Crimes Against Logic: Exposing Bogus Arguments

The author calls this “a troubleshooting guide” similar to the owner’s manual of a car or computer. “It is aimed at everyday users and consumers of reasoning…” It certainly meets that measure. The main thrust is on failures of right reason such as inconsistency, equivocation, and begging the question. The author also reveals false claims, principally phony statistics.

Before moving into financial consulting and electioneering for the open market in his homeland of New Zealand, Jamie Whyte completed master’s and doctor’s degrees in  philosophy at Cambridge University (Wikipedia here).  You can find some of his essays archived at the Cobden Centre here. The Centre is named for the successful manufacturer and proponent of laissez-faire in early 19^th century Britain, Richard Cobden.  His writings are archived at the Online Library of Liberty here.

In formal terms, Jamie Whyte is an objectivist, a strict rational-empiricist whose logically consistent statements explain experiential facts. This book is his attack on some of the people who fail to meet either standard.

 

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments
of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders
by Jamie Whyte. (McGraw-Hill 2004, 157 pages.)
Google Books has an extract of the first chapter
on why you do not have a right to your opinion, here. 

The first crime that Whyte investigates is the claim that you have a right to your opinion. No such right exists. Whyte points out that this assertion is founded on an ambiguity. You do have a political right to an opinion. However, that is not to be confused with the epistemic right to an opinion. The epistemic right to an opinion, says Whyte, is similar to the right to boast. Just as you first must achieve something worthy of boasting, so, too, is the “right” to an opinion earned by correctly identifying facts and then explaining them rationally. When someone retreats by claiming that they have a “right” their opinion, they are actually admitting that they are wrong, or at the very least, they can present no reasons and facts to support their assertions.

In the chapter “Prejudice in Fancy Dress” Whyte demolishes Pascal’s Wager and several other examples including Faith and Mystery. The subhead “But Still” examines calls for the acceptance of ignorance. This is actually a variant of the non-existent right to an opinion. Yes, the facts are on your side. Yes, your argument is logical. But still I prefer my prejudices.

The chapter “Shut Up!” scrutinizes several ways that those losing an argument seek to cut off debate by silencing their opponent. Well-known facts are boring. That a claim can be countered with a boring fact in no way mitigates the strength of the contrary assertion. That a boring fact has been marshaled is especially strong, as it points to a clear violation by the party demanding that the other shut up. 

Under the subhead “Shut Up, You Sound Like Hitler” Whyte calls mass murder “something of a lottery.”  He tells of being in a Lenin Bar in Auckland, “decorated with red stars and black and white images of the great Communist leader.”  Hitler bars, he notes, seem to be in short supply. 

In the chapter on “Empty Words” Whyte goes into some depth on the use and abuse of sneer quotes. His example focuses on post-modernist philosopher Imré Lakatos. When you say that my “facts” are in dispute, it is clear from the quotes that you do not believe my claims to be facts. Whyte says that in discussing the work of physicist A. A. Michelson, Lakotos’s excessive use of sneer quotes reveals that he believes knowledge to be impossible because facts are non-existent. This is not unique to one philosopher. Whyte calls the abuse of quotes a hallmark of post-modernist academic writing.

Implied Generalizations slip into discussions – and usually slip by unchallenged. Whyte offers a bald example. When a Christian says that homosexuality should be illegal because it is condemned in the Bible, that is an implied generalization because the Bible condemns many things, including the use of cotton-polyester blends. Backing off from making illegal the use of mixed fabrics (also working on the Sabbath and eating shellfish) then leads to an inconsistency. Whyte also offers a mundane example in Tony Blair’s active campaigning against fox hunting while insisting that other forms of hunting (including fishing) would never be proscribed by his government. Why not?  The implied generalization is that cruel sports are wrong. The resultant inconsistency is that some are acceptable after all.

The chapter “Begging the Question” is subtle and deep. Most of this book was fun to read and I had little difficulty relating to the material. Whyte is a good writer. His topic is compelling. His examples are from everyday experience. However, I read “Begging the Question” three times through and made close notes all along. It paid off well. Whyte sets up a debate in which libertarian Jack calls for an end to regulations. Socialist Jill claims that this would lead to mass poverty. In fact, Jill is begging the question. Jack’s position is that property rights are absolute. Rather than accepting the premise, Jill needs to address it by first showing that property rights are not absolute. Whyte then offers a longer discussion on tolerance. When a Christian fundamentalist asserts that abortion is murder, the response is not, “If you believe that, then do not have an abortion, but neither should you interfere with the rights of others to have them.”  Substitute the word “murder” for “abortion” and you can see that the plea for tolerance only begs the question: Is abortion murder or not? 

You will find discussions of false statistics, weasel words, hurrah words, morality fever, coincidences, and more. It is easily true that no one likes to be contradicted, but that is one way that we discover the truth. As Whyte points out, when you are crossing the street in the false belief that there are no cars coming, you don’t mind being contradicted. Intransigent devotion to the truth is always in your best interest.

  

(An earlier version appeared under Books on the Rebirth of Reason discussion site for September 3, 2008,  here.)  

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

George Boole's Laws of Thought

Gregory M. Browne's Necessary Factual Truths

Knowledge Maps

Harriman's Logical Leap Almost Makes It

Why Evidence is Not Enough

Gregory M Browne's Necessary Factual Truths

This blog is named for Dr. Gregory M. Browne's work bridging metaphysics and epistemology.  In the Introduction to Necessary Factual Truths, Browne explains that his work was inspired by Leonard Peikoff's essay, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy."  This book goes further to uniting inductive and deductive truths.  Inductive truths are factual (empirical; evidentiary), while deductive truths are necessary (logical, rational).  As an Objectivist, Browne expects that there is no dichotomy between the factual and the necessary, the empirical and the rational. 

According to Browne, the historical difficulty derives from the fact that not everything essential to identification and definition is immediately perceptible.  He delineates "shallow" truths from "deep" truths.  Mathematics and logic are "shallow" because everything you need to know is immediately provided.  On the other hand, the internal structures of atoms and stars, the mechanisms of life, and the panorama of human history are "deep" because they are less tractable.  They do have natures. Existence is identity: to be is to be something.  However, we just have not always known -- and may not yet know -- much about these more complicated entities.  When such things are first discovered, we know that they are, but we do not know what they are.  Eventually, we learn more.  According to Dr. Browne, historically, Aristotle followed a unified inductive-deductive methodology.  Over the centuries, philosophers narrowed their certainties, eventually abandoning the empirical, evidentiary, experimental, realistic aspects of knowledge for those that could be argued like geometry.

"...I say that some kinds are such that a description that is logically equivalent to the name - which would be a definition by necessary and sufficient conditions - is not always available. ... This is because some some kinds have attributes which are unknown when they are first discovered, as we shall see, and so it takes work to discover the attributes, and thus come up with a definition by necessary and sufficient attributes, and at any given time we may not have discovered them all." (168-169) 

Browne opens his treatise by discussing why philosophers denied necessary factual truths and created dichotomies.  He then goes on to define categories, classes and kinds, necessity and causality, explaining extension (breadth and narrowness of definition) and intension (depth and shallowness of meaning).  The book argues for three broad claims. First, "some admittedly factual truths - including truths in chemistry and biology - are indeed necessary..."  He achieves this by his explanation of Deep Kinds, entities whose nature is complex and not entirely known.  He ties this to other side of the equation by investigating Narrow Classes and the necessary truths about individuals.  His second claim is that certain factual truths - such as Newton's Three Laws of Motion - are necessary.  Finally, Browne demonstrates why the necessary truths are more than conventions, but factual: they are true because of how the world is.


Gregory M. Browne completed a dual major in political philosophy and political science at Michigan State University's James Madison College in 1979.  Continuing his studies at the University of Michigan in history and philosophy, he returned to MSU, completing a master's degree in political science in 1984 and another in philosophy in 1988 before earning a doctorate in philosophy in 1994.  He taught at Yorktown University in Denver and at community colleges in Michigan before coming to Eastern Michigan University.  In the fall semester 2007, waiting for a class in police operations, I was walking the halls and heard him lecturing about Ayn Rand. His essay on reference and neccesity (in reply to Roderick Long) appeared in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Vol 8, No 1.

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