Leviathan swimming in the Rhine near Utrecht.
False reasoning
often happens. I think that it is as old as humanity. It’s true, often it can
be difficult to develop a correct argumentation, and I am afraid that I, too,
am sometimes guilty of using incorrect reasonings. Being a philosopher I should
have developed a professional immunity against false reasoning, but alas, a man
is human and makes mistakes that are human. Philosophers are no exception. In
fact, it is not strange that people fail to see through complicated reasonings
that are even difficult to understand for philosophers. However, people also
often fail to see through reasonings that are transparent and that have been
rejected as false already since long ago and in many books. Apparently, correct
reasoning is quite a job and one has to learn it.
I became
again aware of all this, when I started to read one of the most famous books of
modern philosophy: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Although this book is
especially known because Hobbes presents here his political theory, its first part
is devoted to man and also to the way man reasons. Everybody should read this
part of the book, for you can learn a lot of it that is useful in daily life. Don’t
be afraid that the text is difficult to understand, for the book is clearly written
and very readable, especially when you take a modern edition. In this blog I
cannot give more than an impression of what you find there, so I just pick out a
fragment that I find striking in the light of the present corona crisis. In my
last blog I promised to write again on other themes, but I cannot help that it
stays in my mind.
Since I am
reading a Dutch paper edition, I have quoted for this blog from the online text
of the Renascence edition. It gives the original text, which may be a bit
difficult for some readers, but, as said, modern editions are very well readable.
The fragment I have chosen is from Part I, chapter 11 (https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/748/leviathan.pdf,
pp. 90-91):
“Ignorance
of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate
and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive. And hence it
comes to pass that in all places men that are grieved with payments to the
public discharge their anger upon the publicans, that is to say, farmers,
collectors, and other officers of the public revenue, and adhere to such as
find fault with the public government; and thereby, when they have engaged themselves
beyond hope of justification, fall also upon the supreme authority, for fear of
punishment, or shame of receiving pardon. Ignorance of natural causes disposeth
a man to credulity, so as to believe many times impassibilities: for such know
nothing to the contrary, but that they may be true, being unable to detect the
impossibility. And credulity, because men love to be hearkened unto in company,
disposeth them to lying: so that ignorance itself, without malice, is able to
make a man both to believe lies and tell them, and sometimes also to invent
them.”
What the
first part of the quotation says, for instance, is that the messenger is blamed
for the contents of the message, even when he has nothing to do with it. We see
this also sometimes in these days that the coronavirus rules the world. A virus
has spread from Wuhan in China all over the world. No matter how it came there,
once it existed and spread, there was only one thing to do: Try to stop it.
Therefore, in most countries the government ordered a lockdown or a semi-lockdown.
At first, most people agreed, but already soon people began to grumble. Many
complained not about the effectiveness of the measures and were asking whether
the governments had taken the right measures, but more and more people began (and
begin) to say: Why does the government do all this to us? Hasn’t the virus
already gone back somewhat? Haven’t we correctly followed the restrictions
imposed on us? As if it is the government that has spread the disease and as if
it is the government that has made people ill. It’s true, governments often
make mistakes or deceive people, but the disease is not spread by governments
but by a virus. For instance, on a press conference by the Dutch Prime Minister,
this question was asked: “Mr. Rutte, already for some weeks you see that the
Dutch behave very well and maintain the corona restrictions. Nevertheless, the
Dutch government extends the term of the restrictions with another three weeks.
How can the latter be reconciled with the former?” Implicitly in this question
the Dutch government is hold responsible for the necessity of the restrictions,
while actually it is the spread of the virus that makes the restrictions inevitable.
In the
second part of the quotation, Hobbes says: Ignorance of the facts makes that
people tend to believe all kinds of impossible things that cannot be true. Take
for example so-called conspiracy theories, which I have discussed in a blog
some time ago (http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2020/03/conspiracy-theories.html). Many people don’t know or don’t
understand where viruses come from. So, even if scientists say that the origin
of the corona virus – or what else we are talking about – is natural, many people don’t understand what this
involves. Therefore, they invent their own explanations. In the past, people
often thought that a disease was the scourge of God. Nowadays conspiracy
theories have taken its place.
Old books and less old books contain a lot of
wisdom, but what is this wisdom worth if we ignore it?
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