Each month, in pursuit of better arguments and improved public discourse, I highlight a different logical fallacy. This month I invite you to consider the irrelevant appeal to authority.
People of a certain generation perhaps recall advertisements for Sanka decaffeinated coffee in which actor Robert Young, known for playing a doctor on a popular seventies television drama, Marcus Welby, M.D., warns against the health risks caffeine poses and recommends Sanka to TV viewers.
In Chapter 6 of his popular work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini describes the influence this particular ad wielded in shaping the coffee purchasing decisions of its audience:
From the first time I saw it, the most intriguing feature for me in the Robert Young Sanka commercial was its ability to use the influence of the authority principle without ever providing a real authority. The appearance of authority was enough. This tells me something important about unthinking reactions to authority figures. When in a click, whirr mode, we are often as vulnerable to the symbols of authority as to the substance.
The well-worn, now comic phrase “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” has its provenance in ads such as this one. But our automatic reaction to authority is no laughing matter.
Clever speakers understand how easy it is to manipulate the public’s deference to perceived experts, using the appeal to authority to disarm our reason in their efforts to persuade us to their point of view. The appeal to authority may assume several forms, including its best known, the irrelevant appeal to authority (invoking an authority figure on a subject on which the authority figure is no expert, such as the Sanka ad). To gird ourselves against such manipulations of our reason, we should perhaps heed the advice of sixties-era protest signs: Question Authority.
By the way, if you’ve enjoyed this series on fallacious arguments and want to learn more about the application of logic in everyday life, there is no better resource than Robert J. Gula’s Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language. It’s available in print and also for free downloading in PDF.
Welcome to December’s installment of my ongoing series, Fallacious Argument of the Month.
Driving in my car on my way to a meeting on Friday, I happened to catch a popular NPR news analysis program, On Point. Host Tom Ashbrook was talking with political commentator and Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter on his newly published book, Judaism: A Way of Being.
Gelernter, a proponent of Zionism, provoked strong responses from some callers who disputed his conclusions and offered spirited counterarguments. Toward the end of the program, one Jewish caller criticized Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, pointing to her experiences traveling in Israel and the gulf she perceived there between biblical values and practice. Instead of responding to the issues she raised, Gelernter dismissed her with the epithet invoked all too often in debates over Israel. He condemned her as a self-loathing Jew, sneering that “the most vicious haters of the Jewish community are Jews themselves”.
In this on-air interview Gelernter committed perhaps one of the most common of fallacies: the argumentum ad hominem, which is an attack on the speaker, rather than on the substance of the speaker’s statements, for the purpose of discrediting the speaker and undermining the speaker’s arguments. The ad hominem takes many forms; in this case Gelernter used the technique known as “poisoning the well“. To poison the well, you present negative information about your opponent to damage his credibility in the eyes of your audience. (Incidentally, earning Fallacious Argument bonus points, Gelernter also utilized the false analogy, comparing the caller’s criticisms of Israel to blood libel and Nazism.)
Highly explosive, the ad hominem inflames passions and prejudices. When it detonates, it leaves a scarred chasm that cannot be bridged, making speakers and audience members into bitter partisans, with discourse and civility collateral damage. When the shouting at last dies down, all that’s left to smolder in the rubble is ill will.
Each month I dedicate a post to the discussion of a different fallacious argument. It’s part of my ongoing effort to help the world bicker better.
Here, friends, is this month’s installment.
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That diverting entertainment, magic, depends upon distraction to delight and mystify an audience. Magicians play their tricks not primarily with hats and rabbits but instead with our perception, directing our attention elsewhere as they nimbly palm the coin or make the assistant vanish into air.
In the hands of the skilled illusionist, magic is artistry. But in the theatre of argument, misdirection is nothing but a cheap trick. Allow me, reader, to introduce you to November’s Fallacious Argument, the distractingly odorous red herring.
A red herring is a device used in discourse to sidetrack attention from the original subject to another topic, preferably one that has no bearing on the discussion at hand and designed to inflame the emotions of the audience. Although the red herring flourishes wherever enemies of rational discourse may be found, it prefers to spawn during political election seasons. When large issues loom, the red herring is ready to divert attention from energy, health care, or social security to a $400 haircut or a candidate’s wardrobe. Handle with care: its smell is notoriously long-lasting.
(With thanks to Philip J. Loree, Jr., a fierce defender of rational discourse and a highly insightful ADR blogger.)
Conflict.
There’s certainly plenty of it to go around. Daily life is made up of discord, debate and disagreement. I for one would hate to see conflict vanish. Not only would it put me and all the other mediators out of work, but life would be far less interesting. No doubt quality of life would suffer, since conflict after all famously provokes improvements. (Besides, in a world without argument imagine how erotic love might suffer without make-up sex to spark things up.)
What we need is not fewer arguments in the world. It’s not the quantity that’s at issue, it’s the quality. Friends, we need to bicker better.
Regular readers are familiar with a recently added feature on this blog, the Fallacious Argument of the Month. With the goal of promoting clearheaded and reasoned debate and improving discourse, each month I skewer a different fallacy. One consequence of creating that feature is that it has sharpened my eye for real-world instances of mistakes in arguing. Hence this post: I found a whopper.
One common mistake when arguing is to make cheap appeals to emotion through an old playground trick: name calling. The intent is to arouse the disgust of one’s audience against the target of one’s attack. Using words designed to inflame the prejudices of your audience can certainly be effective. Unfortunately, this ruse can backfire. Your audience may turn on you and not your intended target.
I spotted an example of this in the pages of the local paper, the Boston Globe. One particularly touchy subject these days is a proposal concerning a public law school for Massachusetts, one of a handful of states without one. Under this proposal, the state higher education system would take over private Southern New England School of Law. The Globe has run several opinion pieces on the subject, pro and con, including one, “Bailing out a failing law school,” penned by two University of Massachusetts trustees.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that I oppose this plan myself. But I winced when I read the UMass trustees’ opinion. Instead of focusing on relevant facts to sway the undecided or the committed, the writers vitiated their argument by throwing in deliberately demeaning language, lobbing phrases such as “fourth rate”, “raw political pork”, and “‘Lawsuits ‘R’ Us’ justice”. Not surprisingly, it provoked angry letters from insulted readers.
How much more effective this op-ed piece would have been had its authors stuck with facts and reasons, leaving the sneering provocation behind in the first draft.
To do my part to improve argument and discourse everywhere, each month I feature a different fallacious argument. I launched the series in July with the straw man; discussed the false analogy in August; and in September explored the misused ellipsis.
Today I take great pleasure in introducing you to October’s Fallacious Argument of the Month, the confusion of cause and effect.
There’s an old joke that goes something like this: A guy walks into a bar, sits down, and orders a beer. As he waits for his beer, he claps his hands together again and again, loudly and insistently. Annoyed, the bartender asks, “Hey, pal, what’s up with the hand clapping?” The guy says, “It scares the elephants away.” “But,” says the bartender, “there aren’t any elephants around here.” The guy replies, “See? It’s working!”
It’s easy enough to snicker at the beer drinker’s logic. But unfortunately this confusion between cause and effect is no laughing matter. It’s a persistently occurring phenomenon. All too often, people readily assume that when Event B follows Event A, it must be because A caused B.
The confusion of cause and effect is often used for political purposes to manipulate public opinion by exploiting prejudice or fear. It has been used to attribute blame for a host of social ills to purported causes that have included feminism, video games, atheism, and the internet. But it is also often the product of careless or exploitative journalism. For example, when British schoolgirl Natalie Morton died unexpectedly from an undiagnosed malignant tumor shortly after she had received a vaccination to prevent cervical cancer, some media rushed to report that it was the vaccine that killed her, fueling public anxiety.
These false connections flourish best in the presence of closed minds and foregone conclusions. They persist only because countering them demands hard work – a willingness to discard assumptions and dig deep for the facts.
Each month, in pursuit of better arguments and improved public discourse, I highlight a different logical fallacy. This month I invite you to consider the irrelevant appeal to authority.
