The Logical Fallacy Project

Events past and quite recent have gotten me thinking about logic. I’m not talking about funky symbols and math proof kind of logic. I’m talking about logic and argumentation that people use when they talk and write. And what I’ve been thinking about it is this: people have forgotten how to use logic, misuse logic, or choose not to use logic at all. We are in an age that relies so heavily on written communication. At the same time, we are in an age of informal text messaging, instant messaging, and college students who don’t know how to write an appropriate email to a professor, let alone pay attention in Freshman composition. People are forgetting how to use their words to effectively win friends and influence people.

The spoken word is no less vulnerable to bad logic. As our friends at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report like to point out, our politicians and public figures put their foot in their mouths all the time. And much to our amusement, the more newsreel archives they have to work with, the tastier the foot seems to be. Put reading and writing faux pas together, and I come to the following conclusion: assuming that we are a rational and educated bunch of homo sapiens is becoming more and more of a fallacy.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about logical fallacies. I think a misconception about logic is that you need to be a brain child to understand it. I disagree. To pursue logic and learn about logical fallacies, you don’t need a philosophy class, math class, or even a college degree. Ivory Tower not required. It’s OK if you didn’t take Latin or do debate in high school. I sure as hell didn’t. As far as I’m concerned, all you need is YouTube.

There are examples of bad logic all over the place. We can shake our head at them, get pissed off about them, ignore them, or even laugh about them. Perhaps more productively, though, if we document cases of bad logic in our day to day lives, we can learn from them.

To this end, I would like to start The Logical Fallacy Project. Here’s how it works:

1. Find a logical fallacy you would like to give a visual representation to
2. Give the definition of the fallacy (with some link to an internet reference)
3. Give video title and video (or give link to video)
4. Give brief description/background of the video and why it demonstrates (or does not demonstrate) this fallacy.
5. Any other comments you want to make after the person has watched the video.
6. Tell your friends and hope it catches on.

So here are the two I would like to start with:

The Fallacies:

Argumentum ad misericordiam: This is the Appeal to Pity, also known as Special Pleading. The fallacy is committed when someone appeals to pity for the sake of getting a conclusion accepted.

Argumentum ad nauseam: This is the incorrect belief that an assertion is more likely to be true, or is more likely to be accepted as true, the more often it is heard. So an Argumentum ad Nauseam is one that employs constant repetition in asserting something; saying the same thing over and over again until you’re sick of hearing it.

Video Title:

“We Both Reached for the Gun” aka “The Press Conference Rag” from the movie version of the musical Chicago (lyrics can be found here).

For those not familiar with the “Roxie Hart defense”, here is the background:

Girl is cheating on husband. Her lover tells her their affair is over, and in a fit of rage, she shoots him in the back and kills him. She is thrown in jail. Fact: Roxie shot him on purpose and they did not both reach for the gun. Defense lawyer gives a fabricated–yet plausible–story of the murder, and through arguments ad misericordiam and ad nauseam tries to persuade the press that girl is innocent.

Video:

Commentary:

Misericordiam: Let’s feel bad for poor Roxie. Commiserate with her:

• Her parents are dead
• She was orphaned
• She was rescued by the Nuns of the Sacred Heart
• That pushy Amos forced her to get married
• She knew she was doing wrong by meeting with her ex
• Poor her, her burly pistol-toting “ex-boyfriend” came at her with a gun
• She’s a girl, and therefore defenseless against such an attack
• She’s frightened in jail
• She went crazy from jazz and liquor
• She was taken advantage of by men who are out chasing tail.
• But she would give her right eye to undo her “mistake”

There’s no way she could have done something so heinous on purpose, right?

“are you kidding?”

When Miss Sunshine is not swayed by the misericordiam arguments, she starts asking questions about the murder. When the questions get a little too detailed for comfort, Billy goes for the ad nauseam:

They both reached for the gun…they both reached for the gun…you are getting sleepy…

The puppet-master motif in this scene is especially powerful in showing what an ad nauseam argument can do. If you can get people to stop asking questions and hypnotize them to believe your story by repetition, you can spin your story to front page news. As this video shows, with ad nauseam, not only can you get away with avoiding the real issues, you can get away with…

Well, murder.

You make me uncomfortable with your words

OK, the summer has passed, and school is about to start once again. I feel like now that some time has passed, I can give a retrospective of some of the things I learned last semester being a discussion section leader in a 101 level class.

I went to a big state school, and I have sat in my share of discussion sections. Some days, I didn’t want to go to them. And some days, I went ahead and skipped them. When it came time for me to teach one of these things, I expected people to run me a line or two to explain why they haven’t been showing up to class. You know, lines that didn’t involve “Sorry, I got really wasted last night and your discussion section is at 9am” or “dude, I got really wasted last night, and besides, you’re going to ask me questions about a lecture that I didn’t even go to.” My favorites, paraphrased thusly:

“I’m sorry that I missed the first two weeks of your discussion section, but see, this class is in Science Building 2, and on my class schedule printout, they put Science Building 1. I’ve been going to Building 1.”

So you mean to tell me that, out of all the other students in this class who managed to find the classroom–and probably had Science Bldg. 2 written on their class schedules–you are the only one who had a little mixup, because they put Bldg. 1 on your schedule. And you also mean to tell me that, after the first week, when you went to Bldg. 1 to find nobody there, you decided to go back there again the next week only to find the classroom empty, and only then did you think something was up and that you might need to contact someone about that.

Yeah.

“I’ve been trying to contact you to tell you I’ve been sick for the last two weeks, but I had the wrong email address for you. I’ve been emailing the wrong person.”

Um, my email address is on (1) the course syllabus, (2) the info. sheet I handed out on the first day of discussion section, (3) the department website, and (4) the homepage for the 101 class on the department website. (5), I’ve sent group emails to the class, meaning you could have just hit reply. And (6), my email address is very Google-able.

I hope any of my former students who might find and read this know that I love them, loved teaching them, and that I would do anything for them and the advancement of their education.

But people, I’m gonna have to call you out. I called my student out on this latter one, and we had a laugh.

And school starting again means that I will be heading back to tutoring at the Writing Center, a job that I thoroughly enjoy. But boy, I will tell you the greatest thing about being a discussion section leader and a writing tutor: I don’t have to grade. Which brings me to the main feature of this post.

English/composition/rhetoric professors and TAs have to deal with a lot of mess. A lot of semi-literary, semi-professional, semi-baked written down mess. Hell, any TA or professor who has to deal with written assignments deals with mess. I am reminded of Taylor Mali’s The The Impotence of Proofreading.

The worst part is, they have to evaluate and grade this mess. And when a student gets a grade that they don’t like, or a grade that they think won’t make mommy and daddy happy, the lines people run them can be downright outrageous. But this one takes the cake:

You Make Me Uncomfortable with your Words

The gist of this story from the Acephalous blog is that a student got a bad grade in a writing class, emails the teacher, and essentially blames the teacher for the bad grade. The entire post is worth a read, but here are some excerpts, emphasis mine:

You try to be objective and the very attempt becomes your flaw because you try so hard to grade fairly and comment wisely that you become biased to your own ideas. You criticize our writings because we are college students and young but do not realize that you offend most of us when you do this…

…You like to lead discussions and that is bad because it is the entire means by which we learn but we do not know what you want from us on our papers. I have honestly no idea what I learned from you in this class because so much time was spent discussing the tiny details in the passages in the book and so if I learned anything it is how to read things in too much detail. I could have read books in too much detail on my own but that is not what I came to college to do because I already know how to read and I would have told you this but you make me completely uncomfortable with your words so I never said a word.

Well, let’s not feel too bad for the guy, right? It’s just an international student, possibly Asian, who has deference for his superiors, a penchant for run on sentences, and really might not feel comfortable talking to his teacher, because that’s not how they do it where he’s from.

No. As revealed later:

the student is, in fact, a native speaker of the upper-class, Wonder Bread variety.

I feel justified to re-call this person out cause I have been guilty of running such lines. Never to this extent, but I have. In fact, I laugh because I have been guilty of this in my graduate student career. Yes, I was a great writer in high school. In college, the papers I wrote in my French poetry and literature classes were nonpareil. But my eventual undergraduate degree, business, did not require me to write a lot of papers. I took time off of school between undergrad and grad school. And I changed fields when I went from undergrad to grad school. My writing, for which the two years prior to grad school had been limited to journaling and letter writing, was completely inappropriate for the research tasks I was taking on. I was having composition translation problems–I couldn’t compose a research paper to save my life. And though my teacher was very explicit on what the content of the paper was supposed to be, she wouldn’t tell me how to do it in the format appropriate for the field, and I got pissed. I also once got mad because I thought a prof. was giving preferential treatment to ESL students–holding me up to a higher standard because it was OK for their presentations and papers to not be perfect (who knows if she was). I think teaching domain-specific academic writing styles and techniques is important, and not done enough (at least to my knowledge). And ESL students should get a break–but not too much of one. But these are all other posts for another day.

I laugh at this post because I, too, am of the upper middle class white bread variety. I laugh because oh my god, I have been one of those people. But some people think we shouldn’t laugh. And the author apparently got a bit of criticism for posting it from both colleagues and students. But here’s the thing. For whatever reasons, we laugh because the author is absolutely on to something. The root of the humor is particularly pithy:

Some students, and generally some people, have an incredible sense of entitlement. When they show their ass by laying that out on the line, it’s funny.

Entitlement is not a new concept in education. And that is nothing to laugh about. The story that comes to my mind is uproar over grade inflations at Harvard–particularly the uproar that I imagine must have come from the parents: “I pay how much to send my kid to this school, and you’re giving them a what in your class?” It trickles down to their kids. But right on, Mister author man (I believe his name is Scott). As he told his critics, they can ruffle their feathers all they want:

But only the outrageously entitled will think poorly of me for mocking outrageous entitlement … and I’m not interested in pandering to that particular demographic. (White patriarchal privilege being something I demystify in my class, not encourage.)

Issues of money, the cost of higher education, and the mentality of “getting what you paid for” won’t be separated from the learning process for a long time. It’s a shame, because it hurts our collective critically-thinking brain as a whole.

It’s hard to call out students who you think are not working up to their potential. Or ones who does not care to. Especially the entitled kind of students like the one here. As great as it would be, you can’t just say, “I can tell you spent all of about 5 minutes or pulled an all nighter to throw this together” or “it’s entirely clear that you have not read the book, nor have you gleaned anything from class, the times that you do choose to show up”. Not only do you risk a slap on the wrist, you risk lawsuits. You want to see students get all they can out of what you’re offering them. But they make their choices, and most of the time, these choices do not factor in the fact that education is a privilege, not another hoop their parents are making them jump through.

I will say that the student did have one good point, at least one that was implied: it is scary to approach a professor about writing a paper. You think you’re cheating. Or your ideas are your babies, and they need to be protected. I’ve felt all these things. As a teacher, it’s hard to establish trust with students in order to get them to come to you on the offensive instead of the defensive.

I think the big message I’m trying to make by these examples here is clear: educators in general need to find ways to start calling out this mess. And students need to know that it is a mess. Learning is a process. Learning how to think independently, and how be criticized for those independent thoughts is tough. Those words are uncomfortable. But sometimes, you gotta sit there, take them, and learn something from them. And examples like these are ways to start the conversation. I think the more that students and teachers can acknowledge that these kinds of situations exist, the better. The more we can accept that confrontation is not something to back away from–especially in education–and the more teachers and students can get up in each other’s faces about it, the better off we are.

And if we do that, not only can we make our words more comfortable, we can make them smarter.