Alonzo Fyfe

• > Home
• > Books
• > Articles
• > Media
• > Debates
• > Links
• > Works In Progress
• > Contact

Chapter 5: Logic

I: Introduction to Logic

By far, the most important classes that I took in college was Philosophy 271: Introduction to Logic.

I loved the subject. The professor, Dr. Britain, would hand out assignments such as, “Do every fourth question in parts A, B, and C at the end of the chapter.” I would do them all, in that chapter and the next. They were fun. I couldn’t put the book down.

When I had first signed up for the class, I dreaded what I would find there. I had studied something called “logic” in high school. It was horrendous part of my math class where we were taught to manipulate tables with T’s and F’s (meaning ‘true’ and ‘false’) that meant absolutely nothing. Yet, somehow, one arrangement of T’s and F’s would be marked correct, while another set would be marked incorrect. It was totally frustrating.

When I entered Dr. Britain’s logic class I found the same T’s and F’s. However, in college, teachers were allowed to do something that was sorely missing in my high-school class. They were allowed to apply these Ts and Fs to real-world examples.

Later on in life I would make friends with a person who discussed her own experiences with high-school ‘logic’. She remembered a bunch of statements about dolphins eating peanut butter — statements like:

She had the same reaction that I did. The class proved to her that ‘logic’ was a foolish waste of time that had absolutely nothing to do with the real world. It was something invented by a bunch of egg-heads because they thought it was interesting.

Why would people divorce high-school logic classes from the real world?

I could well imagine how parents would scream bloody murder if schools actually taught children how to critically assess what they read and heard. The children would certainly start applying these rules to what their parents said, and would likely come up with answers that the parents would not want the children to have.

In reality, many parents do not want schools to teach children how to think. They want schools to indoctrinate children into adopting a carbon copy of the parents’ own ignorance. Classes in logic would be contrary to these interests, so it is not done. Or, where it is done, the teachers are limited to presenting in a way that hides the real-world application of its principles.

It is as if high-school logic classes are designed to teach students to hate logic and to think that nothing of value can be found there.

In contrast, the very first chapter in my college text book was filled with examples of fallacious reasoning taken from newspaper editorials, presidential speeches, historical texts such as Adam Smith’s THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. It mentioned issues such as national health care, capital punishment, and American involvement in foreign wars, the existence of God, and the obligation to obey the law.

It was clear at the start that class would teach me how to apply the principles of logic to the real world issues that I cared about. Once I saw that this stuff was actually useful and applicable, I was determined to make sure I understood it.

II. The Informal Fallacies

I still have my college logic book: Hurley, Introduction to Logic. Chapter 3 of that book talks about the informal fallacies. It was a list of nearly thirty different types of statements a person can make in defending their own position or attacking somebody else’s that were invalid. The person who uses an informal fallacy claims that they are offering a reason for the opponent to draw a particular conclusion. However, the conclusion, in fact, does not follow from the premises. This list of informal fallacies included among its members “begging the question”, “straw man”, and “red herring.”

Informal fallacies are not at all difficult to understand, and I immediately asked the question of why people are not taught to recognize these things at a much earlier age. A sixth grader could easily put these principles to practice, recognizing bad arguments that they may read, hear, or come up with themselves. But I have yet to meet anybody that had any formal education helping them to identify these types of errors before college.

The reason is obvious. Imagine the fate of the Junior High School teacher who sent his children home with the following lesson:

There is one Junior High School teacher whose career has just ended.

Or imagine the reaction of the parent whose child had heard the following lecture:

A. Sample Logic Lecture

The classic form of the argument that homosexuality is wrong is as follows:

Now, our job in this class is to see if this really is a good argument. One of the tests that we are going to look for is whether the argument’s premises are all true. For example, let’s look at the following argument:

We know that the person who offers us this proof has not made a good argument, because the first premise is not true. Once we know that the premise is false, we can throw out the argument.

Another potential problem with an argument is that it can have an invalid form. Here is an example of an invalid form.

This form of argument is called invalid because even if the premises were true, the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. Fluffy could be a cat, or a mongoose, or a horse, or a whale. In any of these cases, both premises are true, but we do not know from these premises that Fluffy is, in fact, a dog.

Now, let’s look at our homosexuality argument.

This argument appears to have a valid argument form, a form called modus ponens. Modus ponens arguments look like this:

An example of this would be:

This is a good argument form. If the premises are true, then the conclusion has to be true.

However, in this case, you have to be wary of a trick. You have to make sure that you understand the argument correctly.

Take, for example, the argument:

This argument looks like it uses the form modus ponens. However, the word “Christian” has two different meanings. In the first premise, it means anybody who believes that there was once a man named Jesus Christ who was the son of God and who died and was resurrected. In the second premise, it means anybody with the last name “Christian.”

It’s a mistake to say that this argument has the form

The argument actually has the form

This second form is not a valid argument type. Mike Christian might actually believe in God — there is nothing here that proves that he does not. However, this argument does not prove that he believes in God either.

This type of argument is called an equivocation. An equivocation is an argument that uses two different premises, U and V, that seem to mean the same thing, when they do not.

Now, we return to the original argument. Is this argument against homosexuality any good?

The argument looks like it has the valid argument form modus ponens. However, it could be an equivocation. The difference depends on whether we can come up with a definition of “unnatural” that is true in both of these premises.

We have a lot of possible definitions to choose from.

For example, we could say that ‘unnatural’ means ‘artificial’ or ‘manmade’. But if we use this definition of unnatural, and keep it constant throughout the argument, we would have to say that manmade things are wrong. Cars, airplanes, computer programs, hammers, houses, books, philosophical essays on the nature of moral truth, are all evil because they are manmade (that is, they are unnatural) things. However, that is false. Because we have a false premise, we cannot say that we have proved that the conclusion is true.

Let’s say that ‘unnatural’ means ‘animals don’t do it’. If this is our definition, then the first premise is false — homosexual acts are very common in nature. However, the second premise is also false. I have never seen an animal read a book, go to school, email a friend, or write an essay on the nature of moral truth. Animals do not go to the movies, play video games, use a cell phone, or make pizza. Clearly it is not the case that it is wrong for humans to do things that animals do not do. In this case, both premises are false, and we have not yet come up with an argument to prove that homosexual acts are wrong.

We could say that ‘unnatural’ means ‘it does not serve its natural ends’. So, tell me, is it the case that earlobes exist for the purpose of punching holes through them to fasten earrings? Do hips exist for the purpose of holding up our pants or skirts, and does the bridge of our nose exist for the purpose of holding up our glasses? The fact is, no body part has a ‘natural purpose’, we use all of our body parts a number of different ways simply because it pleases us to do so. We have yet another argument in which the second premise is false, and we still do not have an argument for proving that homosexuality is wrong.

Many of the arguments people give us for thinking that homosexuality is wrong commits this fallacy of equivocation. The arguments use two different meanings of the word ‘unnatural’ to create an argument that looks sound, but which is not sound.

So, here is your assignment for tonight. See if you can come up with a definition of ‘unnatural’ that does not commit the fallacy of equivocation.

B. Analysis

The teacher who gave this lecture would be yet another teacher that will quickly lose his job for the crime of teaching students how to think, and for committing the heresy of asserting that logic has a place in the real world.

I made it a point to have the teacher in this case not say that homosexuality was not wrong. The teacher simply assessed a string of arguments and found them to be flawed, then challenged the students to find an argument that was not flawed. He made no final judgment one way or the other.

However, in too many cases, this would be enough to end his teaching career.

As I said above, the informal fallacies are not difficult to understand. Many Junior High School students could understand them if given a chance. However, any parent with an unreasoned prejudice would not want their child to be exposed to the rules of critical thinking — at least not in a way that might be thought useful in questioning the parent’s prejudices. So, in Junior High and High School, if they get any exposure to logic, they get:

Or they get truth tables with stacks of T’s and F’s, stripped of all sense that it might have applicability in the real world. They get a lesson in logic that teaches the child what too many parents seem to want their children to learn — that this thing called ‘logic’ is a waste of time and something best avoided.

III. The Illogic of Religious Ethics

Let’s look at the following argument:

Since this argument also follows the form of modus ponens, it is a valid argument. It passes one of the tests for a sound moral criticism of homosexual acts.

However, logic also demands consistency. Premise 2 applies equally well to working during the Sabbath, or loaning money at interest. If the argument above is a sound argument for condemning homosexual acts, then the following argument is sound:

As well as this next argument:

What this tells us is that, logically, we are not justified in treating homosexuals any differently than we treat people with a savings account, or people who work on Sunday (or is it Saturday?), and perhaps only half as badly as we treat bankers who work on the day of the Sabbath.

The best that can be said of people who condemn members of one of these groups but not the other two, and who claim that they justify this on religious grounds, is that those claims are irrational.

We could call them worse things — bigots and hypocrites who only quote the bible to rationalize their hatred, and conveniently ignore the bible when it condemns something that they, themselves, want.

However, we are left with a puzzle to be answered. There must be a reason why this person treats members of the three groups differently. If this reason is not found in God’s law, it must be found somewhere else.

Hold that thought for a moment — the thought that there must be some explanation for the difference in peoples’ attitudes. Before I go further into that, I want to introduce another set of relevant facts.

Let us introduce a fourth argument having exactly the same form as the previous three.

Religion now says that we should treat murderers, homosexuals, people with a savings account (or who purchase CDs, bonds, or other interest-bearing securities), and people who work on Sunday (Saturday?) the same. They are all violating God’s law. So, why do we treat some of them different from others?

In the real world, we would be hard pressed to find even one person who believes that members of all four groups deserve condemnation as people who have sinned against God. I know of no person who feels as much outrage for the person with a savings account as for the person who engages in homosexual acts or the murderer.

What this suggests is that the distinction among different wrongs does not, in fact, come from the Bible. If it came from the Bible, there would be no distinction. If not the Bible, then it must come from “something else”.

Whosoever appeals to this “something else” to determine rightness and wrongness, and admits to it at least insofar as they condemn members of some of these groups but not others, shows through their behavior that they believe that biblical morality is flawed. It requires correction and interpretation through appeal to “something else.” This “something else” is the foundation on which people’s interpretation of the bible — their determination of which parts to accept and which to ignore — are based.

Because of this, when somebody offers the claim that nobody who denies the existence of God can be truly moral, I offer this response. Any who condemn others for looking at sources outside of religion to judge good and evil are hypocrites. They condemn others for doing exactly what they do when they decide, “I choose to accept and obey this package as defining a moral truth (condemning murder), but I reject this other passage as not describing a moral truth (collecting interest, working on the Sabbath), yet hold that the morality of homosexuality is to be decided entirely on biblical grounds.”

IV. A Few Fallacies At Work

I am including this section in order to illustrate some of the types of things that one learns when studying philosophy, and their applicability to things more important than dolphins that eat peanut-better.

A. Argumentum ad Hominem

By describing my own personal experiences in my quest to figure out what it takes to make the world better than it would have otherwise been, I fully expect some sophists to take advantage of the opportunity to use rhetorical fallacies to criticize this view.

One argument I expect such people to make is: “This guy admits in the very first chapter that he was bullied in school. He asserts that this bullying was done by Christians. He offers no proof of this one way or the other; at best we must take him at his word (or, another way of saying the same thing, is that he expects us to accept it on faith). Even if it is true, then we can expect that he has strong feelings of hatred against Christians. In his book, this hatred comes out again and again, in one attack after another on religion. Psychologically, he is just striking back at the children he knew when he was a child. We should simply ignore this childish tantrum.”

Another argument that I expect some to make is: “In Chapter 3, he admits that he could not walk into a classroom full of students. Obviously, he is emotionally unstable. Such an unstable mind cannot be counted on to raise meaningful objections to religious thinking.”

These are both examples of the fallacy “argumentum ad hominem” at work. The primary characteristic of an ad hominem fallacy is that they focus on facts about the person (hominem) and from that argue for rejecting the conclusion that the individual argues for.

However, logic, like the process of adding numbers in a column, does not yield one answer for one person and a different answer for a different person based on personal characteristics. This argument makes as little sense as arguing that the sum reached by a person adding a column of numbers is to be rejected because the person who did the adding has a cut on his finger. Whether the column adds up to the number the person says is does is true or false independent of any cut on the accountant’s finger. Similarly, the arguments that I have raised are sound or unsound independent of any personal characteristics I may have.

The person who appeals to these types of characteristics, like the person who would appeal to the cut on the accountant’s fingers, are hiding a conclusion that they do not want people to accept behind a smokescreen of irrelevancies. No amount of mental gymnastics can give merit to these types of arguments. All that can be said of people who use these types of arguments is that they are not concerned with merit. They are concerned only with protecting their prejudice.

B. Argumentum ad Populum

The Argumentum ad Populum fallacy (a.k.a. ‘bandwagon fallacy’) says that, “If a lot of people agree with me, then I must be right.”

Such as, “If a lot of people agree with me that the world is flat, then the world must be flat.”

This is the fallacy contained within a piece of Godspam that came into my inbox recently. This chain letter contained the argument that since 84% of the population accepts a particular idea, that the remaining 16% ought to “sit down and shut up.”

They speak as if an opinion poll can reliably determine truth, and any who disagree with the majority are automatically wrong.

However, this would imply that when the first Christians found themselves heavily outnumbered by the practitioners of other religions, when the practitioners of those other religions demanded that Christians worship their gods or face death, the minority Christians should have accepted their minority status and ” shut up.”

This would imply that, in a country where 51% of the population feels the need to round up 1% and send them off to death camps for execution (the remaining 48% being indifferent as long as it does not preempt their favorite television show), that the 1% being executed should recognize that the majority is always right and ‘sit down and shut up’ or, better yet, get themselves to the nearest railway yard, as is their duty.

Eighty percent of Americans in 1942 supported the Japanese internment, where American citizens were imprisoned for years for the crime of having Japanese parents or grandparents. According to this argument, the 20% who opposed it should have simply “shut up” instead of voicing their objections.

In the recent past, 80% of the population in some areas supported racial segregation. According to this argument, blacks in these communities ought to have accepted their inferior status and recognized their obligation to “sit down (in the colored section) and shut up.”

It is disturbing to see that so few average Americans can recognize injustice when they find it in their email inbox, that they cheer it when they see it and pass it on to their friends and co-workers with a hearty endorsement and an encouragement to spread the word.

This is one of the symptoms of our failure to teach people the principles of logic — that they can accept fallacious reasoning like this, and pass it on with a hearty cheer.

C. Non Sequiter

At the start Persian Gulf War II, I heard a fallacy that was repeated at the highest levels of government, as well as the media — showing that the very people to whom we trust our future and inform us of world events are lacking significant critical thinking skills.

The claim was directed against France. It was offered as a reason to believe that France was wrong to oppose the United States in its plans to invade Iraq. The argument said that France would have continued suffering under NAZI aggression indefinitely, if not for American help. As a token of gratitude for rescuing them, the French were obligated to support the United States in its attack on Iraq.

However, imagine a person who says to a neighbor, “I saved you from that rapist in the parking lot a few years ago, therefore you are obligated to help me murder my boss and take his car.”

The fact is, receiving help from somebody does not obligate a person — or a country — to support that person in doing something wrong.

The literal definition of ‘non sequiter’ is ‘non-starter’. It applies to arguments where the premise that a person offers bears virtually no relation to the conclusion that he wants to support. This is the perfect categorization for the assertion, “I helped you, now you must support me in what I do with no regard to its being right or wrong.”

One may be tempted to counter this by saying that the American attack on Iraq was not wrong. However, this misses the point. Even if it was true that the American attack on Iraq was not wrong, America’s political leaders and media pundits were not saying, “You should support us because it is the right thing to do — and here is why it is the right thing to do.” If they did, then they would not be saying anything about the help that the United States gave to France in World War II — it would not have even come up.

This, in fact, is how the case should have been handled. Those leaders and media pundits should not have even mentioned World War II but, instead, focused their efforts on arguing that the attack itself was justified.

The fact that such a fallacy could obtain such widespread use with so few people recognizing it points to a major problem. Because people are not trained to recognize these fallacies, they are vulnerable to all types of demagoguery — misdirection and deception on a grand scale. Those who have been deceived then pass on the deception to others, not out of malice, but simply because they do not know any better — because nobody has taught them any better. A population that cannot reason determine the reasonableness of a policy because they have not been taught how to reason is can eventually be expected to pay a very high price for their ignorance.

D. Summary

A standard introductory logic text book will contain over two dozen additional informal fallacies. Every one of these is a recipe for deception that will continue to work as long as the information remains in just a few hands. Again, these are not complex concepts to understand. Children can easily be taught to recognize fallacious reasoning when they see it, or at least to do a better job than they do now. What is difficult to understand is why people do not want their children to know how to think.

V: Intellectual Negligence and Recklessness

Since this is a book on ethics, it is time to get to the moral of this particular chapter.

Imagine that you are reading the newspaper, or browsing a news site on the web. You come across a story about a truck driver who carelessly heaped junk into the bed of a large truck. Then, while taking a sharp turn on a road, some of the junk fell off and killed a motorist in another car.

We would instantly conclude, and rightfully so, that the motorist is guilty of a moral failing — the moral crime of recklessness. He is guilty of wrongfully causing the death of the other motorist. We have no trouble condemning him and in saying that he ought to be made to pay for the harm he has done. Punishment in the forms of fine and even imprisonment are considered wholly justified in these types of cases.

I can see no difference this type of physical recklessness and the intellectual recklessness associated with the use of fallacious reasoning. Yet, everywhere, individuals are allowed to heap belief upon belief into an unsupported pile of junk, paying no attention to how securely those beliefs are fastened to any sort of foundation. In spite of the risks that these people create for others, we do not condemn them. We do not even seem to think it is important to teach them how to use logic to fasten their beliefs a more securely, and to recognize those that pose a risk to themselves or others.

A military pilot neglects to follow procedures that have been established to verify (or falsify) his belief that the soldiers he sees on the ground are enemy soldiers. He drops a bomb on them, killing several. Later, he discovers that his belief is wrong and he has killed allied soldiers. We hold him not only legally accountable, but morally accountable, for those deaths. As well we should.

However, an American President builds his belief that a war is justified on a foundation of ad populum, non sequiter, question-begging arguments, and orders that a bomb be dropped in Iraq that kills a number of Iraqi citizens. In doing so, this President has failed to follow procedures that have been known for centuries to be useful in determining if a belief is justified or not. Indeed, this President could not likely even identify what those procedures are. Yet, he is not held morally accountable for the deaths that his recklessly formed beliefs have caused. He is forgiven for the same moral crime that sent the pilot to prison.

There is no justification for treating the two cases differently. The President who fails to follow easily understood procedures for verifying his belief is just as guilty as the bomber pilot who fails to follow procedures to verify his beliefs.

Again, evidence that a (moral) failure to follow established procedures does not prove that the dropping of the bomb is right or wrong in itself. The pilot is required to follow established procedures, not because the troops on the ground are allied soldiers, but merely because the possibility exists that the troops on the ground are allied soldiers.

Similarly, heads of state and military pundits have an obligation to follow established procedures for securing a belief on a solid foundation, not because their conclusions are wrong, but because the possibility exists that they are wrong, and error will cause innocent people to suffer..

That possibility always exists.

VI. Other Fallacies

If you, the reader, are interested in recognizing his intellectual responsibilities and wants to learn more about the informal fallacies, I invite you to visit:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies

There, you will see arguments of a type that you hear every day, discussed in a context that both gives them relevance in the real world and illustrates the disastrous consequences that can result from intellectual recklessness. The site has to do with the Holocaust, and the fallacies are presented in recognition of how people’s intellectual recklessness makes these types of events possible.

In fact, I would like to give you, the reader, a homework assignment.

Once you become familiar with even a few items on the list, pick up your local newspaper and a pen, go to the opinion page, and start circling instances of fallacious reasoning. Put big red marks around every instance of ad hominem, ad ignorantum, cum hoc ergo proctor hoc, petitio peteti, and whatever other fallacies you may discover. Do this on a regular basis for just a few weeks, and you will find instances of intellectual recklessness jumping at you from all directions, even from people who take the same side of important issues as you do.

Or, do the same with your favorite television pundits — the anchors of news programs that have had increasingly less to do with reporting the facts and more to do with spouting rhetoric in the past few years. See how often you can find instances of these fallacies in what you hear. Then ask yourself why, if you can so easily identify these fallacies, why is it that the person you are listening to seems so disinterested in finding them himself?

With practice, you will begin to recognize fallacious reasoning in your own arguments. You will rather quickly become able to stop yourself and say, “No, that argument is an ad populum fallacy, and I should be explaining to people that this idea is popular because it is right — and why it is right — rather than trying to trick them into thinking that this idea is right because it is popular. Because a popular wrong is no less wrong; and an unpopular right is still right.”

We all make mistakes from time to time. In a recent debate I complained that the Bush budget deficit means that every taxpaying household faced $12,000 worth of additional personal debt. It is as if the government ran up $12,000 worth of charges on each family’s credit card and gave the taxpayer’s children the bill to pay, with interest.

In reality, this is an unfair argument. Each family will not be asked to pay back an equal portion of the debt. Some will pay back more than others, and the poorest will pay back none at all. I do not know what the actual breakdown is. However, for the point that I have to make here, that does not change the fact that dividing the debt equally among the people is fallacious reasoning. It is used by demagogues to frighten average-income people into thinking that their personal situation is worse than it really is. It is a piece of intellectual recklessness that I recently caught myself using. Once I recognized it, I resolved that I would not repeat it.

I really cannot think of a more significant intellectual and moral test of a potential policy maker or a news reporter than that they have the capacity to recognize nonsense when they hear it, plus a personal ethic that places the use of such nonsense on the same moral shelf as lying under oath and bribery.

Everybody will make mistakes. I will bet good money that, somewhere in this book, I unwittingly drew an invalid inference. However, I have tried to avoid them. I have passed these essays around to others as well informed about the rules of logic as I am, so that they may point out to me where I might have made an error. My obligation to subject my own work to inspection is no less than that of a pilot to have the passenger plane he is about to fly inspected. Lives could actually depend on it. However, even with this care being taken, there will be mistakes.

The fault lies, not with those who inflict unjustified harm on others in spite of their best effort to avoid it. The fault lies with those who do not try to avoid it.

VII. A Better Place

I took this class five years after first asking myself how to make the world better than it would have otherwise been. When I left this class I found one very promising way to make the world better than it would have otherwise been.

I could be wrong about the virtues of capitalism, about issues of global warming and the dangers of pollution, about capital punishment, abortion, and animal rights. In persuading others to adopt my opinions on any of these matters, I could be persuading them into error. I could be doing the very thing I sought to avoid.

However, if I am somehow able to contribute to a world in which more people are able to recognize and use the most basic principles of logic, such as the informal fallacies — to apply them to what they read, hear, and say, and to adopt a moral sensibility against their use — to the degree that I am able to do that, then to that degree I have made the world better than it would have otherwise been. I have created a world whose occupants are better able to see through the mistakes that I have made, and better able equipped to see the truth that surrounds them.

A better place is one in which:

(1) We teach Junior High School students how to recognize the informal fallacies and to adopt a moral sensibility against their use.

(2) We require that older students are as familiar with the more formal rules of logic and their applicability to real-world issues (as opposed to dolphins eating peanut butter), as they are with the rules of geometry, grammar, and spelling.

(3) We, as a culture, become more literate in logic, and recognize that violations of reason — the intellectual recklessness of those who would commit these violations — are as much a danger to life, health, liberty, and property as drunk drivers and other practitioners of recklessness.

If this essay has promoted any greater appreciation at all for these three points, then I have done good.

Back to the Index