Logic Can Be Studied and Learned!
The cartoon above is emblematic of the anti-vaxxer/QAnon disease affecting our country and the world. Why are so many people so proud of their ignorance? When I was in high school we took a Logic Class. One exercise was to bring in editorials from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times and dissect them for the logic of their arguments. I'm not sure any high schools teach logic (or critical thinking) any more. This editorial by Sean Scully describes the problem.
From the editor: Hunting for logical faults
Sean Scully, Napa Register
Even if you’ve never heard of these things, you’ve certainly encountered logical fallacies. They are common fallacies or flaws in arguments and debates — so common that they have names.
For example, the “Ad Hominim” fault involves attacking the integrity or character of your opponent rather than the substance of his argument. “Your argument shows your level of intelligence ...”
The “Straw Man” fault involves distorting your opponent’s position and then proceeding to demolish his supposed argument. “My opponent hates America...”
The “False Dilemma” fault involves suggesting that there is an either-or proposition with no possible compromise or gray area: “If you don’t support tight restrictions on immigration, you are in favor of open borders...”
The “Red Herring” fault involves subtly changing the topic or reframing the debate with some distraction. “My guy may have done something bad, but what about your guy...”
The “Appeal to Authority” fault involves invoking the name of someone famous or knowledgeable as a substitute for concrete evidence to support your position. “As Thomas Jefferson said...”
On the other end, there is the “Appeal to Ignorance,” which involves casting doubt on an argument because we don’t know everything about the topic, or using the very absence of concrete proof as evidence to support your own position. “We don’t know how the Egyptians managed to build the pyramids; we cannot discount the possibility that aliens helped them...”
As you can probably see, these faults sometimes bleed into one another. It is perfectly possible to have several logical faults wrapped into a single argument, or even a single sentence.
None of these are new — in fact, many of them were well-known and described by Greek philosophers. They have been part of arguments, debates, political conversations, bar-room banter, and pretty much every form of human communication for as long as humans have been talking to each other.
But logical faults seem to be having some sort of golden age lately. Why? Because we’re in a golden age of mass media. From talk radio to Congressional debates on C-SPAN to talking heads on cable news, you can get a 24-hour-a-day diet of slippery arguments and fallacious rhetoric.
Now social media has brought this to the masses. Fallacious arguments that used to be conducted among a handful of people at the coffee shop or on barstools now can be spread to hundreds, thousands, even millions in a keystroke on Facebook and Twitter. Pretty much every person on Earth has the opportunity to broadcast his or her own logical faults to the masses.
All this brings me to two of my favorites, both of which I have learned about fairly recently, but now that I know them, I see them everywhere on social media.
The first is called a “negative meta-induction,” which basically means because we’ve been wrong before, we must be wrong now. This underlies lots of current discussion: for example, experts told us that Thalidomide was safe, so why should we believe them that vaccines are safe?
The other one I find even more common. It is known as “naive cynicism.” There are several related meanings for this phrase, but the one that is most relevant to social media is, roughly, a reflexive tendency to be skeptical or cynical about an issue or person you know very little about. Think “All politicians are on the take ...” or “All the city cares about is tourists ...” or “Bureaucrats are just in it for a cushy job and a fat pension ...”
Once you know about these faults, it becomes kind of a sport to spot them and analyze them. Make a game of it as you’re slogging through yet another social media debate.