Logical Fallacies - Slippery Slope

I have lived in areas with freezing rain.  You people who have only experienced Rocky Mountain snow do not know what it's like.  The rain falls, and instantly freezes on anything it touches.  That releases a bit of heat which makes a slick layer of water on the top.  Friction practically goes away.  If you start moving down a slope, there is really no way to stop.  This concept forms the imagery of an interesting logical fallacy, the slippery slope.

It goes something like this.  If I take the following action, I will inevitably continue to take more and more extreme actions, so I should not take the first action.  If you start eating cotton candy, soon you'll be eating it every morning.  After that you'll progress to eating cotton candy for every meal, and become malnourished.  Therefore, you should never eat cotton candy.  In this context, it's pretty clearly a fallacy.

Take the following example:

If we allow gay marriage, where will it stop?  We will move toward allowing polygamous marriages, and perhaps marriages between siblings.  Even parent-child marriages!  Abominations in the gene-pool, and the destruction of the human race as we know it!  So we can't allow gay marriage!

This should be seen as just as ridiculous as the cotton candy example.  Now look at this one:

If we allow anyone to refuse service to a gay customer, where will it stop?  People will start by refusing to take pictures at a gay wedding, and pretty soon gay people won't be able to shop at the supermarket.  We can't let this happen!

The amazing thing to me is that many of the people who readily recognize one of the above examples as clear fallacy often entirely miss that the other one is based on the same logic, and just as unsound.  These fallacies are meant to rile up the masses -- they are a call to arms.  I think we need to stop this kind of verbal warmongering and start actually conversing.  That way we can problem-solve and actually come out better in the end.

Compare and Contrast - Gay vs. Deaf

This one has always really fascinated me.  I happen to have friends who are part of the Deaf culture, yet I'm not deaf.  On the other hand, while my orientation is gay, I don't really interact with anyone who is part of the gay culture.

This parallel is often seen as offensive to both groups.  The similarities are quite remarkable, though.  Many straight-oriented people view a gay orientation as a kind of reproductive disability, but the gay community rejects that view strongly.  Similarly, many hearing people view deafness as a disability, but the Deaf culture strongly rejects that view.  Many people believe their orientation is something they are born with while others feel it is realized later in life.  Many deaf people were born deaf, while others lost their hearing later in life.  In both cases, the culture mainly caters to the former.

A major debate in the Deaf culture deals with cochlear implants.  If a deaf person is treated so that they can hear, is that the overcoming of a disability or is it the loss of part of their core identity?  Is the act of getting a cochlear implant a betrayal of the Deaf culture and heritage?  This sounds like debates surrounding re-orientation therapies that have plagued the homosexual community for years.  It also could be connected to mixed-orientation marriages where a gay person can have their own children with a straight spouse.  Is that a betrayal of their gay community?

Despite all these similarities, there are some clear differences.  First, the Deaf culture uses ASL primarily to communicate.  They have their own language.  The gay community, on the other hand, uses English, and their language does not identify them.  It would be difficult for a deaf person to hide their deafness from hearing people around them, while it is common for people to hide gay orientations from the straight people around them.  These different situations produce very different types of challenges and concerns among the members of each community.  A closeted gay man, for instance, might feel psychological trauma for hiding their feelings from their family and friends, but a deaf man can't hide their deafness, and doesn't experience the same problems.  Rather the deaf man might feel more isolated among the hearing because of the communication barrier, which the gay man doesn't experience.

Differences like these make it dangerous to draw too many conclusions from a comparison between the two groups.  This can be said of any parallels drawn between the gay community and another group of people, yet both sides of the "gay-debate" constantly extrapolate too much from such metaphors.  These comparisons are fine to communicate ideas, but they have no power to prove debated points.  Any relying on these similarities as evidence of some kind is a logical fallacy.

Compare and Contrast - Gay vs. Alcoholism

In my last post, I looked at the common comparison drawn between orientation and race.  This time I'd like to examine another comparison.

"Being gay is like having alcoholism."

First, let's examine the similarities.  Alcoholism is, in some measure, an attraction to drinking.  The thing that people emphasize is that there is a distinct difference between the attraction to drinking and the drinking itself.  In the same way, a homosexual orientation is an attraction, but that can be seen as separate from forming sexual relations with another person of the same gender.  I think this is the main point of the simile for most of the people who use it.

But there are many significant differences.  First, alcoholism is precipitated by drinking alcohol.  On the other hand, at least for most people, orientation is established long before any sexual activity.  That was certainly true in my case.  But many extrapolate using this analogy, and figure that homosexuality is caused by homosexual relationships, which is taking the analogy way too far.

People who abuse alcohol really do have a problem that needs to be addressed.  Similarly, there are certainly those of gay orientation that are addicted to sex.  They also have a problem.  But their orientation is actually not the problem.  Sex addiction is a problem regardless of whether the orientation is straight or gay.  So unlike alcoholism, where the attraction to alcohol fuels the addiction, it's not the orientation that fuels an addiction to sex.

An interesting similarity is the idea that "once and alcoholic, always an alcoholic."  Basically, there are those who believe that alcoholism is something that doesn't go away, you just have to learn to deal with it.  Despite this belief, there are many people who claim to actually be cured of alcoholism, that they no longer have the temptation to over-drink.  Similarly, many people claim (and I'm among them) that a gay orientation is something that can't be "cured."  If your orientation is gay, you have to learn to deal with it.  Yet there are some people who claim that their orientation has changed.

Of course, the big issue that offends some people is that alcoholism, the attraction to drinking, is a disease.  But a gay orientation is not.  Extending this analogy to imply that a gay orientation is a kind of mental disorder is probably the worst use of this analogy.  Please don't fall into this trap.  It's such a common mistake, that this analogy should probably not be used at all, or perhaps only if great care is made to prevent its use in that way.

Compare and Contrast - Gay vs. Race

Last time, I talked about the extrapolation fallacy.  When we draw a comparison, it's always tempting to take it a little further to gain more insight, but that can produce more confusion than insight.  Let's take a look at a popular example.

"Being gay in our culture is like being black in the 50s."

This is a very important and widely used comparison.  It's the basis of labeling people as bigots -- the racists of our day.  There are many similarities.  But there are also many differences, which often get ignored.  Like any analogy, we can learn much from these differences.

The fact that gay individuals have been treated as second class citizens is the obvious similarity, but the scale of the class gap really is not similar at all.  It doesn't take much research to see the decades of Jim Crow laws and such were far more severe and blatant than the discrimination based on orientation.  So while the comparison is apt, we need to temper the reactions.

Another difference is the ability to hide.  There was no don't-ask-don't-tell when it came to race.  This changes the way orientation discrimination has progressed, both in good ways and bad ways.  For instance, the good: I suspect most people are friends with someone who is gay, but they just don't know it.  When the friend comes out to them, this provides opportunities to overcome stereotypes because they are already friends.  On the other hand, the bad: keeping secrets can have emotional consequences like feelings of isolation, higher levels of depression, etc.

A very important similarity is the fact that orientation, at least for most of us, is not something we actively choose, just like race is not something that is chosen.  But there's a remarkable difference.  While race is mostly identified its physical characteristic, people were of the unfortunate belief that there were personality and behavioral differences.  People mistakenly believed that those of African heritage were mentally inferior or some other such nonsense.  On the other hand, orientation is primarily a trait that affects behavior -- sexual and relationship behavior in particular -- but many want to view it as some kind of purely physical attribute, like race.

These kinds of differences confuse the lines of communication, because people tend to forget about the differences and focus only on the similarities, and often take the analogy too far.  This is getting too long, so I'll put other examples in future posts.  This analogy is one used by the "pro-LGTBQ" side, so let's look at one used by the "anti-LGTBQ" side next, alcoholism.

Logical Fallacies - Extrapolation

As a human being, I communicate by finding comparisons.  I think it is something hardwired into our brains.  Notice how many parables were used in Christ's teachings.  But the problem with any parable is that the comparison only goes so far.  For every similarity, there are also differences.  It's like when my junior high teachers asked me to write a compare-and-contrast paper.  We learn just as much from the differences as we do from the similarities.

The extrapolation fallacy is where some relationship or analogy is drawn, and then that relationship is used beyond the scope of its relevance to draw some conclusion.  For example, we know that a ten-year-old child is about 25% taller than a five-year-old, on average, and a fifteen-year-old child is about 25% taller than a ten-year-old, on average.  If we extrapolate this to older individuals, we might think a 30-year-old was 25% taller than a 25-year-old.  But that conclusion would be an example of the extrapolation fallacy in action.

Whenever someone says that "being gay is like -----", there is probably some relevant connection, some similarity that helps the speaker communicate their meaning.  But when the relationship is extended to imply more about homosexuality than the primary similarity, that is when the extrapolation fallacy is being invoked.  There are so many examples of this from so many different parties, that rather than list them here, I'll split them up among several future posts.

Believing is Seeing

I recall reading a book by Joseph Campbell that really changed the way I viewed philosophy.  He pointed out that the number 432000 shows up an awful lot in ancient cultures' mythologies, and concluded that there was something very important, cosmologically speaking, about that integer.  He mentioned Babylonian uses, Mayan uses, etc.  But being the nerd that I am, I quickly decided to write the number in base 60, since that's what the Babylonians used.  To the Babylonians, it's just 2000.  It's like a big round number that's roughly half a million.  It's just double the cube of 60.  What's the likelihood of rolling all ones on three rolled dice?  One in 216, exactly half of 432.  (Play creepy music).  But it's all just a made up construct.  There's nothing in the universe that says everything has to be made of powers of 6 and 10.  It's just that humans have developed our numerical language around these things.  It's like the Dilbert Comic:



Once my wife and I realized this, we tried it with another number.  We chose a somewhat interesting number (the product of 3 small primes) and started looking for it.  We saw it all over the place.  If we believed that there was something extremely significant to the number, we would have found a ton of evidence for this.  And there's the rub.  If we focus on some pet theory, as we look around at the world around us we will see a ton of supposed evidence for our idea.  I wondered how much of philosophy is based on this.  How much of science is based on preconceived notions that we are simply affirming rather than actually producing real supporting evidence?  It's an easy game to play.

I see people doing this with other things.  When people watch Disney's Frozen, for example, and see Elsa as a metaphor for coming out of the closet as a homosexual, I get where they are coming from.  I saw it, too.  After all, that interpretation has meaning to me, my orientation not being public.  Only I also realized that it could be seen as a metaphor for leaving your family and responsibilities in pursuit of personal pleasure.  In fact, whatever your situation, you could probably draw up a good parallel with the story somewhere.  We humans are very good at that.  We look at the clouds and see forms of, I don't know, a bunny riding a wheeled crocodile, or something like that.  I guarantee that the clouds have nothing to do with that, but we humans see the shapes.  We draw parallels.  We make metaphors where none were intended.  And they help us make sense of the world.  But please be aware that they are not necessarily an intrinsic part of reality.  Rather, they are a way in which our brains interpret and communicate the world around us.

Logical Fallacies - Appeal to Possibility

I had a friend that encouraged me to read the Foundation series.  I started to read it, but I never picked up the second book because it seemed so logically inconsistent.  It was all the probabilities quoted that bothered me.  The author seemed to believe that the most likely events were events that would happen, at least most of the time.  It's a huge fallacy.  In real life, unlikely events far outnumber likely events, so much that in most cases the more likely events still are not very likely.

The appeal to possibility (sometimes called the appeal to probability) is the argument that since something is a viable possibility (or has a high probability of happening) that we may accept it as a forgone conclusion.  I see this reasoning when people don't believe that I truly love my wife, simply because I'm gay.  They see valid cases of gay men married to women who are not happy in those marriages, and so assume that since the possibility is there, it must be true for me.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  But it makes for a great example of the logical fallacy.

Logical Fallacies - The Ecological Fallacy

It's been a while since I've had a fallacy post, so I though it would be a good time to investigate another one.  This one is fascinating to me.  It stems from the fact that many people do not understand how aggregate statistics and individuals relate.  Suppose you find out that the average income in a neighborhood is higher than the national average.  You know someone who lives in that neighborhood.  Does that mean that it is likely that the person has a higher than average income?  If you think it does, you're the victim of an ecological fallacy.

Logical Fallacies - The Fallacy Fallacy

This one is an interesting trap.  When someone argues fallaciously, it is tempting to assume that their point was wrong.  After all, why argue for a true point with fallacies.  But this is not necessarily the case.  When someone rejects an idea because fallacious arguments were used to support it, that someone is making the fallacy fallacy.

Logical Fallacies - Anecdotal Evidence

This one is probably the most difficult fallacies to fight.  An anecdote is a brief story or vignette.  Anecdotal evidence is the use of someone's story as evidence for a general hypothesis.  It often starts with something like, "I knew a guy who," and then continues on with some story to provide evidence.  "I knew a guy who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and lived to the age of 94, which proves that smoking doesn't cause cancer."  The problem is, statistics only work with large samples, and anecdotal evidence has very small samples, often sample sizes of one.

Logical Fallacies - Confirmation Bias

I remember Gordon B. Hinckley liked to say that if you always look for shadows rather than light, you are likely to find them.  He was pointing out that many critics of the church fall prey to a logical fallacy often called confirmation bias, a kind of fallacy of incomplete evidence.  The idea is that if you believe something is true, you tend to primarily notice evidence for that thing, while missing much of the evidence against it.  Often this happens without the participants even noticing.

Logical Fallacies - Appeal to Authority

Okay, now we get to a real confusing one.  Almost everything everyone believes is based on trust in some authority figure.  Most people haven't actually performed the gold foil experiment that demonstrates the existence of atoms, or even know someone who has.  But we're taught about them by teachers who were taught them by professors, who were taught about them in their own classes, etc.  There's simply not enough time or resources for everyone to experience everything, so we have to use trusted sources, teachers, encyclopedia articles, and other such authority figures.

Logical Fallacies - Appeal to Popularity

"If everybody else walked off the edge of a cliff, would you?"  You've probably heard some form of that phrase.  It is a warning about the appeal to popularity, the attempt to prove a point simply because it is a popular belief.  Sometimes it sounds like peer pressure (everybody is doing it).  But in it's purest form, it is an appeal to some common belief as evidence for its truth.

Logical Fallacies - The Golden Mean Fallacy

This is more formally known as the argument to moderation.  The problem is when people figure that if two parties hold differing views, the truth must be somewhere in the middle.  Please note that the truth may very well be somewhere in the middle, but it might not.  The existence of the differing views is not evidence for the truth being a compromise of the positions.

Logical Fallacies - Appeal to Emotion

This is the logical fallacy that advertisers use the most.  The basic structure of the argument is that because I invoke a certain emotion, what I say must be true (or my point must be valid).  If you watched the presidential debates, I think both candidates made more appeals to emotion than actual logical statements.

Logical Fallacies - False Cause

Culturally, this is one of the most common fallacies there are.  It's not used in arguments so much as misunderstanding the world around us.  In Latin, the Fallacy of False Cause is known as "post hoc ergo propter hoc," or "it happened after, so it happened because."  You go to a restaurant for dinner, and shortly thereafter get a stomach ache.  The obvious conclusion is that the restaurant must have had some bad food, but that is logically fallacious.  If it is food poisoning, the symptoms can occur immediately, but often occur a day or two later.  And it might be a virus or something else.  Nevertheless, we humans tend to be particularly prone to drawing these kinds of fallacious conclusions.

Logical Fallacies - The Straw Man

When I hear the term "straw man" I think of jousting dummies - enemies that are just a set up, that can't fight back.  And that's essentially what a straw man argument is.  It's a logical fallacy in which the opposing view is simplified or subtly replaced in such a way as to make arguments against it easy and powerful.

Logical Fallacies - Argument from Ignorance

The argument from ignorance, sometimes known as an appeal to ignorance, is a fallacious argument that states "if you can't prove it's wrong, then it must be right."  A simple example would be to argue that I was Napoleon Bonaparte in a past life because you can't produce evidence against the claim.

Logical Fallacies - The Red Herring

The story is told that when training dogs to follow a scent, a red herring (cured fish) with its pungent smell is used to distract the dogs; and they need to learn to ignore the odor.  Similarly in logic, one trap to fall into is to be distracted by a tangential argument that misses the point of the case being made.

Logical Fallacies - Equivocation

Equivocation is a logical fallacy created by a misuse of language.  When you change the definition of a word mid-argument, that's equivocation.