a different meaning throughout the argument. Now, if the point of the argument is the redefinition of the word, then the shifting meaning is appropriate. However, when this happens, it must be made clear that the person making the argument is redefining the term and the purposes behind redefining the term. If neither is offered, then you have equivocation.

How not to be an asshole: define your goddamned terms and stick with them. Also, try not to shift between meanings of a term throughout the conversation. If you’re going to use a term in multiple ways in an argument, make sure you explain why you’re doing it, and how it contributes to the argument.

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Complex or leading questions - frames the argument to lead to a predetermined answer. 

Basically, the question creates a situation that assumes the answer, so when someone answers the question, they’re confirming the answer that was assumed. Okay, that’s complicated because a complex question isn’t an argument in the actual sense, but it involves arguments implied in the questions, so it gets a place. Also, everyone likes to use these things. This is the most basic one that I like to use in class:

“Did you stop cheating on the exam?”

So the question, if answered “yes” means that they were previously cheating; if answered “no,” it means that they have not stopped cheating on the exam. Either way, the person answering the question is fucked. Obviously, we can see how this is used by a variety of people: pundits like to use this to trap their guests, parents like to use it to trap their children, police use them on suspects to coerce confessions, but what about the supposed good guys of the world?

Well, this is something that people who’re acting in the service of good causes like to use as well, especially when attempting to set up those who they’re actively opposing. Proponents of particular cultural change may ask those they view as not working with their movement complex questions to get them to “admit” to not caring about certain issues, or to “revel” inherent biases that they assume are present, e.g. “have you started dealing with issue X yet?” If the person answers “no” they’ve admitted to not caring about issue yet; if they answer yes... well you get the point.

Complex questions aren’t always phrased in the above way, “where did you hide your drugs?” An implication is that you either did drugs, or that you hid the drugs. Now, this might seem like a bit of a stretch, but think about how you’d answer the question: “I didn’t hide the drugs,” implies that you know something about the drugs including who hid them, and this is the way that a lot of people get trapped into answering questions in ways that presume their guilt. Law and Order is excellent at providing examples of these.

Before I get to the other parts of this, I need to make a difference between complex questions and leading questions. A complex question has an argument implied in the question, or has more than one question built into it. Those are pretty easy. Leading questions suggest the answer within the question. For example:

“Did you see him with the person yesterday?”

This question doesn’t involve a fallacy, but they do attempt to lead a person into answering a question in a particular way. Again, leading questions are not fallacies, they’re tools of rhetoric and they can be involved in fallacies.

How not to be an asshole: Don’t bury arguments in questions and don’t double up on questions. Also, don’t use your line of inquiry to force people into admitting something that they do not hold to be true, and then attempt to use the admission to prove something about the individual. If you really need to get clear about a person believes, ask them to clarify their position without interjecting your own position within.

One of the ways that students often abuse the lessons learned in intro logic courses is through complex questions, as they understand how to use them to provoke an answer that they want. Seriously, don’t do this.

[philosophytranslator]

Petitio Principi – begging the question or “repeat the principle.” An example, “his shirt is green therefore his shirt is green.” The trick is to make it less obvious. If the conclusion is already in the premises, or if the conclusion repeats the premises, then you have committed this fallacy. The most common way that this shows up is when people create the illusion that shitty premises provide decent support for the conclusion by leaving out something that’s essential to the conclusion, or by reasoning in a circle: “it is what is is,” for example.

“It’s obvious that Black communities need more police. After all, a majority of crime happens in predominantly Black neighborhoods.” - This is an example of begging the question because it restates a premises as the conclusion. Further, the argument is missing the fundamental support for crime as more frequent in communities of color. If we were to take an expanded view, this statement also leaves out the possibility for other causes of crime within predominantly Black communities, thereby failing to demonstrate the soundness of their argument.

Now, one of the interesting things about begging the question is why the argument is phrased in a particular way. In most examples of begging the question, the person making the argument is not able to establish the trugh of the conclusion, so they rely upon sentences like “of course” or “obviously” or “clearly,” to create the illusion of being true, when there’s no evidence for the case. That’s not to say that all statements that begin with those phrases are examples of begging the question, but you should look critically at anything that claims something is “obvious.”

A more controversial way of putting it would be “Obviously gender is not real because it’s a social construct,” which, you know, leaves out information essential to why gender is not real because of its socially constructed nature, what we mean by real, and so on. That’s not saying we can’t say “gender isn’t real,” but we have to explain why the fact that gender is a social construct means that it is not real. So pretty much, you can’t just go around spouting things without supporting them.

“People who believe in transforming the system have an idea for a better world, because if they don’t then they can’t possibly want to change the system.” - This is the restating the conclusion thing I’m talking about, and it’s pretty obvious because the conclusion is just said all over again. Other forms of this version of begging the question involve restating the conclusion using different words so that the reader cannot tell that the conclusion has been restated. A lot of people tend to use this one on both sides of the social justice spectrum use this one to justify statements.

More generally, you’ll see this a lot when people are trying to justify selling you something or trying to convince you of something. This is one of those really common errors that many people make due to lack of information or just out of ignorance for what they’ve done.

How not to be an asshole: don’t assume that something’s obvious when you haven’t provided the support for it. Something that seems obvious to you might not be obvious to anyone else if you don’t actually support your argument. Further, don’t assume that whomever you’re talking to actually knows the shit you’re talking about: something that might seem like obvious knowledge might not actually be obvious given different lived experiences and what not.

Also, don’t use the conclusion as part of your premises.

[philosophytranslator]

Amphiboly – Grammatical error to make a change in the meaning. It is the difference between “knowing you’re shit” and “knowing your shit.” Okay, so what this means is that an argument uses a grammatical error or something similar to create an illusion of a consistent or coherent argument. So, because of the grammatical thing, the statement can be understood in two different ways. Let’s use my example above:

Stop saying you know your shit. Stop saying you know you’re shit.

Okay, so one is telling the person to stop saying that they know what they’re doing and the other is telling the person to stop saying that they know that they’re crap. When spoken, they sound the same (and on the internet, where no one can hear grammarians scream), and it is difficult to tell the two apart. In fact, some versions of amphiboly, usually used by reporters or other folks, rely on this ambiguity to make things work in their favor.

To be super technical, the kind of ambiguity we’re talking about is called syntactical ambiguity, which pretty much means that there’s an issue with the syntax, or the structure of the sentence. I just said that, right? This is important because it allows us to make the difference between amphiboly and equivocation. See, amphiboly has everything to do with the statement and equivocation has everything to do with the word.

How not to be an asshole: Uh... Just don’t do it? I mean, really, the easiest way to not be an asshole about this is not to do it. Also, grammar nazis love to pounce all over amphibolies because they can use them to discredit the argument. Really, when they do this, they’re making ad hominem attacks because the implication is that the person can’t even use grammar correctly so there’s no reason to even listen to them.

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Ad populum – appeal to the people. “Everyone says x, therefore x must be true.” The number of people who agree with the premises is irrelevant to the truth of the conclusion. In my logic class, I called this the Geico Commercial fallacy. Basically, let’s put it this way: the sheer number of people who believe in a thing does not make that thing true. Now, that doesn’t mean that the thing that people believe in doesn’t have real effects in the world, it just means that a whole bunch of people believing something doesn’t make it true.

If this is called “ad populum,” why am I using an image for the bandwagon fallacy? Because WIKIPEDIA:

This type of argument is known by several names, including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to democracy, appeal to popularity, argument by consensus, consensus fallacy, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy (also known as a vox populi), and in Latin as argumentum ad numerum ("appeal to the number"), and consensus gentium ("agreement of the clans")

So, there are a bunch of different ways this fallacy shows up, but all of them deal with using a whole bunch of people to justify the argument, rather than using evidence to justify the argument. There are some exceptions to this rule, like social conventions for what people should be doing in polite company, but these social conventions are subject to change, and they can’t be universalized across cultures. Just because a bunch of people do something in America where it’s considered polite, doesn’t mean that it’s polite everywhere. That’s one of those contextual things.

Anyway, so the way that this thing works is because the fact that a belief is widely held doesn’t make it true. Also, there’s always an argument about what constitutes a “majority:” this is a problem with news polls: when they say “a majority of Americans” (usually with “polled” after it), they’re usually referring to a majority of a specific subset of people, rather than a majority of Americans in general. Think about it this way, everyone believed that the world was flat until someone showed up and proved them wrong, and even then, they tried to burn the dude at the stake. Just because everyone believed it was true, didn’t make it true.

A lot of people use this argument when they poll people about their preference for a product and then use it as proof for the superiority of that product. That doesn’t really prove anything except some people prefer one thing over another; superiority is measured based on how the thing performs in conditions.

On the other hand, there’s a variation where people use this to argue against conformity, where they’re basically saying “everyone who believes this is a sheep, therefore you shouldn’t believe it.” So the bandwagon here is everyone else, and the fact that everyone believes x is being used against whatever x is, but it is still being used as the support for the argument. So, this is bad because even if everyone is a sheep for believing x, the fact that everyone believes it isn’t evidence against the thing.

How not to be an asshole with this: pretty much remember that the number of people that you get to agree with a premise doesn’t make that premise true. I could probably find a whole bunch of men who would agree that sexism isn’t a thing, but that wouldn’t make it true. The strength of an argument shouldn’t be based on the sheer number of people who agree with it. Parents are really good at rejecting this when their children use ad populum to argue for relaxed limitations, by stating “I’m not everyone else’s parents. Your curfew stays the same.”

Also, and a lot of people are going to hate this, “every person living in the United States is a beneficiary of imperialism, so how can we buy the argument that other nations are worse,” is also a bandwagon fallacy, especially if used as the ground for whatever the argument is. In general, if you develop an argument that leads to the conclusion that everyone is a beneficiary of imperialism, you need to ground the argument not in something that evokes contempt. Right, so if I were to present how everyone in the united states is a beneficiary of imperialism, and then use that to criticize their judgment of other nations, I would not be committing the bandwagon fallacy.

Then again, no one really points the above out as a bandwagon or ad populum, likely because of where these arguments are being made.

[philosophytranslator]

Appeal to (false) authority – using a famous person to confirm a conclusion. This is pretty much relying on an authority that does not have any authority. Most of the time you’ll find this in the premises of the argument: one of the sources for the argument is that authority figure x says so; therefore it is true. The source is irrelevant to the context of the argument, especially when the source has no relation to the argument.

So, let me make it simple for you: appeal to authority shows up in commercials that use famous people who don’t know anything about a subject to advocate for that subject; it shows up when people assume that experts in a field are infallible; it shows up when someone appeals to someone who is an authority figure as an expert, when they have no knowledge of the subject.

Tumblr loves this one. No, seriously: people tend to use really famous bloggers as authority on certain things, even if said blogger has no experience in the particular area. Now, that’s not to say that all bloggers aren’t experienced in the fields that they’re talking about, but most people don’t bother to check their fucking sources when citing them. Also this shows up with people tossing out names, or “name dropping,” especially when the name in question (while an academic) doesn’t have shit to do with the subject matter.

How not to be an asshole: pretty much, do your research. I mean, if you’re going to cite sources, make sure the sources are appropriate to the argument in question. If there’s a question about their appropriateness, try to demonstrate how they’re appropriate. Also, “receipts” don’t demonstrate that people are using an appeal to authority: scholars can be assholes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re wrong (see ad hominem).

Actually, that’s an interesting point: most people who show up with receipts to discredit a scholar’s argument are using MASSIVE ad hominem attacks: they’re demonstrating the other person is an asshole and not refuting the argument. In response, most people default to the appeal to authority in an attempt to present the authority as infallible. That’s not to say that “receipts,” aren’t valuable, they are, but only when appropriate to the context.

Also, don’t assume that someone who seems to know what they’re talking about actually does know what they’re talking about.

[philosophytranslator]

ASK JOHN SOME QUESTIONS.

Especially on fallacies you’d like to see explained!!!

[philosophytranslator]

Ad hominem – attacking the person. This is also called character assassination, defamation, slandering, etc. Pretty much, it’s where someone makes an argument based on a (supposedly) negative characteristic of the person. “Sam has a plan for financial reform, but Sam was arrested for embezzling, so his plan is crap.” This is bullshit because Sam’s embezzlement, while illegal, has nothing to do with his plans for financial reform.

There’s another version where people attack the argument because of the circumstances of the arguer. So, it’s basically attacking the person because they’re arguing in their self-interest: “Mike is pushing for diversity in education, but Mike is black, so she’s just arguing for her people and not in the best interest of everyone.” So, this is an asshole thing to do because Mike’s plan being in her interest doesn’t have anything to do with accepting or rejecting it. In fact, Mikes plan for diversity might benefit everyone collectively, while providing specific assistance to her group of people.

And the last one is the whole “you’re advocating peace, but you’ve aggressively pursued violence, so why should we listen to your plan?” Thing is with this, whether or not a person follows whatever it is they’re arguing has nothing to do with the soundness of the argument. This one is kind of tricky because we like to base the authority of an argument in part on whether or not the person doing the arguing actually follows that they’re up to, but in reality, this has nothing to do with the plan itself.

How not to be an asshole with this: you have to figure out if the person is attacking you or if the thing being attacked is part of the argument. So, if I say “American culture is rooted in patriarchy and white-supremacy,” and someone says “AD HOMINEM, you’re attacking American culture!” they’re being an ass. An argument that brings to light the negative qualities of a thing does not automatically equal an ad hominem: the argument needs to be grounded in the attack on the person for the fallacy to be present.

Saying “Hilary Clinton is the product of an imperialist system,” does not make an ad hominem, especially if the argument supports this conclusion. However, attacking Hilary Clinton based on her appearance, or some other aspect of her personhood not related to the issue at hand, counts as an ad hominem attack.

Further, when looking at the more situational ad hominems, you need to be careful how you’re critiquing the situation. You see the second example a lot in politics where opponents of a particular measure will tear it down by indicating the benefits to a particular group of people while ignoring the way that it offers benefits to a wide range of people: just because the person advocating the plan is a member of the group that’s going to be helped does not mean that the plan is unsound. Here, “plan” and “argument” are the same thing because all a plan does is argue for a path to a particular solution.

Now, the last ad hominem, is kind of tricky, which is why most people don’t like to point it out: it is easier just to call the person a hypocrite, however, the person’s hypocrisy (in some cases) is not a reason to reject the argument. This is where things like patterns of behavior come in: if a person makes an argument for change, yet keeps on doing the thing they’re arguing against, it becomes more difficult to accept the argument. Still further, if the person’s argument will actively put people at risk to the very behavior they’re doing, yet arguing against, then you may question their motives. A really good example of this on a global scale is western nations demanding that other nations reduce their armaments while failing to do the same.

[philosophytranslator]

Ad baculum – (by way of a stick) threats. “You should believe x, or I will hit you with a baseball bat.” The fact that you can exert violence is irrelevant to the conclusion of the argument. Now, when I mean “violence,” I don’t just mean hitting people with sticks, I mean the expression of social violence as well, which is the kind of thing we see most often in some kinds of social justice rhetoric, particularly with feminism. Stuff like “if you don’t support sex-positivity (in this way), then you’re not a feminist,” relies upon ad baculum to convince the other person of the truth of the argument with the threat of not being a feminist.

Now, this is not to say that you cannot create arguments for what something is, but the core of the argument, how it convinces people, cannot rest on threatening compliance. You could argue (and I’m just using the example) that a certain kind of sex positivity is essential to feminism for a variety of reasons, and those reasons would give structure to the argument of connecting sex positivity with feminism. However, if the core of your argument rests on the implicit threat of being evicted from a community, then you’ve committed the ad baculum threat.

How not to be an asshole with this: seriously? Don’t make threats, implicit or explicit, in your rhetoric. If you’re going to say something like the above, you probably should explain why the conclusion is necessary for being a feminist, or whatever. You see a lot of this in more militant social justice groups and in the groups that they oppose, (especially in political campaigns and arguments for third party candidates in the US: “a vote for Sanders is a vote against the democrats, so don’t vote for him” or any variation is ad baculum) mostly because it’s a cheap rhetorical tactic that threatens a certain outcome if a person takes a particular action.

One of the things that is most commonly overlooked when considering ad baculum in rhetoric is that threats are not always physical, but can be social, emotional, or grounded in some other use of force. That is, if the convincing force of your argument rests on threatening the well being of the other person, then you have committed the ad baculum fallacy.

[philosophytranslator]

Ad misercordiam – appeal to pity. Trying to bring about a conclusion on the basis of someone pitying you. The pity of a person is irrelevant to the conclusion of the argument. Even if I were to feel pity, then that does not legitimize the conclusion. To be a little crude, Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” is an example of rejecting ad misercordiam.

I guess this needs a little more clarification. Ad misercordiam is not the presentation of suffering as evidence for a particular argument: people suffering under oppression are not making the ad misercordiam fallacy when explaining how systems of oppression contribute to their suffering. That’s a description of the effects of a particular system, not an appeal to the pity of the individual.

No, if we really want to find the ad misercordiam, we can look to self-proclaimed “nice guys,” who try to guilt women into dating them. At bottom, a person’s hurt feelings are not reason enough to engage in a relationship with them. In fact, pressuring someone for any kind of relationship on the basis of their hurt feelings (or guilting them) is an attempt to force a relationship not based on the person’s qualities, but based on the pain they’d be caused.

We can see a lot of this go down when people close to us make arguments for why we should or should not do something based on their hurt feelings. This is not to say that we should not consider the feelings of others, but it is to say that basing an argument on pitying someone does not make a valid argument. “If your mother knew you were doing x, it would break her heart,” is worth considering, as some of us value the feelings of our mothers, but in so far as an argument is concerned, it’s not a valid basis for an argument.

How not to be an asshole: don’t try to guilt people into things, or leverage hurt feelings as evidence in an argument. I mean, if you got 99 problems, I feel bad for you son, but I got 99 valid reasons and your feelings ain’t one. Or something to the effect. The most common way to avoid this is not to avoid discussing the emotional effects of an argument, but to indicate that these are part of a variety of things that are working against the particular argument. Further, don’t rest your whole case on “I feel bad, so...” because your hurt feelings might be an inevitability of some situations.

For example “don’t talk about <insert oppression here>, it makes me feel bad,” is not a damned argument not to talk about  <insert oppression here>. The ultimate rejection of ad misercordiam (and I probably should’ve used this earlier) is the meme of “white tears” or “men’s tears,” because it rejects the assertion that the hurt feelings of these groups is a reason not to talk about the suffering that they perpetuate. Put simply, “white tears” is a rejection of the “pain” felt when people have uncomfortable conversations about race. The hurt feelings of the oppressor might be the biggest ad misercordiam argument ever.

[philosophytranslator]

What are FALLACIES, and what to do the next time you’re in a Tumblr brawl and some asshole is like “omg fallacy so you’re 110% wrong.”

This is the other part of the thing on logic that we’re doing, and it’s the thing that most people who’re not philosophers run into: fallacies. Anyone who takes a 100 level philosophy course learns about them and then starts throwing them around like an “I win” button in an argument. Basically, most people think that pointing out a fallacy means they’ve won, even if they haven’t really done anything with the argument. This is bullshit, especially when you consider that logic (as a system) works in and with cultural contexts. So a man who dismisses a woman’s argument about sexism using an anecdotal fallacy (or a white person dismissing racism in the same way) is a jackass for not recognizing that his position in the social world blinds him to things outside his lived experience. We’ll get to more abuses of fallacies later on.

Anyway, there are a whole bunch of different kinds of fallacies that we can talk about, but they generally fall under two different types. I say “generally” because logicians and other philosophers will fight to the death over what counts as a fallacy, but most will agree that there are two categories. So, the first category is what we call “formal fallacies,” which are pretty much errors in the form of the argument, or how the argument is put together; and there are “informal fallacies,” which have to do with the content of the argument and not how they’re put together. If we’re going to make it simple, a formal fallacy is like a spelling error: it has nothing to do with the meaning of the word, just how it’s put together. An informal fallacy is like using the wrong definition of the word: the word could be spelled correctly, but it doesn’t mean what we think it means.

This difference is SUPER important because a formal fallacy doesn’t say shit about the premises or the conclusion, just how you got there. So, in a deductive argument, which is a fancy way of saying an argument where the conclusion follows from the premises, a formal fallacy is basically saying that the conclusion doesn’t follow logically from the premises. So the argument is invalid because the structure is wrong, not because the premises or conclusion is incorrect. In an inductive argument, which is an argument where we’re pretty sure that the conclusion follows from the premises, formal fallacies are basically where we screw up our probabilities. Again, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the content, but it has everything to do with the way you put together your argument.

Informal fallacies are the ones that most assholes like to toss out in the middle of an argument without actually knowing what they mean. Basically, an informal fallacy is a problem with the content of the argument that pretty much makes the argument bullshit. So, for example, the fallacy of composition, which basically says that if an argument says something true of the part, it must be true of the whole, is pretty much bullshit because a single member of the group doesn’t reflect the whole group absolutely. Now, this is a little more complicated because some of these (like logic itself) are grounded in the perspective of the people in the argument and are subject to biases, but generally they work to evaluate arguments on the basis of what they’re saying, and not how they’re structured.

Where people fuck up is with shit like how fallacies deal with truth and validity. So if you have a formal fallacy, that usually means that the person got to the conclusion in a messed up way, or that there’s no logical connection between the two, but not that the premises or conclusion is necessarily false. Like, “If it is night, the moon will be out. The moon is out. Therefore, it must be night.” So, this is a fallacy because it doesn’t talk about other reasons the moon could be out and it not be night, like a solar eclipse, maybe. The conclusion could be true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it must be true. But yeah, like I said before, formal fallacies don’t give a shit about the truth of the premises or conclusion, just that they follow from one another, and in the case of the example I gave the premises don’t follow from the conclusion. But that doesn’t mean that either the premises or the conclusion aren’t true. 

Informal fallacies are failures to prove the point and are usually related to the evidence that someone puts into their argument. Like the fallacy of composition above; in order to prove an argument that used the fallacy of composition correct, you’d have to look at every part of the group in question and demonstrate that it is similar to the part you’re using as an example. Pretty much, an informal fallacy has everything to do with what’s in your argument and how you’re supporting it, and not with how you’re structuring it.

Where this gets tricky is with conversations about groups of people (i.e. in social justice circles) where the fallacy of composition and division are often tossed out to discredit reactions to systemic problems, without realizing that most arguments about power majorities (white people, men, straight people) are grounded in a critique of the system that goes about producing these individuals. So, if you can demonstrate that the system has a particular element in it, it follows that the thing that the system produces will have that element in it. So, when you say “not all men,” as a response to sexual violence, you’re kind of missing the point that people are concerned about the culture that tells men that sexual violence is okay. Also, you’re committing the “onus probandii” fallacy. Okay, so since I’ve started using latin, this means I should get to explaining what certain fallacies are.

So, this wikipedia page pretty much defines some of the fallacies for you. There are other lists, some of the overlap, and none of them are comprehensive because philosophers can’t agree on what counts, and other people in other areas keep trying to throw shit in there.

Since the lists of fallacies don’t seem to agree with one another (and neither do the textbooks), I’m gonna go with the SEP’s first fifteen fallacies in individual posts: if anyone wants me to do some from other places, you can drop me an ask.

[philosophytranslator]

I study mathematical logic, which is, of course, an outgrowth of philosophy, but we our perspective and language are somewhat different so I may be misunderstanding. In your post on logic, you state under completeness "Arguments that break this rule are fallacies". I believe that should be arguments which break soundness. Completeness says certain arguments must exist. The only way to break completeness, then, is if one of them doesn't. The system breaks completeness, arguments don't.

I goofed when writing that part of the post, and you’re actually right.

One of the weird things about soundness is that formal fallacies don’t really care about it: they’re only concerned about the structure. So, an argument can have true premises, true conclusion, yet be formally invalid; just as an argument can have a nonsense premises that leads to an equally nonsense conclusion, because validity refers to the structure of an argument.

“Rose is a cat, all cats are felines; therefore the sky is blue.” All of these assertions are true, as is the conclusion, but the conclusion does not follow from the first, and so the argument is invalid. This would be the fallacy of irrelevant conclusion. However, “All cats are dragons, Rose is a cat; therefore, Rose is a dragon,” is a valid argument because the conclusion follows from the premises. Confusing, isn’t it?

But yeah, good catch. Most philosophers deal with logical systems that are “complete” in some way: only the much loathed Analytics try to demonstrate the incompleteness of logical systems as a way to discredit them.philo