In This Chapter

Picking up tips for real-life debates

Looking at how newspapers and politicians spin arguments

Arguments are all about providing reasons to support a position. Reasons are often, in practice, limited to producing so-called authorities who're claimed to hold the same view (perhaps important people, important books or of course God). Or perhaps they're claimed as links to future events, for good or bad: for example, countries should put a hefty tax on lightbulbs and petrol or else the seas will rise and drown coastal cities.

Such arguments are very weak, but not necessarily invalid. Why do I say they're weak? Because in the first case they require others to accept your judgement of who's an authority, and in the second case they ‘beg the question’ of exactly what is the causal link. (Remember, in logic, premises are assumed to be true, however implausible. The thing that makes an argument invalid is an internal contradiction.)

Here, however, I provide ten common argumentative tactics that I strongly suggest you avoid!

Claiming to Follow Logically: Non Sequiturs and Genetic Fallacies

Non sequiturs and genetic fallacies involve statements that are offered in a way that suggests they follow logically one from the other, when in fact no such link exists.

The term non sequitur comes from the Latin, simply meaning ‘that which does not follow’. It's spelt with a ‘u’ at the end and not the expected ‘e’, and so watch out if trying to impress! A good example is that of someone arguing against wedding rings on the grounds that they must be bad because they have their origins in something bad — the historical fact of the unequal submission of women to men. The argument is fallacious, because the use of wedding rings today carries no such associations – at least not ‘logically’.

This example is actually a special kind of non sequiter, oops, sequitur, called the genetic fallacy. This occurs where people draw assumptions about something by tracing its origins back, hence ‘genetic’, even though no necessary link can be made between the present situation and the claimed original one.

Making Assumptions: Begging the Question

Begging the question is the dodgy argumentative tactic of assuming the very point at issue. In effect, the conclusion is one of the premises in an argument supposedly intended to prove it. Therefore, it's a form of circular argumentation.

But, in logic, a valid argument has to have all the true information needed in the premises to work too. So in a sense, in order to be logically valid you have to beg the question! Nevertheless, in Critical Thinking argumentation, don't do it. The reasoning of your argument should extend the information contained in the premises a little bit further.

Restricting the Options to Two: ‘Black and White’ Thinking

In black and white thinking, or the false dichotomy to give it its slightly grand title, the arguer gives only two options when other alternatives are possible. For example, ‘If you want better hospitals for everyone, then you have to be prepared to raise taxes. If you don't want to raise taxes, you can't have better hospitals for everyone.’ Logical nonsense! Plenty of other options are possible between these two extremes. (Maybe money could be swapped from building roads . . . or new missiles.) Someone using this type of argument is probably deliberately trying to obscure other available approaches.

You may also spot another failure of logic in this example (like buses, fallacies often come in twos and threes) — mistaking correlation for causation (see the later section ‘Mistaking a Connection for a Cause: Correlation Confusion’). Better hospitals and higher taxes aren't necessarily linked: healthcare can improve without increased funding and increased funding for hospitals doesn't necessarily improve it either.

Being Unclear: Equivocation and Ambiguity

Equivocation and ambiguity involve using a word or phrase that has two or more meanings as though it has just one. You can hardly avoid encountering various types of ambiguity, including:

• Lexical: Refers to individual words.
• Referential: Occurs when the context is unclear.
• Syntactical: Results from grammatical confusions.

Politicians rely heavily on this kind of bad argument. Actually, here's an example of referential ambiguity from recent political life in the United States. President Clinton was accused of not having ‘taken out’ Osama bin Laden (the man who later organised the crashing of the hijacked planes into the Twin Towers in New York).

Clinton insisted that, on the contrary, he'd approved every request that the CIA and the military made of him involving the use of force against Osama bin Laden. But he didn't disclose that he'd also instructed the CIA and military, in writing in several Memoranda of Notification, that he wanted bin Laden captured and treated humanely, but not killed, unless it was in the process of capture.

So yes, he agreed with all the requests, but he also instructed them not to use lethal force unnecessarily. Another, rather better-known, Clinton example concerned one of his lady friends — Gennifer Flowers — who alleged she had had a 12-year affair with him. He said her story was untrue and that she was ‘a woman I never slept with’. The story was ‘untrue’ however only in the sense that it was not exactly 12 years and he never literally fell asleep with her.

Mistaking a Connection for a Cause: Correlation Confusion

Correlation confusion is also summed up as the adage: ‘correlation is not causation’. Anyway, this common fallacy consists of assuming that because two things often go together a link must exist. For example, children are eating more biscuits and cars are getting bigger. But did the one cause the other? The link is spurious — children who eat a lot of biscuits may need larger clothes, but not larger cars. Don't jump to an unsound conclusion.

As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 12, one particular form of this fallacy, usually known as affirming the consequent, is a surprisingly common error. The logical structure of the argument is of the form:

If P then Q.

Q

Therefore P.

(In other words, the dodgy argument is saying that since ‘Q’ really is the case, then ‘P’ must have caused it.) Another example, ‘If there's a serious drought, the leaves will fall off the trees. The leaves are falling off the trees, therefore there's a serious drought.’ You can seen that such reasoning is dodgy when you remember that leaves can fall off trees for plenty of other reasons — like because it's autumn!

Resorting to Double Standards: Special Pleading

Special pleading (or ‘stacking the deck’) involves employing values or standards against an opponent's position while not applying them to your own position, and without being able to show a relevant difference to justify the double standard.

For example, a motorist may complain about other people driving too fast while claiming that his or her own ignoring of the speed limits is justified by superior driving skills. You can see the problem when you realise that almost all motorists have a firm belief in their excellent driving skills!

The notion is related to the principle of relevant differences, according to which, say, two people can be treated differently if and only if a relevant difference exists between them. For example, an elderly lady can ask the strapping young footballer to let her have the seat beside the door of the bus by arguing that she's frail and he isn't.

Thinking Wishfully

Wishful thinking is about assuming conclusions just because you want them to be so. Despite the obvious problems of relying on reasoning that involves this fallacy, people do so surprisingly often — surprising, that is, when looked at coolly and rationally. A likely explanation is that the subconscious mind finds the tactic a very good way to make its points, turning its desires into assumptions of truth.

People who use wishful thinking often supplement it with emotional states such as aggression or pleading, seeking to batter others into accepting their assertions. Appeals to ‘majority opinion’ to back up a factual claim is a particular kind of wishful thinking, for example when children tell their parents that ‘everyone else’ is wearing Nike trainers to school.

Detecting the Whiff of Red Herrings

Red herrings are irrelevant topics or arguments that people bring into a discussion with the effect of allowing the real issue to go unexamined. Apparently, smoked herrings (which are red) were sometimes used to confuse dogs chasing after foxes.

When the BBC ran programmes looking into the reason behind the UK government's unpopular and controversial decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, the then Prime Minster's press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, was accused of trailing red herrings after he managed to change the focus of the debate into one about the BBC's coverage of the issue. He claimed the coverage showed a disgraceful bias. Many public debates seem to consist of a series of red herrings being dragged round — and often the only outcome is a bit of a stink!

Attacking a Point that Doesn't Exist: Straw-Man Arguments

Straw men are similar in many ways to the red herrings of the preceding section — at least when you're talking about arguments, which I am. They're both kinds of arguments that introduce and attribute a weak or absurd position to an opponent, before swiftly proceeding to demolish it.

Here's one classic example of the straw-man tactic. President Nixon had to respond to criticism that he seemed to have been caught red-handed misappropriating campaign funds for his personal use. Instead of attempting to deny or defend his actions, he started talking about whether or not people thought he should have let his children keep a black and white cocker spaniel dog, which a supporter had sent in a crate all the way from Texas: ‘And, you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the dog, and I just want to say this right now, that, regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.’

Nixon is no longer talking about what his opponents asked, but instead about a much weaker charge for which he could expect to win public support and understanding. Indeed, he was elected a little later, by a landslide. Smart fellow, but illogical.

Particularly in terms of writing, the straw-man fallacy often involves misrepresentation of someone else's argument, perhaps by distorting the context, perhaps by crudely paraphrasing the opponent. This kind of tactic is closely connected with the fallacy of ignoratio elenchi, or more simply, the fallacy of offering irrelevant conclusions.

Redefining Words: Playing at Humpty Dumpty

This error is named in honour of Lewis Carroll's egg-shaped character who sits on a wall (but at least he's not sitting on the proverbial ‘fence’). Humpty insists ‘When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Here's a real-life example that involved me as part of the Global Warming debate. I noticed that the London Guardian (like other newspapers) kept telling its readers that carbon dioxide was the main greenhouse gas. The implication being that it was essential to get control of it in order to influence the so-called greenhouse effect (which keeps the Earth from icing over, but is now suspected of making it too hot).

Being a stickler for accuracy, I wrote to the Guardian, citing about ten articles where the newspaper had said this, along with some sources to show that it was unambiguously accepted in the scientific community that the major greenhouse gas is in fact water vapour. (Water vapour in the atmosphere is responsible for about 80 per cent of the greenhouse effect.) The paper, very responsibly, investigated, found that I was right, but then replied that they'd continue to say that carbon dioxide was the main greenhouse gas it was using the words ‘the main greenhouse gas’ in a special way which everyone understood and had got used to.

The moral is, of course, that the decision on usage was political.