Archive for the 'Philosophy' Category

Species of speciousness 4: false analogy

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 28, 2007
in Philosophy
. 3 Comments

This is a simple and self-evidently fallacious technique, yet it would be difficult to find an author who has not, at some stage, indulged it to some degree—largely because all analogies that aren’t actually tautologies are not, strictly speaking, true in logical terms. The following extract, however, shows how important questions of degree are—along with the elusive question of what we judge to be reasonable or unreasonable. In the spirit of a debate currently animating Prospect’s blog and postbag, it is taken from Peter Hitchens’s review in the Daily Mail of his brother Christopher’s God is not Great:

As the serpent promises: “Ye shall be as gods.” These may be the most important words in the whole Bible.

Take the enticing satanic advice, and you arrive, quite quickly, at revolutionary terror, at the invention of the atom bomb, at the torture chamber and the building of concentration camps for those unteachable morons who do not share your vision of a just world.

And also you arrive at the idea, embraced by Christopher, that by invading Iraq, you can make the world a better place.

An astonishing number of assumptions and equivalences are crammed into these three paragraphs, but their besetting error is that of false analogy—lumping together a roll call of items that are, supposedly, similar enough to constitute of themselves a coherent argument.

Peter Hitchens may, of course, truly believe that his brother’s support for the invasion of Iraq is best understood in the light of Satan’s words in the garden of Eden; but the pretence that he can offer a coherent historical argument supporting this claim (as is implied by the words “you arrive at…” ) is dishonest. What we are given is a series of opinionated descriptions pretending to be an argument, underpinned by the demonstrably false assumption that the analogies between a Biblical story, revolutionary terror, the invention of the atom bomb, concentration camps and American foreign policy are so self-evident they need not be spelled out. Analogies there may well be, but unless these are precisely defined and qualified, they can have no force or validity (or utility).

Speciousness-watchers may enjoy combing through Peter’s review for their further edification, furnished as it is with gems like these—”We abolished the gallows… and found we had created an armed police and an epidemic of prison suicides,” or ” If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power.” It’s enough to make you wonder who the real devil’s advocate is.

Species of speciousness 3: begging the question

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 18, 2007
in Media and Philosophy
. 1 Comment

Derek Draper, Labour adviser turned psychotherapist, has recently graced the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog with a piece on TV therapy programmes, one of which he is currently involved with. It’s an interesting topic, and an interesting post, not least for its reliance on a technique familiar to any regular reader of “defences” of arguably exploitative, voyeuristic programmes. Draper summarizes his case as follows:

[T]he most fundamental argument for TV therapy is related to the objections to it… I suspect there is an underlying, if often unconscious, dynamic behind many of the objections to this new “psychological TV”: that being openly emotional is still something many people find uncomfortable, and therefore that exploring our thoughts and feelings and searching for emotional comfort is something that should be done only in private.

This is the fallacy of begging the question or, in more formal terms, petitio principii, in which the proposition to be debated—in this case, that TV therapy is a good thing—has already been assumed. Any reader who accepts that “the objections” to Draper’s position are founded on an unreasonable and “often unconscious… dynamic” must accept that there can be little legitimate querying of his conclusions. It is, in other words, impossible to suggest Draper is wrong without rejecting the terms of his debate (which also present an oversimple account of his opponents’ arguments). He continues:

Why do we flinch at seeing feelings expressed and explored in public? Why do we assume that people will be risking damage to themselves if they open up their emotions and let others know how they are feeling on the inside?

These are both good questions, but they are not being asked openly. Their intention, rather, is to bolster the opinions offered in the previous paragraph. “We”, Draper tells us, flinch at seeing our feelings publicly expressed; “we” assume we risk damage by opening up; and “we” are surely unreasonable when we assert these things. Thus, when “we” disagree with him, it’s because of our unconscious fears and repressions. And who wants to be on the side of nasty things like repression, or against good stuff like expression, self-exploration and opening-up?

Importantly, Draper’s position does not involve a failure of logic. It is an informal, as opposed to a formal, fallacy—we cannot deduce from it that any of his claims are wrong. He is, after all, an expert. Like many other experts, however, his writing here presents opinion as though it were argument; and makes the assumption that its author knows better than “we” do about our true feelings and motives. He may well be right. But this is still a dishonest way of beginning a debate.

And when did you last see your beliefs?

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 15, 2007
in Arts and culture, Books, Philosophy and Religion
. 2 Comments

Bertrand Russell famously wrote, at the age of 15, that “the search for truth has shattered most of my old beliefs”—at least according to the diary extracts he reproduces in My Philosophical Development, which detail his departure from the comfortable, Christian teachings of his youth into the realm of rigorous enquiry. “My thinking,” he adds, “was, in a crude form, along lines very similar to that of Descartes.”

15 may seem a precocious age for the commencement of questing as a full-blown philosopher, but it’s beginning to look positively geriatric in comparison to the more recent British, intellectual and faithless crop. Martin Amis, for one, describes in his 2002 essay “The voice of the lonely crowd” his apotheosis at the age of just 12:

Later - we were now in Cambridge - I gave a school speech in which I rejected all belief as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was 12: it seemed open-and-shut.

Even this pales in comparison to Christopher Hitchens, however, whose intellectual atheism was fully achieved before he even hit double figures. As he tells it in the opening pages of his (sensationally irate) new book, God is not Great:

At the age of nine… I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher [explaining why it was obvious the world was made by God] had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences… There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking. I do not think it arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections… before my boyish voice had broken.

Eat your heart out, Bertrand.

Revisiting autonyms

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 14, 2007
in Arts and culture, Asia, China and Philosophy
. 2 Comments

I’ve been writing about two Chinese authors for this month’s Prospect, and it just has struck me that Will’s June column about “autonyms”—words that in some way embody themselves—touches on something that is fundamental to all languages, but that is far more obvious in character-based ones: all writing has its roots in autonymy. For example, take a few Mandarin Chinese characters:

中 (Zhong) means “middle,” and is based on the image of an arrow striking the centre of a target, and perhaps also the idea of a flag flying

国 (Guo) means “kingdom,” and is based on the image of a square of land within which stands a highly stylized piece of jade, representing the wealth of that land. This is, however, the “simplified” version of the character; the pre-20th century, “traditional” form contains within its outer square the characters representing a town and a weapon, indicating a defended territory.

人 (Ren) means “person” or “people,” and is based on the image of a standing person—one of the most basic and ancient of all characters, and the basis for many other sets of meanings (大, for instance, connotes “large,” as it represents someone stretching their arms out; while 天 connotes “heaven” because it represents a large man with the sky above him)

Put these together and you have a phrase that reads “middle kingdom people/person,” or, as we might more simply put it, “Chinese person/people.”

Similarly, in Japanese, take these two characters:

日 (Ni) meaning “sun” or “day,” based on the image of the sun—a circle with a dot in it that has over time become a square with a stroke across its centre. Rather wonderfully, the symbol for the moon is the same but with “legs” drawn in underneath it, 月, as it has to run faster around the earth.

本 (Hon) meaning “origin” or “root,” based on the image of a tree (大, the same as the Chinese character for “large,” and with many of its connotations; Japanese writing is derived from Chinese) with the ground drawn in underneath it.

Put them together and you get “sun origin” or, more comprehensibly, “place of the rising sun,” which is the Japanese name for Japan (the word “Japan” is a western mangling of Ni-Hon, also pronounced Ni-Pon. The name ”China” probably derives from the early Qin dynasty).

Even our own alphabet began with the concrete. The letter “A” can be traced to a pictogram of an ox’s head in hieroglyphics; both “C” and “G” probably come from Hebrew representations of a throwing stick; “F” from the image of a hook or club in proto-Semitic; and so on.

There are massive complexities to be explored here which my potted comments barely hint at, but it remains astonishing to think that over the last 6,000 years humanity has leapt from representing the world with images to exploring its deepest workings through the layers of meaning these images have accumulated. No matter how astonishing its flights of abstraction may seem, the written word is rooted in the physical world.

RIP Richard Rorty

Published
by
Susha
on June 10, 2007
in Academia, In the news and Philosophy
. 1 Comment

The American analytical philosopher, Richard Rorty died on Friday.

In April 2003, Prospect published a portrait of him by Simon Blackburn.

Species of speciousness 2: epistemological error

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on June 7, 2007
in Philosophy
. 1 Comment

Having defended Richard Dawkins, one of our greatest God-bashers, in the first of these columns, it seems only fair in the second to consider a flawed species of argument from the other side of the debate.

Johann Hari spoke for many when he wrote in the Independent in May that “faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking – it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up. Where does that end?” I have every sympathy with the rhetorical thrust of his questioning and its implicit critique of extremism and dogmatism. Yet Hari is guilty of a common epistemological error, or at least of an epistemological crudity. Which is to say that his argument is a misrepresentation of the nature of knowledge and of what it is possible for us to know.

It is true that many beliefs can and should be tested against what we know of the world. I do not, for example, consider it reasonable to claim that anyone has ever come back from the dead, or that the world is ringed by a giant serpent, or that smallpox represents a form of divine possession—yet people have at some stage in history had faith in all these things. But I also do not consider it reasonable to claim, as Hari does, that any line of thought not based in “evidence or reason” is a bad one. Where will this end? If every claim that cannot be verified against empirical evidence is to be dismissed, we will soon find ourselves having to do without much of morality, aesthetics and metaphysics—effectively taking the position that there is nothing of importance to be said about many of the questions that most people spend much of their lives worrying about. This, surely, is a rather limited definition of importance.

As Hume argued, induction—the basis of the scientific method—is a matter of common sense rather than certainty. And common sense, if it means anything, means that our systems of thought must have some room to credit what is commonly said and done and thought. Do we all possess reasonable beliefs that cannot be supported by an unimpeachable rationale? Yes. Are all arguments made by people of faith necessarily wrong? No. Does their faith invalidate their ability to be rational? No.

To have faith in something is not, automatically, to be dogmatic or stupid. Indeed, it is the faith that a question is worth asking or an area of human life worth exploring that underpins philosophy’s most serious contributions to the world. Similarly, if criticisms of faith are to be a positive force, they need to deal with individual beliefs—and the way these beliefs are acted upon—rather than to pretend that it is adequate to vanish humanity’s oldest and deepest concerns into the ether with a few impecccably rational sentences.

Hari’s article as a whole is far from guilty of this, but it offers an interesting reminder of just how seductive the glow of righteousness—the belief that your assertion is free from error—can prove on any side of a debate.

Species of speciousness 1: false dichotomy

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on May 31, 2007
in Philosophy and Religion
. 2 Comments

“Philosophy,” Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” It is a battle, he might have added, that we are both unsure we can win and unsure we want to win. To call something “specious” is to say it has a false look of truth – from the Latin speciosus, meaning beautiful. It is, in a way, a complement. As poets and tyrants have long known, beauty has a way of making things look true; while there is in all of us the suspicion that it may matter more to appear honorable, kind and intelligent than it does actually to be these things. Despite and because of this, I will in this occasional column be looking at some of the species of speciousness that throng our media. These anatomies will, I hope, be hotly disputed and/or derided by Prospect readers, that most discerning brand of truth-seekers.

While unconditionally equating faith with bad thinking is one of today’s most common God-bashes, equating atheism with blind faith is one of its most elegant ripostes – and is equally inadmissible as argument. Yet almost every critic of the God-haters has succumbed. Here’s a perfect example. According to former philosophy tutor Barney Zwartz, writing for The Age back in November 2006, Richard Dawkins “is on a relentless crusade against religion in any form, but cannot see that his own scientistic materialism is as much a dogmatic form of fundamentalist faith as those he despises.” As Prospect’s philosophical campaigner in residence, AC Grayling, would doubtless point out, this is a false dichotomy. Atheism is not the opposite of religious belief, because nothing is not the opposite of something, and believing in the absence of something is not at all the same as believing in something. Declaring, for example, that the world was not created by a dwarf called Boris does not make you a dogmatic, fundamentalist anti-Boris-ist.

Dawkins may well be a gross oversimplifier of facts – and even a practitioner of the straw man fallacy – but this does not make him a fundamentalist. Especially as his thesis is that “God” is an absurd and unlikely concept, rather than that “non-God” is an absolute truth which has been imparted to him by unassailable texts. And how many fundamentalists make believing in the possibility that God does not exist a cornerstone of their faith?