Reasonableness, Stance & Credibility

A while back, I was at what was then the game-shop I went to on the weekends. I was chatting with a friend of mine who expressed a view I found somewhat disturbing, but not surprising from some in this country — that he found someone to be more credible and more trustworthy in making obviously unreasonable statements, and another worthy of suspicion for sounding more reasonable, because as he put it “you at least know where he (the unreasonable man) stands.”

Let’s unpack this and see what’s being said…

It indicates a distrust of rationality and reason itself as something untrustworthy because it’s easy to use clever argumentation to mislead and deceive. It seems to be saying that an openly irrational person is not hiding his stance beneath a cloak of deceit.

This ignores the difference between fallacious reasoning to deceive, and sound or cogent reasoning as a way to discover the truth, not hide it.

I’m reminded of Martin Luther’s argument warning that reason was deceptive, using reason itself to make his point, as ironic and logically inconsistent as that is…

Logical and rhetorical fallacies are the tools of rationalization and propaganda — you cannot support a false position using good reasoning and sound premises, nor can you reliably reach a sound position using bad logic and presuming facts not in evidence or out of context.

But it is itself fallacious to conflate bad reasoning with good, to reject both out of hand. Reason is fallible, and that’s why there are tests we can use to evaluate its soundness. That’s one reason that skeptics keep themselves up on logical fallacies as well as techniques of good reasoning as a means of reaching reliable conclusions.

I don’t know about you, but I find the more reasonable types more trustworthy, not less. Rationality not merely feigned implies a willingness to discuss disagreements, though false rationality is one reason why I find religious apologetics and ideologically-motivated denial of science (on both the left and the right) so unworthy of credibility.

Certainly, it’s a good idea to turn a skeptical eye to even reason and rationality, to better let us know when they’re being misused to our detriment, but all else being held the same, we need more reasonable people, not fewer. The less rational types are simply making their destructive attitudes more obvious, and more dangerous. It takes a reasonable man to have a reasonable stance.

That, and at least you can discuss things with reasonable people without getting shot or stabbed.

Related articles

• Debunking the Theist’s Appeal to Authority Fallacy (scepticalprophet.wordpress.com)
• The “logical fallacy” poster… (leiterreports.typepad.com)
• Introduction to Logical Fallacies (Workshop Style) (trippleblue.wordpress.com)
• 9 Ways to Create an Unbeatable Argument (scepticalprophet.wordpress.com)

 

Certainty, Probability & the Fallibility of Factual Knowledge

Portrait of René Descartes, dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy”, after Frans Hals c. 1648 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

[This entry has been revised, rewritten, and reposted from a prior version. The original meaning is unchanged.]

I’ve often stated my views of knowledge’s fallibility, of it being more or less certain but rarely if ever absolute. I’m not attempting to propound on the ultimate nature of truth, simply noting an observation made by scholars in both philosophy and the sciences: that concerning the failure of the quest for complete certainty as a criterion for knowledge.

This quest has evidently failed, because in the world outside of our heads and logical conceptions, the unexpected cannot be ruled out completely. In my view, this quest was a misguided one, for it presumed that certain truths of the world were to be found.

Pure mathematics and logic render certain truth of a sort, but this is due to the use of conventional axioms and those theorems based around them, axioms allegedly self-evident and true by definition, such as the statement that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

Within Euclidean geometry, this is true and internally consistent. Elliptical and hyperbolic geometries, however, have axioms that are self-consistent but inconsistent with those of the Euclidean model.

A good example is the axiom that the sum of the angles of a triangle can exceed 180 degrees, which is a perfectly accurate way of describing the geometries of bodies with strong gravity wells in General relativity.

The point is that there’s no single mathematical or logical system that alone completely and consistently describes all of reality — such systems are arbitrary constructions but useful when applied to describing what they are designed to describe.

We choose the systems that best fit the task we wish to perform, hence, using different tools made to purpose, each according to its own set of conventions.

Logical certainty is of two sorts: that which involves the validity of a statement, when the truth of its output, or conclusion, follows necessarily from its premises — certainty of a conditional and formal sort even when the content is probabilistic — and certainty in the content of the statement itself, when a statement is strictly defined and determinate in its meaning.

Logical certainty is of a sterile sort, working only within the context of the system. Arguments concerning reality must have some referent to it, and these need premises grounded in observation, experience, or experiment to strengthen the conclusion and justify it as a claim of fact.

Axioms and arguments alone tell us nothing of the world — and this is how logical proofs bereft of real factual content fail to do what they are intended. Ignoring empirical knowledge in one’s arguments, and demanding strict logical proofs for matters of worldly fact is to miss the point, and it is dishonest to argue this way when this is understood.

Psychological certitude, the personal feeling of conviction concerning a claim’s truth, is much too subjective and tells us nothing of whether a statement actually is true beyond mere say-so — an ipse-dixit appeal to authority — all too common in claims of private revelatory experiences, which all have their own rivals in the uncorroborated experiences of others.

As above, we cannot rule out the unexpected, since we are not omniscient — we cannot foresee and control for all possibilities — so we must limit ourselves to those we know of and which come to our attention, through knowing and finding out ourselves or learning of them from others.

Whether indeterminacy of a quantum mechanical sort does or does not spill over into the macroscopic world, that of human experience does seem to be ruled by some degree of randomness, and so our knowledge of it seems restricted to the more or less probable than the certain.

General Relativity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are both calculable probabilities — those we can assign a numerical value to — and there is our innate sense of the plausible, that being what we can intuitively consider likely or unlikely based on our available stores of prior knowledge.

It’s possible to have an item of knowledge that is so well established through repeated tests and unsuccessful attempts to falsify it that it seems very close to certain. Some findings, like many of the fundamental laws of nature are so well-supported by the data that it would take mountains of even better data to dislodge them. With most, that has yet to happen.

Such ideas, while still supported by the evidence used to test them, are still subject to questioning and new testing by the research community with each new finding made.

Scientific research is a fiercely competitive enterprise, and it is the rivalries within a field of study that work to give science its self-correcting quality — new research workers are always trying to unseat older ideas to make their careers and establish their reputations.

This rivalry keeps science moving and allows it to be more of a process of thought and less of merely a body of knowledge, to discover new things and reliably produce techniques and technologies that will work for everyone who uses them, regardless of personal belief.

I think that, in an ongoing quest for understanding, we must be satisfied with what we can get, not what we merely wish, and not place the bar for real knowledge so high that we cannot possibly reach it.

Post Hoc Reasoning, Special Pleading, and Ad Hoc Hypotheses

The powers of the paranormal, if they exist, cannot be very great if they are so easily thwarted by mere doubt. It seems as though, in the world of supernatural claims, doubt is the strongest magic of all. It can cancel anything, except science, which actually needs it to work. At least, this is the impression I get from the claims of paranormal believers when attempts to replicate initially successful parapsychology studies fail. And fail they have once the controls of the initial study are improved, reducing statistical significance closer to chance levels and shrinking effect-size to zero.

It seems to me that even with perfect methodology there would still be a chance for false-positive results, and that what these studies show is not what they are claimed to — only that something other than chance may be at work, and giving no indication of what that may actually be. It could be due to poor experimental design, inappropriate use of statistics, errors in reasoning, bad data collection, and rarely, but often enough to taint the entire field of study, fraud.

One thing never fails, though, and that’s the rationalizations offered for this failure to replicate. This post deals with a species of error in reasoning: Special Pleading, the Post Hoc [after this, or "after the fact"]fallacy, or Ad Hoc [for this (only)]hypothesis, and sometimes just “covering your ass by making shit up.” I also aim to show that it is not always a fallacy under the right circumstances.

This fallacy, regardless of its name, is an attempt to rescue a claim from disproof by inventing special reasons why it should be exempt from the usual standards of evidence, to deflect criticism without demonstrating that these alleged reasons are in fact true or actually exist apart from the claim they attempt to defend. Every attempt has been made to boil the following examples of its use down to their essence and to avoid committing straw-persons:

Psi phenomena are shy, or jealous. They do not work in the presence of skeptics. Skeptical doubt cancels them.

What about this one?

Successful replications do occur, but the doubt of skeptics reading the journals they are published in reaches back through time, retroactively changing the experiment and causing it to fail.

Or…

Psi is elusive and a delicate phenomenon. Imposing excessively strict controls (read: adequate ones) in a study impedes Psi’s natural functioning in a sterile laboratory setting.

What I find interesting about this sort of reasoning in its fallacious form is that it is considered acceptable in some circles.

Never mind that many of the replications are attempted by other believers and by those without an apparent bias against the paranormal, and another such rationalization goes something like:

They (believers or neutral parties who don’t get results) are burdened with a repressed skepticism that causes their replication attempts to fail, no matter what belief or neutrality they claim to have. These hidden attitudes unconsciously sabotage their efforts.

Never mind the fact that this argument is made on the basis of mere supposition and absent the use of a valid psychological test. Those who reason thus are essentially claiming to be able to read minds, the very thing that some of these replication attempts have failed to demonstrate.

This phenomenon, the success of some to get positive results in their studies and others to get negative results based on their belief systems, is in parapsychology known variously as the Shyness Effect, the Wiseman Effect, or, in a form broadly applying to any field of science where attitudes may unconsciously influence results, the Experimenter Effect, or Observer-expectancy effect, and this is one of the reasons for double-blinding studies and other forms of experimental controls.

A good example was a series of medical studies for a procedure known as the portacaval shunt, and in the analysis of these studies, it was discovered that those who were more enthusiastic about the procedure tended to get false-positive results more often than those not so inclined. And this was from a study assessing an experimental surgical method, not magic mind-powers.

Above were some examples of this form of argument used as a fallacy, but are Ad Hoc hypotheses always and everywhere bad reasoning?

Fortunately, no.

This can be a perfectly good way of reasoning, as long as at least one of the following conditions is met:

• The reason for failure to demonstrate something has already been shown, or can be, to exist independently of the hypothesis it is used to support. There must be valid evidence that it is true and relevant as a viable supporting reason.
• The Ad Hoc hypothesis is both interesting and fruitful in predicting new phenomena that could in principle be tested even without being true or existing itself. The key point is that it must be testable, whether by verification or falsification if a general or a particular claim.
• The Post Hoc reasoning is used to invent new and creative ways to test a claim, and as long as it is used to further inquiry and not merely to thwart the goal of critical reasoning by making up silly excuses as needed.

A good example of an Ad Hoc hypothesis that was both interesting and fruitful was Einstein’s addition to General relativity of the Cosmological Constant, which though he later rejected it and called it his “greatest blunder” has shown to be useful today in the concept of Dark Energy to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. Another would be the the Lorentz contraction offered to explain the failure of the  Michelson-Morley experiment to detect the Earth’s motion through the Ether, later incorporated into Einstein’s Special relativity.

One thing to note about many forms of argument used as fallacies:

Philosophers and communications specialists may differ on this, but informal fallacies are not so much violations of argument form as they are violations of argument procedure, as attempts to subvert the rules and goals of constructive argument and critical discussion. In this sense, they are abused, often out of ignorance but sometimes out of intellectual dishonesty, as rhetorical devices masking themselves as cogent arguments when they are not. For ethical, productive argumentation, try to keep this in mind and avoid this yourself whenever possible. Happy debating.

Related articles

• The Power of Confirmation Bias (theness.com)
• 15 Bad Arguments We All Abuse (listverse.com)
• Logical Fallacies (comppost.wordpress.com)

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Argument from Ignorance and UFOs

This is from a while back, but for ten minutes, it’s the most complete, indepth discussion Dr. Tyson’s given on this subject.

How to Argue: Formally Setting up Arguments

Below is an argument of mine, in its entirety, that I recently posted to Facebook, and I thought that this would be a good opportunity to set it out logic-book style, to analyze what is being argued here as both a blog post and as an assignment for my critical reasoning course.

I’m taking a podcast course from Oxford Uni taught by the awesome Marianne Talbot titled Critical Reasoning for Beginners. It’s free, so check it out if you fancy.

Before we begin, I’ll point out that though others found this argument persuasive, I really don’t know if it’s a truly good argument — that the conclusion really follows from the premises.

However, we’ll concern ourselves here with setting this argument out into a sort of structure to simplify it and to analyze what’s being said.

Here it is:

Expressions of belief are claims.

No claim should get a free pass, not yours, nor mine, nor anyone else’s.

If you express your claims but don’t like criticism, then you have two choices — and no, whining that you are offended when criticized is not one of them:

Either make better claims or defend them.

Let’s do this in stages, like so:

• Identify the conclusion
• Identify the premises
• Add any unstated premises
• Remove irrelevancies
• Remove inconsistencies
• Remove cross-references

To keep this argument from seeming to hairy and vicious, we’ll lay out the premises and conclusion first, later using capital letters for each of the statements, and then put them into formal notation.

I’ll try to keep this simple. It’s a good idea to first break down a problem into its components and deal with each separately. That makes solving it easier.

First we identify the conclusion, the key to knowing what is being said, and we’ll mark that in green:

Expressions of belief are claims.

No claim should get a free pass, not yours, nor mine, nor anyone else’s.

If you express your claims but don’t like criticism, then you have two choices — and no, whining that you are offended when criticized is not one of them:

Either make better claims or defend them.

Let’s clarify that conclusion, make it a complete sentence by providing some context for it as part of an argument, shown in green:

Your choices are to either make better claims or defend them.

So, we next pick out the premises, and those will be marked in red as follows:

Expressions of belief are claims. (we’ll call this the first premise, or p1)

No claim should get a free pass, not yours, nor mine, nor anyone else’s. (this shall be the second premise, or p2)

If you express your claims but don’t like criticism, then you have two choices — and no, whining that you are offended when criticized is not one of them: (this is the third premise, or p3)

Your choices are to either make better claims or defend them.

Now that we’ve picked out conclusion and premise, and there are no unstated, suppressed or hidden premises to tease out, lets remove any words that do not contribute to the argument’s meaning. I’ll mark these in blue below.

Be careful to keep complex sentences that are needed in the argument, since these must be considered when we evaluate it later, and don’t add any content to the argument not already there or implied.

Expressions of belief are claims.

No claim should get a free pass, not yours, nor mine, nor anyone else’s. (this part merely emphasizes what is already stated in the premise)

If you express your claims but don’t like criticism, then you have two choices — and no, whining that you are offended when criticized is not one of them: (this may have rhetorical value, but is irrelevant logically, so I’ll take it out)

Your choices are to either make better claims or defend your claims.

We’ve replaced “them” in the conclusion, with “your claims,” marked in red since there could be a bit of ambiguity in what what was said. Clarity demands that we put what we are arguing about in like terms to avoid confusion when we can.

So, with those out of the way, the argument now looks like this, and while we’re at it, let’s assign capital letters to these, so that we may more neatly and compactly use formal notation:

• Expressions of belief are claims. — P
• No claim should get a free pass. — Q
• If you express your claims but don’t like criticism, then you have two choices: — R
• Your choices are to either make better claims or defend your claims — S

“S” is a complex conclusion, with an “or” disjunction as part of the content, not to logically separate the choices.

So our argument looks like this when laid bare for all to see:

• p1: P

• p2: Q

• p3: If P and Q together are true, then R is true.

• C: If R is true, then S is true.

Finally, in formal notation:

• p1: P

• p2: Q

• p3: (P & Q) → R

• C: R → S

The → is the If/Then operator, making the truth of “R” conditional on the truth here of both “P” and “Q,” and the truth of “S” dependent on the truth of “R.” “P” and “Q” are joined in a single statement by a conjunction using a “&.” They are shown in parentheses to allow ease in doing the order of operations to calculate them correctly, just like in ordinary maths.

Now that we’ve done all that, we’ve gotten the argument stated and laid out in simplest terms. We’ve teased out what it is saying and have put it in a form that makes evaluation much, much easier.

Next week, we’ll evaluate the argument to test it for validity, which while not directly truth itself, is of great value to anyone concerned with truth.

I’m not talking about deep cosmic Truths™ mind you, but a concern for the only things that actually can be true or false…

…beliefs and statements of belief, and nothing else.