A new fallacy? “Limbaugh’s problem”

So you are driving across a sad little island yesterday, which has been devastated by a major hurricane, with a car sick cat. What would you do? Turn on the radio? If you do, and you’d like some distracting talk, then you just might listen to Rush Limbaugh for a very few minutes. And you might learn something, such as the existence of a fallacy you hadn’t known of before.

I couldn’t find a transcript, so this is an inexact version, but the basic problem is the same. And the problem is the fallacy of the specious contradiction. Here are the two (approximately) statements by Obama that Rush was taking to be contradictory:

1. At the start, only the government can reverse the  failure of the economy.
2. In the end, only business and the workers can sustain the economy.

Though my versions are inexact, the temporal qualifications were explicit.  And they’re why there is no contradiction.

There’s a familiar and similar problem with identity:  How can the adult you be the same person as the 15 lb infant seen in a picture of you as an infant?  And one can  get some students to argue that you can’t be the person in the picture.  It’s just that  now this sort of poor reasoning has a major role in US politics.

Should it be called “Limbaugh’s problem”?  That is, why doesn’t “P at t” contradict “not-P at t+n.” 

O dear, I hope I haven’t made this look interesting.  It’s really a pathetic bit of poor reasoning Limbaugh, quite possibly motivated by genuine hatred, was trying to pass off.

“He’s been to too many universities,” says Dennis Prager.

I was teaching right after the inauguration and missed the  commentary on NPR and Pacifica, really the only liberal stations in my red state.  And commentary can be such fun to listen to.  So driving home I thought I’d turn to another talk show, just to hear what was being said.  Sad to say, I turned on Dennis Prager,  yet again!  One of the people with whom, one hopes, the country is fed up. 

So what’s so bad about Obama’s thought that Prager is saying he went to too many universities?  Well, the first thing he lit on was this line:

 Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

Honestly, what followed was unfortunate.  Prager argued that only liberals, who are supposedly all totally out of touch with political reality, would believe that having a just cause makes one secure.  Now actually, there is something to be said for his criticism, since, as we know, people with just causes may end up being killed by people  in their own society or by invaders.  What’s unfortunate  is that Prager took it out of the context Obama put the statement in; namely,

They [earlier generations] understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use. Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

That is, among other things, it is very risky for the US to continue to act like a rogue state, engaging in highly unethical practices, disregarding international law, and ignoring the wisdom and historical lessons of other countries.   To put it in critical reasoning terms, Obama is saying that power may be necessary but it is not sufficient because  justice is also necessary (presumably in the long term, since a bully can win for a day).  Prager takes Obama to say that justice is sufficient and power is not necessary, which is very different.

But now what about the people who listen to Prager, a conservative and supposedly highly  respected radio show host and lecturer, and who are encouraged to think there’s an ‘overeducated’ nitwit in the presidency?  Is that Prager’s idea of making the nation more secure? 

I think there are very serious questions to be asked about whether there’s some way to stop the nonsense  these populist conservatives people put into people’s minds.  They’re at it all the time, and there seem to be  no  constraints at all on what they’ll say.   Surely something short of unconstitutionally restricting free speech can be done.

in 40 years, 13 out of every 10 …

In 40 years 13 out of every 10 US citizens will not have landlines.  The kind of reasoning that leads to this conclusion also supported the recent claim that in 40 years 10 out of 10 Americans will be obese.  As the Numbers Guy in the Wall Street Journal points out:

The phone forecast is impossible, of course, but it’s arguably no less solidly grounded than the obesity forecast. The weight projection uses three data points spread out over nearly three decades to estimate a linear trend — then brazenly draws that line into the future.

Human beings have real deficits in reasoning about probability, and that can include people giving medical advice, but you don’t really expect it to show up in a scientific journal, even an online journal like Obesity (link corrected thanks to Noumena  in comments), where it was published.  Certainly, at least not one backed by the highly respected Nature Publishing Group.

The recent study was intended by lead author Youfa Wang “to send a message” to public-health officials, he says. Dr. Wang, associate professor of international health and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University, adds that there is no conflict between this goal and the standards of scientific inquiry. He notes the scientific pedigree of his co-authors, who include Hopkins colleagues, and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and at the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

And the response when confronted with the problem?

“This study isn’t designed to predict what the future actual situation will be,” Dr. Wang says. “We just say, if you take these assumptions, this is what the future may be.”

…

Richard Bergman and David Allison, editor and associate editor, respectively, of Obesity, wrote in an email: “Each scientific paper is hoped to be an ever closer approximation to the best possible answer to a question than was the work that had gone before. We believe Dr. Wang’s paper fulfills that spirit.”

On the fact of it, I’d say the paper deserves a C or a D and a good scolding that centers around not presenting propaganda as though it were truth.  And the editors?  Well, I just hope they are not the sort that grumble at cocktail parties about how post-modernism is the curse of academia.

Is that too harsh?  What do you think?

(And thanks to Tara Parker-Pope’s article for the link to the Numbers Guy.)

Feminists destroy the earth!

No, we feminists don’t hate men. We just hate the stupid arguments that are sometimes wheeled out by anti-feminist men. Such as that provided by Angry Harry. Witness:

Argument for conclusion that feminists encourage traffic problems (this is a reconstruction. His far less well formulated argument can be seen in full here):

1.there is a very powerful group of dysfunctional people – feminists – whose main aim is to encourage family breakdown.

2. By living together – e.g. getting married – people can save on transport … Traffic congestion and pollution would be reduced enormously and time spent travelling would be cut.

C. By encouraging family break down, feminists are encouraging greater traffic congestion.

Introduced to this argument (at the excellent Fem08) by Damian Carnell from NDVF, as an example of the problematic men’s movements out there, Jender and I scoffed heartily. Ha ha! Why stick at that, why not add:

4. Greater traffic congestion means greater carbon emissions.

5. Greater carbon emissions contribute to global warming

6. Feminists encourage global warming.

Ha ha, reductio reductio! What a ridiculous argument.

But we underestimated Angry Harry – you’ve got to give it to him, he follows the premises through to their conclusion, and thus his bold conclusion:

Feminists Destroy the Planet!

 At least he has provided us with an excellent example to use in critical thinking classes (there’s lots more at his site). But perhaps Harry has indeed been too angered by the all those traffic jams. On yer bike Harry!

Misogyny Mishap: Update

We remarked on Charlette Allen’s mysogynistic indulgence, and the remarkable fact that the  WaPo printed it, here.  Thanks to a comment on that post by Roger, we can call your attention to a reply, which the WaPo has printed here.  And since it’s by Katha Pollitt, you know it is good! The article’s title and subtitle:

Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and Its Editors
The question is not why Charlotte Allen wrote her silly piece — it’s why The Post published it.

A sample just in case the author’s name isn’t enough to send you straight there:

The upshot: we ladies should focus on what we’re really good at — interior decoration and taking care of men and children.

Oh, gag me with a spoon. Sure, girly culture can be silly — but what does that prove? It’s not as though men spend their evenings leafing through the plays of Moliere. Susie whips up doggy treats, Mike surfs porn sites; she curls up with the Friday Night Knitting Club, he watches football. Or maybe the two of them watch “Grey’s Anatomy” together — surprise, surprise, about half the show’s audience is male. If you go by cultural preferences, actually, you could just as well claim that women are obviously smarter than men — look around you at the museum, the theater, the opera house, the ballet, the concert hall. Women read more than men, too, especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that didn’t happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers — while men, if they do pick up a novel, make sure it’s estrogen-free. Who’s really the dim bulb, the woman who doesn’t see the beauty of “Grand Theft Auto,” or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?

And now for an important qualification: In a passage copied below, Katha Pollitt endorses a view close to a problematic one of Gloria Steinem’s; namely, that sexism in the USA is worse than racism. We’ve discussed this claim before; it should be rejected. It does seem to me true that the WaPo would not write a comparably demeaning article about Blacks or Asians, but that does not show that, as KP puts it, sexism is the last acceptable prejudice. There are too many ways in which racism is also treated as acceptable, and arguably more than sexism is. So how do we capture what lies behind the fact that respectable newspapers and journalists are printing and uttering offensively mysogynistic pieces, while the awful racism directed toward Obama does not seem to make the op-ed pages yet? Women are the last joke?

Readers are invited to share their answers/observations.

From KP:

A far more important question is this: Why did The Post publish this nonsense? I can’t imagine a great newspaper airing comparable trash talk about any other group. “Asians Really Do Just Copy.” “No Wonder Africa’s Such a Mess: It’s Full of Black People!” Misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice, and nowhere more so than in our nation’s clueless and overwhelmingly white-male-controlled media.

Is a clone an abomination in the eyes of God?

If we think that what occurs in nature is compatible with a divine view, then it appears She may be a bit more flexible than religious leaders sometimes think.  Not only do we have gay penguins, but now it turns out that virgin births, in which a female gives birth to genetically identical offspring, can be found in Komodo dragons and other species:

Virgin birth, known to biologists as parthenogenesis (from the Greek, “parthen” meaning virgin or maiden and “genesis,” beginning), has been seen in other species over the years. Some lizards occasionally produce offspring in this way. So do several species of fish, including a female hammerhead shark at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha that produced offspring without a male last year.
…
Cloning is one of many mechanisms species use to survive in a dangerous world. Indeed, the diversity of reproductive strategies seen in animals staggers the imagination. Some reptiles do not determine sexes genetically, but rely on different incubation temperatures to determine the development of males and females. Other creatures can actually switch sexes during their lifetimes, being born male and developing as females. Still others can switch sexes based on behavioral cues in the social group. There is no one way that creatures start development, grow and form sexes — there are many varied ways.

Unfortunately, humans seem to forget this fact when we find ourselves turning to nature to guide us through difficult choices, such as arguments about whether life begins at conception, or over the proper structure of the family. Or, more recently, regarding the morality of cloning. Whether we’re talking about raising bigger cattle or growing life-saving organs or trying to “live forever,” both sides like to stress their abilities to judge what is “natural.” Judging from Komodo dragons, lizards and sharks, the answer seems to be that for reproduction, almost anything goes.

Thanks to Neil Shubin for the lesson that we should not assume nature meets our sense of what is natural.  The article seems to me a good example for teachers of various philosophy courses, and I’ve stressed the parts that  describe a problematic kind of reasoning philosophy profs will find familiar and the passages with Shubin’s general challenge to it.

How It Works

From xkcdThanks, Mr Jender!

Fallacies for feminist philosophers

Can you share a favorite case of a fallacy-for-feminist-philosophers?  Or add something to the tentative discussion below of the ‘second kind’ of fallacy?  If so, please join in with a comment.

There are lots of times when a good fallacy comes in handy.  Critical thinking classes are one, but in most philosophy classes I  teach, it’s necessary at some point to discuss a fallacy and often to go a bit more generally into fallacies and fallacious reasoning.  I assume others find this true.

There are two kinds of examples of fallacies for feminists that I can think of.  One kind is a perfectly ordinary, standard kind of fallacy, but the specific example illustrates a  feminist point.   The other kind includes the fallacies that show up in reasoning about women (and sometimes others), but which may not have a standard name. 

For example, I think this post is concerned  with a common fallacy-of-composition-PLUS-fallacy-of-equivocation that is rampant in science popularizations.   It would be great to have a name for  it.   Maureen Dowd’s recent piece on Hillary Clinton –  discussed in an earlier piece today –  is an extended use of a fallacy that is showing up a lot in conservative writing about HC, and in some more liberal writers too.  And, of course, it’s applied to lots of other women.  It might  be  nice to be able to say when one hears this stuff, “Well, that’s just the same old fallacy of X.”

Supposing it’s true that these last two cases don’t have names and should, I’ll suggest a candidate for each.   Please bring in alternatives if you want.

For the first: The fallacy of cognitive displacement.  E.g., assuming women think with their ovaries.

For the second:  The fallacy of gendered projection:  E.g., assuming that one’s problems with powerful women reveal important facets of other people.

(I’m not completely happy with either of these; the second seems particularly hard to name.)

If we start to find enough of these unnamed fallacies,  we could adapt a recommendation of Calypso’s and call them the  fallacies of pernicious effect.  The effect being at least the further spreading of sexist attitudes.

Please add anything you like!

Maureen Dowd breaks record for sexist journalism

The record is for the winner in the category of “those who do know better.”  Here’s how she did it:

What is the environment for the woman who is the first ever to do such-and-such?  Well, she’s often one woman in a hitherto exclusively male club.  Feminism has made us aware of the temptation to describe the significance of her actions in terms of their (conjectured) gendered impact on the guys.   To do so is more than belittling; if people take you at all seriously, it is damaging in a way that goes beyond what the actions alone merit.   It strengthens  the  biases that  give her an unfair extra burden.

Here are things you might be tempted to think. But to do so is really to once again position a woman as a kind of sex object.

If she is tough, she’s their dominatrix.  
If she puts one of them down, she may be just like his wife. 
If she swears,  you should described it as directed now and in the past at the men.

The following should be an easy question on the “do you have any grasp of your own biases” test:

True or false:  Women’s actions are significant in so far as they are part of a continuing struggle between the sexes. 

False.  To publish such a view of Hillary Clinton  in the New York Times  is unconscionable.  And Maureen Dowd has done it.