A Freeper's Introduction to Rhetoric (Part 12, Test Your Knowledge)

Introduction to Logic | Irving M. Copi & Carl Cohen

[general_re]

Referring to the fallacy discussions previously posted (and linked below) may be helpful before beginning.

Among the following passages, identify those in which there is a fallacy; if there is a fallacy, analyze it, give its kind (whether relevance, or presumption, or ambiguity) and its specific name.

1. Which is more useful, the Sun or the Moon? The Moon is more useful since it gives us light during the night, when it is dark, whereas the Sun shines only in the daytime, when it is light anyway.

   — GEORGE GAMOW (inscribed in the entry hall of the Hayden Planetarium, New York City)

2. The human brain, with a volume of roughly a quart, encompasses a space of conceptual and cognitive possibilities that is larger, by one measure at least, than the entire astronomical universe. It has this striking feature because it exploits the combinatorics of its 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion synaptic connections with each other. Each cell-to-cell connection can be strong, or weak, or anything in between. . . . If we assume, conservatively, that each synaptic connection might have any one of 10 different strengths, then the total number of distinct configurations of synaptic weights that the brain might assume is, very roughly, 10 raised to 100 trillionth power, or 10^{100,000,000,000,000}. Compare this with the measure of only 10⁸⁷ cubic meters standardly estimated for the volume of the entire astronomical universe.

   — PAUL M. CHURCHLAND, The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain, MIT Press, 1995

3. Time heals all wounds. Time is money. Therefore money heals all wounds.

   — "Ask Marilyn," Parade, 12 April 1987

4. Revelation is a communication of something which the person to whom that thing is revealed did not know before. For if I have done a thing or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it or seen it, or to enable me to tell it or to write it. Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth, of which man himself is the actor or the witness; and consequently, all the historical and anecdotal parts of the Bible, which is almost the whole of it, is not within the meaning and compass of the word revelation, and therefore is not the word of God.

   — THOMAS PAINE, The Age of Reason, part I, p. 13

5. The average earnings of workers with a high school education remain significantly above those of the less educated, and the earnings of workers with a college education now dwarf those of the high school educated. . . . Society as a whole also benefits from education. The nation is strengthened economically by having workers with more and better skills. . . . The more educated are more prone to vote in local and national elections, and a better-informed and more responsible electorate improves the workings of a democratic society. Increases in the level of education are also associated with reductions in crime. Education has also helped to achieve greater social equality in the distribution of economic resources. . . . It is safe to say that education has been a good investment both for society and for individuals.

   — ERIC A. HANUSHEK, Making Schools Work, Brookings Institution, 1994

6. An outstanding person is always "out of step" in some respects. If he were entirely "in step" he would be no different from anyone else and hence, by definition, not outstanding.

   — EDWARD SHILS, "More at Home Than Out of Step," The American Scholar, Autumn 1987, p. 577

7. Mysticism is one of the great forces of the world's history. For religion is nearly the most important thing in the world, and religion never remains for long altogether untouched by mysticism.

   — JOHN MCTAGGART ELLIS MCTAGGART, "Mysticism," Philosophical Studies

8. Mr. Stace says that my writings are "extremely obscure," and this is a matter as to which the author is the worst of all possible judges. I must therefore accept his opinion. As I have a very intense desire to make my meaning plain, I regret this.

   — BERTRAND RUSSELL, "Reply to Criticisms," in P. A. Schilpp. ed., The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (Evanston, IL: The Library of Living Philosophers), p. 707

9. For the benefit of those representatives who have not been here before this year, it may be useful to explain that the item before the General Assembly is that hardy perennial called the "Soviet item." It is purely a propaganda proposition, not introduced with a serious purpose of serious action, but solely as a peg on which to hang a number of speeches with a view to getting them into the press of the world. This is considered by some to be very clever politics. Others, among whom the present speaker wishes to be included, consider it an inadequate response to the challenge of the hour.

   — HENRY CABOT LODGE, speech to the United Nations General Assembly, 30 November 1953

10. The war-mongering character of all this flood of propaganda in the United States is admitted even by the American press. Such provocative and slanderous aims clearly inspired today's speech by the United States Representative, consisting only of impudent slander against the Soviet Union, to answer which would be beneath our dignity. The heroic epic of Stalingrad is impervious to libel. The Soviet people in the battles at Stalingrad saved the world from the fascist plague and that great victory which decided the fate of the world is remembered with recognition and gratitude by all humanity. Only men dead to all shame could try to cast aspersions on the shining memory of the heroes of that battle.

    — ANATOLE M. BARANOVSKY, speech to the United Nations General Assembly, 30 November 1953

11. Prof. Leon Kass reports a notable response to an assignment he had given students at the University of Chicago. Compose an essay, he asked, about a memorable meal you have eaten. One student wrote as follows:

    I had once eaten lunch with my uncle and my uncle's friend. His friend had once eaten lunch with Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was once a man of great spirituality. Therefore, by the law of the syllogism, I had once eaten lunch with God. And, as Einstein had habitually expressed in reaction to the quantum theory: Gott wurfelt nicht . . . God does not play dice.

    — LEON KASS, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature, 1995

12. If Utilitarianism be true it would be one's duty to try to increase the numbers of a community, even though one reduced the average total happiness of the members, so long as the total happiness in the community would be in the least increased. It seems perfectly plain to me that this kind of action, so far from being a duty, would quite certainly be wrong.

    — C. D. BROAD, Five Types of Ethical Theory

13. . . . it is only when it is believed that I could have acted otherwise that I am held to be morally responsible for what I have done. For a man is not thought to be morally responsible for an action that it was not in his power to avoid.

    — ALFRED J. AYER, "Freedom and Necessity," Polemic, no. 5, 1946

14. Whether we are to live in a future state, as it is the most important question which can possibly be asked, so it is the most intelligible one which can be expressed in language.

    — JOSEPH BUTLER, "Of Personal Identity"

15. If you hold that nothing is self-evident, I will not argue with you for it is clear that you are a quibbler and are not to be convinced.

    — DUNS SCOTUS, Oxford Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard

16. Thomas Carlyle said of Walt Whitman that he thinks he is a big poet because he comes from a big country.

    — ALFRED KAZIN, "The Haunted Chamber," The New Republic, 23 June 1986, p. 39

17. If we want to know whether a state is brave we must look to its army, not because the soldiers are the only brave people in the community, but because it is only through their conduct that the courage or cowardice of the community can be manifested.

    — R. L. NETTLESHIP, Lectures on the Republic of Plato

18. As the American Revolution began to appear likely, some Americans sought reconciliation with England; Thomas Paine opposed reconciliation bitterly. In Common Sense (1776), he wrote:

    . . . all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation may be included within the following descriptions. Interested men, who are not to be trusted, weak men who cannot see, prejudiced men who will not see, and a certain set of moderate men who think better of the European world than it deserves; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this Continent than all the other three.

19. If science wishes to argue that we cannot know what was going on in [the gorilla] Binti's head when she acted as she did, science must also acknowledge that it cannot prove that nothing was going on. It is because of our irresolvable ignorance, as much as fellow-feeling, that we should give animals the benefit of doubt and treat them with the respect we accord ourselves.

    — MARTIN ROWE and MIA MACDONALD, "Let's Give Animals Respect They Deserve," New York Times, 26 August 1996.

20. I know that she's sick, but that's not my problem. She's needed at the shop, and when an employee is sent supervisor, that employee is expected to show up.

21. When we had got to this point in the argument, and everyone saw that the definition of justice had been completely upset, Thrasymachus, instead of replying to me, said: "Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse?"
    "Why do you ask such a question," I said, "when you ought rather to be answering?"
    "Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose; she has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep."

    — PLATO, The Republic

22. Clarence Darrow, renowned criminal trial lawyer, began one shrewd plea to a jury thus:

    You folks think we city people are all crooked, but we city people think you farmers are all crooked. There isn't one of you I'd trust in a horse trade, because you'd be sure to skin me. But when it comes to having sympathy with a person in trouble. I'd sooner trust you folks than city folks, because you come to know people better and get to be closer friends.

    — IRVING STONE, Clarence Darrow for the Defense

23. The most blatant occurrence of recent years is all these knuckleheads running around protesting nuclear power — all these stupid people who do not research at all and who go out and march, pretending they care about the human race, and then go off in their automobiles and kill one another.

    — RAY BRADBURY, in Omni, October 1979

24. When Copernicus argued that the Ptolemaic astronomy (holding that the celestial bodies all revolved around the earth) should be replaced by a theory holding that the earth (along with all the other planets) revolves around the sun, hewas ridiculed by many of the scientists of his day, including one of the greatest astronomers of that time, Clavius, who wrote in 1581:

    Both [Copernicus and Ptolemy] are in agreement with the observed phenomena. But Copernicus's arguments contain a great many principles that are absurd. He assumed, for instance, that the earth is moving with a triple motion . . .[but] according to the philosophers a simple body like the earth can have only a simple motion. . . . Therefore it seems to me that Ptolemy's geocentric doctrine must be preferred to Copernicus's doctrine.

25. All of us cannot be famous, because all of us cannot be well known.

    — JESSE JACKSON, quoted in The New Yorker, 12 March 1984

26. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment.

    — JONATHAN EDWARDS, "The Pit of Hell" (1741)

[general_re]

Previous installments:

Part 1 - Introduction and the Argument From Ignorance
Part 2 - the Appeal to Inappropriate Authority
Part 3 - the Argument Ad Hominem
Part 4 - the Appeal to Force and the Appeal to Emotion
Part 5 - the Irrelevant Conclusion
Part 6 - Fallacies of Presumption and the Complex Question
Part 7 - False Cause and Begging the Question
Part 8 - Accident and Converse Accident
Part 9 - Fallacies of Ambiguity and Equivocation
Part 10 - Amphiboly and Accent
Part 11 - Composition and Division

[general_re]

Part 12 - test your knowledge.

Some selections may not contain true fallacies. Some selections may contain fallacies that are debatable or questionable as to whether it's really a fallacy. Some selections may contain more than one fallacy. Some may contain unusually subtle errors. That's life, so if you can spot most of the errors in the erroneous passages with a bit of effort, you should be well-armed to spot them "in the wild" ;)

[PatrickHenry]

PING. [This ping list is for the evolution side of evolution threads, and sometimes for other science topics. FReepmail me to be added or dropped.]

[PatrickHenry]

They all look pretty logical to me.

[RightWhale]

A test? Is this a take-home? Can we work in groups?

[general_re]

You may wish to review the material before beginning ;)

[general_re]

This is an open-book, open-notes exam, where collaboration and discussion is encouraged, and counts for zero points towards your final grade... :^)

[VadeRetro]

Number one bears some relation to: "Your mission will be to travel to the Sun. You won't burn up, however. We'll wait until night."

[PatrickHenry]

25. All of us cannot be famous, because all of us cannot be well known.
— JESSE JACKSON, quoted in The New Yorker, 12 March 1984

It may not be logical, but it's certainly consistent with everything else I've ever heard from that source.

[RightWhale]

Good examples. Next time it might be interesting to give the examples right off the bat and then go into rules and methods. Linguists are building databases of uninterrupted text of millions of words and looking for rules of syntax that might have not been noticed up to now. These examples could serve as a start of a fallacy database, rules, both normative and logical, to follow.

[VadeRetro]

The most blatant occurrence of recent years is all these knuckleheads running around protesting nuclear power — all these stupid people who do not research at all and who go out and march, pretending they care about the human race, and then go off in their automobiles and kill one another. (Ray Bradbury)

Don't see the fallacy and, at any rate, he ain't wrong.

[jennyp]

LI>Time heals all wounds. Time is money. Therefore money heals all wounds.

— "Ask Marilyn," Parade, 12 April 1987

Hmmm... This depends on Time really equalling money. Now, the expression "time is money" really means there is an opportunity cost to spending time on something. So, does money cost time? Yes! You must spend time to earn money. So the expression works both ways. IOW, time & money really are equivalent in some sense that's important to us.

So what about the first part? "Time heals all wounds." That's intuitively true, but is it because of time acting alone, or is it because of all the other things we do during that time that let us get on with our lives? If it's the latter, then maybe money - which makes many new distracting activities possible - really does heal all wounds!

[jennyp]

If Utilitarianism be true it would be one's duty to try to increase the numbers of a community, even though one reduced the average total happiness of the members, so long as the total happiness in the community would be in the least increased. It seems perfectly plain to me that this kind of action, so far from being a duty, would quite certainly be wrong.

— C. D. BROAD, Five Types of Ethical Theory

I think the fallacy here is assuming that you can assign an amount of happiness or unhappiness to the state of never having been born in the first place. If a never-been-born child represents total unhappiness, then yes, producing him/her would increase the total H, no matter how unhappy their life was.

But you really can't assign a value, good or bad, to the life that never existed in the first place. So the equation is invalid.

[PatrickHenry]

13. . . . it is only when it is believed that I could have acted otherwise that I am held to be morally responsible for what I have done. For a man is not thought to be morally responsible for an action that it was not in his power to avoid.
— ALFRED J. AYER, "Freedom and Necessity," Polemic, no. 5, 1946

Other than placing the premise last, what in the world is wrong with that?

[general_re]

The fallacies employed by those whom we oppose are very often easier to spot than those employed by those with whom we are predisposed to agree ;)

Tu quoque.

[general_re]

Keep in mind that the passage presented may be describing a fallacy, rather than being a fallacy itself - 16 is a good example of this.

You may find the context of that passage interesting. The full text of Broad's Five Types of Ethical Theory is available here, and the passage in question is in this section.

[general_re]

Other than placing the premise last, what in the world is wrong with that?

Who said that every passage was fallacious? ;)

[T'wit]

"Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like to put it more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise." -- Lewis Carroll

[general_re]

Clear as mud, as usual ;)

[PatrickHenry]

24. Clavius, who wrote in 1581:
Both [Copernicus and Ptolemy] are in agreement with the observed phenomena. But Copernicus's arguments contain a great many principles that are absurd [ding, ding, ding!]. He assumed, for instance, that the earth is moving with a triple motion . . .[but] according to the philosophers [ding, ding, ding!] a simple body like the earth can have only a simple motion. . . . Therefore it seems to me that Ptolemy's geocentric doctrine must be preferred to Copernicus's doctrine.

Hmmmmm ... this is a difficult one. Nevertheless, I shall stick my neck out and suggest that the red flag went up when I spotted a poisoning of the well; and the green flag is for a woeful appeal to authority.