More Rhetorical Devices: Psychological and Related Fallacies
More Rhetorical Devices: Psychological and Related Fallacies
We are now beginning to look beyond individual truth claims to the support that people offer for what they say. Chapters 5 and 6 take a first step toward the study of arguments with what you may call "would-be arguments," reasons people have or adduce for their beliefs that do not in fact support them. Pseudoreasoning comprises two kinds of would-be arguments—those that appeal in a misguided fashion to emotions (Chapter 5), and those constructed like real arguments but not working like them (Chapter 6).
1. Pseudoreasoning is a kind of rhetoric that aims at supporting a claim. That is, it offers considerations meant to persuade you to accept the claim.
Whereas a good argument gives a justification for accepting its conclusion, fallacies are likely to have some connection with the claim they are meant to support, but do not in fact support that claim.
Because fallacies are defined in terms of what they are not (not good that is), they do not lend themselves to technical or exhaustive classification in the way that good argumentation does.
Thus the classifications offered in these chapters may overlap in places, or fail to capture what has gone wrong in a particular argument.
The point of these chapters is to alert you to a number of ways in which reasoning may fail.
Within the broad group of all fallacies, the main distinction to keep in mind is the one between thinking that has been distorted by misplaced emotions and thinking that has made a mistake.
2. A would-be argument may be called an "argument" from outrage if it hides relevant issues by arousing anger.
The anger is not the problem. Anger is not an argument, and as long as it doesn't pretend to be one it can't be a fallacy either.
But getting worked up into an angry state might make you think an argument has been given when it hasn't.
Besides, getting angry over one thing can make you fail to think critically about another issue, even when it's not related to the first.
Becoming angry because you see that something is wrong is sometimes appropriate; saying that something is wrong because you are angry is never appropriate.
Scapegoating is a breed of "argument" from outrage in which one person, or a group, gets blamed for everything bad.
3. When the emotion appealed to is fear, we call this scare tactics.
As with many of the examples in this chapter, you need to watch for the differences between justified and unjustified appeals to fear. "If you don't check your parachute before jumping, you may die" is an excellent argument.
In a special case of scare tactics, the "argument" by force amounts to saying, "Agree with me or I will hurt you."
4. The "argument" from pity works like a scare tactic, except for the different emotion at stake. Exactly as in the last case, this appeal becomes fallacious when the pity is irrelevant.
5. Another emotion that can lead to bad reasoning is envy. The "argument" from envy exaggerates the bad points of the envied person.
6. When someone appeals to your vanity, the fallacy goes by the name of apple polishing.
Note that this move can take subtle forms – for instance, "You are too smart to believe in telepathy."
Appeals to vanity have fewer legitimate versions than the preceding fallacies (because vanity has fewer good purposes than pity and fear), but they do exist. For instance: "You should wear the gold sweater tonight because your eyes are so beautiful."
7. Guilt is another emotion that is all very well in its place, as long as its place is not an argument. The guilt trip elicits feelings of guilt to get people to do something or agree that they should do it.
8. In the case of wishful thinking you accept a claim because you want it to be true.
9. Three other fallacies begin with the desire for social acceptance. That desire can make you accept a claim in order to win approval, instead of because of the claim's own merits.
The "argument" from peer pressure puts all its weight on approval alone.
Note that it is not fallacious to act as your friends do to gain acceptance. In that case you are reasoning accurately about what will win your friends' approval, even if you shouldn't make approval so overwhelmingly proposal.
Going along with the crowd inspires fallacies when the reaction of others becomes your reason for doing the same, or calling a claim true.
The group think fallacy along very similar lines reasons on the basis of group identification. One's team or school or fraternity or state becomes the touchstone for deciding on an issue's birth.
A species of group thinking is nationalism, a powerful emotion that can lead to the absolute endorsement of all of a country's policies.
10. Rationalization, like other fallacies (listed below), does not rely directly on emotions but is closely related to other emotional appeals. Rationalization usually begins with a selfish desire and makes up a justification for it.
11. The "argument" from popularity and its variations try to justify a belief or practice on the grounds that other people accept it.
This fallacy is a distorted version of the very reasonable practice of accepting claims from reliable authorities; only now we consider not what the experts say but what everyone (allegedly) thinks.
Two variants of this fallacy are worth giving separate names to.
The "argument" from common practice also seeks to justify something on the grounds of its popularity; it differs from the appeal to popularity itself by focusing on what people do instead of on what people believe.
The "argument" from tradition works like the others. As its name implies however it focuses on what has been done or thought in the past.
12. Relativism and subjectivism begin with the undeniable fact of differences between cultures, or differences among individuals, and try to infer from those differences that anything one believes is true.
"True for me" says the subjectivist; "true for them" says the relativist: there is no real truth, they both say, not even for nonfactual claims.
These positions sound worldly and tolerant and wise but cannot be stated clearly without collapsing into contradiction. They are fallacies.
13. Support for a position rests on the fallacy that two wrongs make a right when one justifies some action that hurts another person on the grounds that the other person has done (or is likely to do) the same kind of harm.
This may be the trickiest fallacy to distinguish from legitimate reasoning, because many people see justice in returning harm for harm.
It helps to bear in mind that "two wrongs make a right" is not the same as a principle of revenge, but applies to the circumstances in which the revenging act is wrong.
Responding to rude service at a restaurant by telling your friends not to eat there may be petty and vengeful but is not fallacious.
If you slip out without paying and justify yourself on the grounds that the waiters were rude, you are arguing fallaciously.
14. While most fallacies introduce irrelevant considerations into a discussion, a smokescreen or red herring may be more specifically defined as an irrelevancy that:
Does not fall under any of the more specific categories of fallacy; and
Is typically introduced with the deliberate purpose of throwing a discussion off course.