In order to understand what a fallacy is, one must also
understand the difference between validity and truth. A fact can be true or
false, but only an argument can be valid or invalid. Fallacies have to do with
false arguments, not false facts. Likewise, one can tell a lie without
committing a fallacy, although it is also possible to do both at the same time.
The world is full of fallacies. They are uttered on a daily
basis, quite often by politicians, lawyers, religious people, advertisers, and
anyone who wishes to persuade someone to do or accept something on the basis of
believing a reasoned argument. However, if the targets of persuasion were able
to see that an argument was flawed, or fallacious, they might not be taken in.
It is therefore useful to be able to spot fallacies when they are used, and to
be aware that one might be committing one when the boot is on the other foot.
Fallacies are dangerous because they can so easily be
confused with statements of fact. One frequently heard argument, for example,
is that somebody in public esteem must have committed an indiscretion based on
the strength of rumours currently circulating. The argument used is: “There’s
no smoke without fire”. That may or may not be true, and the person in question
may or may not be guilty of the act in question, but the argument used is
faulty. The fallacy lies in the inappropriateness of applying the facts about
smoke and fire to a situation in which unsubstantiated accusations spread via
the grapevine (and newspaper tittle-tattle) and are taken as being true simply
because they are frequent and insistent. There may not be smoke without fire,
but there can certainly be false accusations without any grounding in reality.
Undistributed middles
Politicians frequently fall for the argument that “something
must be done”. A bad situation has arisen and a solution must be found. Action
is taken and justified with the line mentioned above. This is often taken as
sound enough argument, but it is a fallacy. The argument could be expanded as:
“Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done”.
Such an argument might sound persuasive until one
substitutes other terms in a similar argument. For example: “My cat drinks
water. My dog drinks water. Therefore my cat is a dog”. This is known
technically as the “fallacy of the undistributed middle”, because the
significance of the middle term of the argument has not been appreciated as
being applicable to other circumstances. Yes, my dog does drink water, but then
so do plenty of other animals, and one could just as easily argue, on this
basis, that my cat is a buffalo or a chimpanzee.
The absurdity of the cat/dog argument is obvious to anyone,
which is why the same reasoning needs to be applied to “something must be
done”. Yes, the proposed course of action is “something”, but there are plenty
of other “somethings” that would be just as reasonable if offered as potential
policies. People need to be more aware of the rhetorical tricks that
politicians play, because they are often based on reasoning that is just as
fallacious as this.
A prime example of the “undistributed middle” fallacy was
its use by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the “UnAmerican” witch hunts of the
1950s, when proof was sought that people in the public eye were Communists. This
took the form, for example, of: “Here is a man who disapproves of racial
discrimination. Communists disapprove of racial discrimination. Therefore this
man is a Communist”. The fact of whether or not this is true is neither here
nor there; the man might indeed be a Communist but this reasoning is not proof
of that fact, because it is perfectly possible to be against racial
discrimination and not be a Communist. It is important to realise that the fact
that the reasoning is fallacious only negates the validity of the argument and
not its truth, because the two are entirely separate.
Many questions
Although a fallacy can be defined as a faulty argument, the
way it is presented may come across in another way, for example as a question. One
such, which is often asked in a religious context, is: “What is the purpose of human
life?” The fallacy involved here is known as “The fallacy of many questions”
because it purports to be one question but is really much more than that. When
it is asked of someone, the questioner is implying the question “What is the
purpose of your life?”, and the same would apply whenever they asked it of
anyone else. Every time it is asked it is a different question and may
therefore get a different answer, each of which could be equally valid.
However, by phrasing it in general terms the implication is that there is only
one answer, which is of course the one that the questioner wants everyone to
accept, whereas the question could only be valid if it sought to ascertain a
purpose for every live individual, each of whom would have to be asked and for
all their answers to be taken into account.
In this latter case, the questioner cannot be accused of
lying to the person being questioned, because no assertion has (at this stage)
been made, but they can be held guilty of using fallacious reasoning because of
the nature of the tactic they are employing. It is a trick used countless
times, not only in the sphere of religion but by politicians and the whole
range of snake-oil salesmen who rely on the gullibility of their audience.
There are many types of fallacy that have been recognized
and named, some notable ones being the Naturalistic Fallacy (which claims that
anything that occurs naturally must be inherently good) and the Pathetic
Fallacy (which ascribes human characteristics to natural objects).
In all cases, a fallacious argument is one that is not
necessarily without basis in fact, as it might well so have, but it has no
basis in logic. It is therefore often more convincing to defeat an argument by
proving it to be fallacious than to seek to show it up as factually inaccurate
or advancing an untruth. Fact and truth can be argued both ways, but there is
no gainsaying of logic.
© John Welford
