Monthly Archives: May 2010
Logical Fallacies — the Unstated Major Premise
Hey, guys. This post deals with the misuse of an otherwise valid informal argument, which borrows it’s logical structure from formal reasoning, a first-order Enthymeme, the abuse of this being known as the Unstated Major Premise.
In both forms, this is an argument in which a major assumption, evidence, premise, or reason that justifies the conclusion, is absent from the wording of the argument, and as long as both parties in an argument share the same semantic assumptions for the terminology employed in the argument, all is fine.
The problem arises when the two parties do not share the same assumptions going into the language used between them, and at least one of them fails to clarify to the other what those assumptions are, whether willfully or not. When this is used to arbitrarily misdefine a word, most often out of ignorance or confusion over its accepted meaning, it is known as a Humpty-Dumpty argument.
This is commonly done in debates with pseudoscientists, who either don’t know what they are talking about and are unaware of it, or with more savvy ones who intentionally use this as a rhetorical tactic to confuse their opponent and attempt to hide the fact that they don’t know what they are talking about unless their opponent calls them on it. This is often used in conjunction with a multiple untruth.
A brief list of words commonly mangled, folded, spindled and semantically mutilated by proponents of a variety of pseudosciences is as follows. There are of course many more:
- science
- religion
- evidence
- skeptic
- denier
- (true) believer
- (ad hoc) hypothesis
- logic
- reason
- theory
- model
- law
- reality
- objective
- closed-minded
- open minded
- fantasy
- revisionist
- straw man
- ad hominem
- scientism
- material
- atheist
- empirical
- peer-reviewed
- logical
- scientific
- energy
- vibration
- resonate
- frequency
- harmonic
- spiritual
- mind
- soul
- consciousness
- physical
- scientific method
- evolution
- scientist
- therapy
- natural
- organic
- dimension
A good example of this fallacy are evolution/creationism debates during which the claim is made that ‘there are no transitional species,’ when the creationist is using a different assumption from his opponent as to what constitutes a transitional species, often a sort of half-formed monstrosity ‘stuck’ between two other species in the fossil record, the oh-so 19th century notion of ‘one species crossing over into another’ fallacy, or the ‘dogs giving birth to kittens’ nonsense.
The major point here is that the creationist’s premise of what a transitional species is, an important bit of information in the argument, has been either overlooked or intentionally concealed from his opponent, the latter being the case with the more educated but willfully deceptive creationists, who often do this to keep from having to ever admit that they are mistaken, which just will not do if you’re a crusader for absolute truth. It’s referred to in some circles as ‘lying for Jesus.’
You might ask why I have been picking on the poor creationists here and there in this series of posts, and the primary reason is the fact that like I mentioned in a couple of other entries, creationists are fun because they are just such a wonderful source of logical fallacies, since they use all of them, and are continuously creating new ones often enough to make my head spin — Linda Blair style.
This endless creation (not the sort they’re trying to promote) of new ways for logic to go astray is just too useful for me to ignore, and yet another reason for me to be more alert for these errors in my own reasoning as well, so as to better introspect and avoid them in my thinking and arguments.
Rigorous self-examination is skeptical.
TNQ | Today’s Noontide Query
I make up lots of characters — way too many in fact, and mostly for tabletop RPGs, though some just for my own written fiction.
It’s cool, sometimes, to come up with a persona to play, as with an actor, and vicariously live for a moment in a world that not only never was, but cannot be when going by the preponderance of a carefully gathered body of scientific data obtained over several centuries.
Yes, our understanding is currently crude, but getting better as time goes on.
I could, of course, abandon skepticism and reality and adopt magical thinking as my new logic, but that’s liable to make me a sucker for whatever bamboozle happens by and get me into a world of trouble — so I keep my fictional life and my real life separate.
As cool as temporarily assuming the role of a hero in a game might be, I ain’t him, whoever him happens to be for a given game-session.
So I’ll ask of you today:
If you could, which fictional character would you most like to be?
TNQ is a daily question that I pose to you, my readers, and please, do feel free to comment — I’m not an ogre. As per the title, TNQ is published each weekday at 12:00 PM
TNQ | Today’s Noontide Query
A quote is attributed to Albert Einstein, as follows: “Intellectual growth should begin at birth, and end only at death.”
I try to live by this quote as I pursue my education, each day learning something really interesting, hopefully useful, and if I can, disabuse myself of at least one myth and/or misconception, which is always a good thing for a skeptic.
It’s never a good idea to believe you know something when in fact you don’t — confusing ignorance for knowledge, “I don’t know something, therefore I do!” — a common logical fallacy that anyone can make when they aren’t careful.
My intellectual journey takes me through a lot of twists and turns, around a lot of corners, and each leading to another, often leaving me in places I didn’t expect. There’s also the occasional dead end when I pursue leads that turn out not to be true. — But isn’t that always the case when you discover something previously unknown to you?
Whether discarding erroneous beliefs or acquiring real knowledge, this whole enterprise keeps me sane, active, open to new ideas, ameliorates my enjoyment of life, and prevents or mitigates a whole host of cognitive problems and errors down the road. This is a good thing.
So, tell me, or else I’ll have my inquisitors bring out the comfy-chair and the soft pillows…
What is the coolest thing you’ve learned this week?
TNQ is a daily question that I pose to you, my readers, and please, do feel free to comment — I’m not an ogre. As per the title, TNQ is published each weekday at 12:00 PM
Week’s End Quote
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
– Walter Lippmann
TNQ | Today’s Noontide Query
2012…the subject of scads of conspiracy theories and apocalyptic predictions, allegedly originating from the Maya, though their modern descendants would and do dispute that, chiding us silly Westerners as just attaching our European religious myths onto their ancient Long Count calendar for no good reason other than the fact that it makes a compelling, scary story.
Come on people, I like good scary fiction too, but the fact that it resonates with our Judeo-Christian eschatological fears or New Age hopes gives us no cause to believe it’s real.
Frankly, I’ll be watching the London Olympics on the telly then, with nary a care about ancient calendars of extinct civilizations or undetectable rogue planets named Niburu, or Nimbiru, or whatever, when the Long Count cycle resets to zero and resumes another cycle, ad infinitum.
I’m quite sure that as long as Sarah Palin doesn’t win the presidential election then, there’s no justification to believe anything really horrible and nasty will happen to the world.
So, today’s question is:
What do you think you will do in 2012?
TNQ is a daily question that I pose to you, my readers, and please, do feel free to comment — I’m not an ogre. As per the title, TNQ is published each weekday at 12:00 PM
Baloney Detection 101– the Clever Hans Effect
This is a form of ideomotor reaction, a sort of involuntary cuing done without conscious awareness of which the one doing it may be completely oblivious, even when actively trying to avoid it.
This effect was named for a horse owned and trained by one Wilhelm von Osten, dubbed der Kluge Hans, or in English, Clever Hans, who was indeed clever, in a much different way than was initially thought.
Hans had convinced even scientists, who at first had validated him, that he was every bit as intelligent as a human being, or at least near-human in intellect, apparently able to demonstrate understanding of peoples’ names, perform simple arithmetical computations by tapping the answer with his hoof, tell time, and otherwise know the answers to questions posed to him by attendees of his performances, which began in the early 1890s until 1904 when his secret was discovered by investigator Oskar Pfungst.
The Clever Hans effect involves subtle cuing by posture and facial expression by way of the aforementioned ideomotor action, as well as a remarkable talent often mistaken for psychic ability in humans — hypersensory perception or HSP.
When a control measure was implemented, in this case the exclusion of those persons who knew the answers to questions asked, Hans was incapable of providing a convincing response and would not know when to start or stop tapping his hoof.
His seeming human-like intelligence simply went away until those absent from the test were once again present.
Hans’ trainer, completely sincere in his initial belief, was taken aback by the animal’s failure to perform when controls were introduced. He didn’t even notice the changes in his posture and facial expression that were signaling Hans, so subtle were they.
In the late 1920s Duke University parapsychologist J.B. Rhine looked into the matter of another, similar case, that of a mare in Richmond Virginia dubbed Lady Wonder by her owner.
Rhine was absolutely convince that Lady Wonder was telepathic, and her performance, signaled by her owner by cracking his whip, involved making predictions and otherwise answer questions by pushing over toy childrens’ blocks with her hoof to spell out the answer.
The case was solved by magician Milbourne Christopher, who had identified her seeming paranormal ability as being the the result of the Clever Hans effect, not psychic powers, since she was unable to perform, often turning over the blocks at random, when her owner was not there to signal her, or when the trainer was unaware of the answer to a question.
This case illustrates perfectly why it is necessary to have a trained magician in attendance of a paranormal experiment, as James Randi has so often, and sometimes in vain, noted.
Something similar happened in a series of animal communication studies done during the 1970s, with the Nim Chimpsky incident (sort of an inside joke by the researchers referring to language theorist Noam Chomsky):
In this case, a male chimp subject named Nim, had at first convinced his handlers and researchers that he possessed sign-language abilities of extremely unusual nature, and had seemingly demonstrated the capacity to use complex sentences and create his own jokes.
He was, however, merely, if one will excuse the pun, “aping” the signs made by his handlers in exchange for a reward. In those instances when the signs were intelligible, he was talking, and if not, that he was making a joke.
There is of course, often a lot of shoehorning, selective thinking and confirmation bias going on during the studies of this sort, when those persons involved will frequently dismiss and ignore the wrong gestures and take note of and remember the correct ones.
It happened in this series of studies that the test-subjects would perform a series of random gestures until their handlers gave them a reward.
I suspect that this may have been the case in studies of a female gorilla named Koko, who in a similar situation seemed to invent her own signs and reportedly show an IQ of about the human equivalent of 60.
This is something that has time and again beset early animal communication research.
Note that, as mentioned above, even being aware of the Clever Hans effect and trying to prevent it brings no certainty of actually doing so.
TNQ | Today’s Noontide Query
Early on as an atheist, I was well, kind of anti-religion in my views, sort of the Village Atheist. I softened up over time and finally, through the writings of Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner and my own personal evolution, decided that religion wasn’t all bad, despite the excesses that some of its self-professed, and self-righteous, representatives take it to.
I do get concerned when religion intrudes where it has no right to, like in the realm of scientific facts, or in American politics, well, the latter any much more than it already is. Sorry, but I’d rather not live in a theocracy, thank you much. If I did I’d live in Iran, and I’d much rather this country not become the United States of Jesus, or whatever.
But religion does have a few positive contributions to make, provided it remains in its proper place and not in the American military, government or science.
Personally I view religion as a mixed package with both useful and detrimental effects on society.
So anyhoo, here’s todays question:
Do you think that religion has a good, bad, or mixed effect on society?
TNQ is a daily question that I pose to you, my readers, and please, do feel free to comment — I’m not an ogre. As per the title, TNQ is published each weekday at 12:00 PM
