Is a fallacy a fallacy?

An argument is either or fallacy or it isn’t. True? If we say “This is tea”, or “This is coffee”, such a statement is either true or false. A drink is tea, or it is coffee, or it isn’t. But in my last blog we have seen that an apparently clear question such as “Do you like tea or coffee?” can be confusing, since its meaning depends on the context in which it is asked. In the same way, also the soundness of an argument can depend on the circumstances in which it is presented. I want to explain this with a short discussion of the so-called ad hominem argument (see also my blog dated 20 May 2019). Like last week, I rely heavily on the book Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy, and now especially on chapters 8-11, written by George Wrisley.

“Ad hominem argument” literally means “argument [directed] against the man” (homo is Latin for “man”). The argument is also called “playing the man”, namely instead of playing the ball, as you are supposed to do in football and in other ball games. There are several types of ad hominem arguments, but here I’ll ignore that.

The phrase “playing the man” makes clear what is wrong with this argument. In football playing the man is not football, since it is breaching the rules. Likewise using an ad hominem argument is breaching the rules of sound arguing. Whether a person who utters an argument is black, white, young, old, a thief, a murder or a decent person, and whether or not s/he behaves as his or her argument says s/he should do, tells us nothing about the correctness of the argument as such. However, sometimes in football a shoulder charge is allowed, which can be seen as a kind of playing the man. How about the ad hominem argument?

Take this example from chapter 8 in Bad arguments (p. 73):

“A school teacher argues for increased pay for school teachers and a critic attacks his argument by replying: ‘Sure! It’s easy to see why you’re in favor of a raise!’ ” Indeed, a school teacher has an interest in increased pay and he can be biased towards it, but makes it that his argument is not correct? Usually it is so that employers want to keep salaries down and employees want to have them increased. Seen this way, it can be right to look for extra information that supports or just undermines the teacher’s demand. Say, he lives in a country in which teachers receive relative high salaries. Then there is a reason to belief that the critic’s ad hominem argument is right. However, in the Netherlands there is a lack of teachers and one measure proposed by politicians to tackle the problem is a salary increase. So in the Netherlands we can assume that the argument is correct, even though the teacher has an interest in a salary increase. What this example shows is that there may be a reason to play the man (namely in the first case).

Or take this example from chapter 10 in Bad arguments (p. 86):

“An eyewitness is on the stand, testifying to the guilt of the accused. The defense attorney asks the eyewitness: ‘Isn’t it true that you’ve been convicted of perjury twice before, and, thus, you are a perjurer, a liar?’ ”

This looks like an ad hominem fallacy, for usually it is so that eyewitnesses are believed just because they might have seen what happened and not because of their personal qualities. However, in this case the eyewitness’s character and credibility are relevant, for twice it has been proven that he was not reliable. It’s not necessary that he’ll be again unreliable (he might have learned his lesson), but there is a good reason to play the man here, and to test his reliability.

The upshot is that, just as a shoulder charge is allowed in football, an ad hominem argument can be to the point. Whether it is, depends on the situation. In his chapters in Bad arguments Wrisley gives some questions which may help to judge whether an ad hominem argument is relevant. In short they are:

1) Is there a good reason to belief that the utterer of the argument is biased; that his or her behaviour doesn’t agree with the argument; and the like?

2) Are these details about the person and his or her circumstances relevant to the argument in question or to the dialogical context?

3) Makes this that the ad hominem argument is to the point or that we need further information in order to substantiate that the utterer’s argument is correct?

But generally it is so that an ad hominem argument is a fallacy. Whether you are black, white, a woman, a man, a Congresswoman, have foreign roots, or whatever your characteristics are, has nothing to do with the soundness of your arguments.

I return to the starting point of this blog, namely the question whether a fallacy is a clear and distinct notion. In Bad arguments a fallacy is defined as “an error in reasoning whereby someone attempts to put forward an argument whereby a conclusion supposedly has been appropriately inferred from a premise (or premises) when, in fact, the conclusion does not and should not be inferred from the premise(s).” (p. 19) According to this definition an argument is a fallacy or it isn’t. In the sense of the definition an ad hominem argument is always a fallacy, for it is not directed against the reasoning but against the circumstances of the reasoning. It’s the same for other fallacies. Nevertheless, as my example of the ad hominem argument has shown, a fallacy can be a relevant argument in casting doubt on a reasoning.

Tea or coffee?

I find logic and argumentation interesting, so when I saw, when browsing on the Internet, that recently a book titled Bad Arguments. 100 of the Most Important Fallacies in Western Philosophy had been published, I couldn’t resist buying it. Already when I read the first chapter, it was clear that it was a good choice, for the chapter is about one of the most confusing words in language: Or.

Consider this example: I have invited my friend John and I ask him what he wants to drink: “Do you like tea or coffee?” Then John will say, for instance, “Tea”. He might also have said “Coffee”, but not “Tea and coffee”, for making a choice is what you are supposed to do in such situations. It’s not polite to ask both for tea and for coffee. However, John might also have said that he wants to drink nothing at all.

Take now another situation. John and I are talking about drinks and then I ask him: “Do you like tea or coffee?” John replies “Tea”, although he might also have replied “Coffee” or even that he doesn’t like tea nor coffee or just that he likes both tea and coffee. That he might have replied the latter is remarkable, for in both examples I asked the same question and nevertheless in the first example John can’t choose both coffee and tea, and in the second example he can. How is this possible?

In order to make this clear, let me write the examples with the help of symbols. I start with the first case. Since logicians prefer the letters p and q for indicating objects, sentences etc, let me use the letter p for “I like tea” and q for “I like coffee”. Moreover, if such a statement is the case logicians call it “true” (or T for short), and if it is not the case they call it “false” (F). Then we can describe my question as “p or q?” and John’s answer is “p ”, which means that p is true and q is false and “p or q” is true. However, if John would have preferred coffee, q would have been true and p would have been false, but “p or q” would also have been true. If he didn’t want a drink at all, both p and q would have been false and so “p or q” would be. Moreover, John knows that it is not polite to ask both for tea and for coffee (p is true and q is true), so for this possibility “p or q” is also false. We can put these results in a table (a so-called “truth table”) in this order:

                                   p          q          p or q

                                   –––––––––––––––––

                                   T         F              T

                                   F          T             T

                                   F          F             F

                                   T         T             F

In the same way the second example can be described with symbols and reproduced in a truth table. Then my question to John is again “p or q?”. John answered “p” as we have seen so p is true and q is false and “p or q” is true. If John had answered “q” instead, q would have been true and p false, but still “p or q” would have been true. However, now it is also possible that John likes both tea (p) and coffee (q), as we have seen, so now – as both p and q are true – “p or q” is true! Including also the possibility that John doesn’t like tea and coffee at all (p, q and “p or q” are false), we get this truth table:

                                   p          q          p or q

                                   –––––––––––––––––

                                   T         F              T

                                   F          T             T

                                   T         T              T

                                   F          F              F

What has this analysis brought to us? I started with two examples in which, as I supposed, the same question was asked, albeit in different situations. Then I clarified the question and the possible answers by constructing truth tables for the two situations. What we see then, however, is that the supposedly same question led to different truth tables in different situations. This is only possible if I actually have asked two different questions, despite the same wording. Although the difference might be in the word “like” (which has slightly different meanings in the examples, indeed), it’s not the “like” that determines the contents of the truth tables, but the choices we are allowed to make do. In each case the choice can be reduced to the question “tea or coffee”. Since tea is tea and coffee is coffee, the upshot is that the word “or” has two different meanings in my examples. In the first example “or” excludes the possibility to choose both coffee and tea, but the second example allows this possibility. Cases like these have logicians made to distinguish two kinds of “or”. They have called them “exclusive or” and “inclusive or” respectively. If we ask a question with the first or, they call it an “exclusive disjunction” (p ⊕ q in symbols), while they talk of a “logical disjunction” (p v q) if we ask a question with the inclusive or. So, when your host asks you whether you would like tea or coffee, it might be possible that he asks you whether you would like to have both.

Reference

Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019.

See especially Jason Iuliano, “Affirming a Disjunct”, pp. 39-41.

Ursula von der Leyen, the new ruler of the European Commission

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (alias Macron and Merkel)

When I saw the excellent performance of Verdi’s opera Macbeth by Opera Vlaanderen in Antwerpen, Belgium, recently, I couldn’t help to compare its story with the power politics as you can see it every day everywhere in the world. Even more, I had to think of a special case, namely the way the new president of the European Commission was chosen by the government leaders and president of the countries of the European Union. Or rather, I had to think of the intrigues by two of them: The French president Emmanuel Macron and the German chancellor Angela Merkel. But let me first tell the main lines of the story of the opera, based on the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare (which goes back to a true history that took place in 1040).

The main characters in the opera are the Scottish general Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth. When King Duncan of Scotland is Macbeth’s guest in his castle, Lady Macbeth, in her lust for power and her desire to become Queen of Scotland, incites her husband to murder Duncan. And so Macbeth stabs him, while he is asleep. Now Macbeth and Lady Macbeth become the new King and Queen. However, they fear the Scottish general Banquo, since a prophecy says that his descendants will inherit the throne. Therefore, Macbeth arranges to kill Banquo and his son as well by hiring two men for the job. Banquo doesn’t survive the attempt but his son escapes. The opera ends with the fall and death of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

So far the opera. Now the other story: The nomination of the new president of the European Commission. As is usual in a democracy, after parliamentary elections a new government must be appointed in accordance with the results of the elections. As a rule this starts with the designation of a new prime minister. For the European Union (a confederation of 27 states – assuming that the Union Kingdom has already left the club) this means in the same way that a new European Commission must be chosen, to start with the election of a new president of the commission. On the basis of the results of the elections for the EU parliament the most likely candidate for this function was the socialist Frans Timmermans, with the leaders of the christian-democratic and liberal fractions as acceptable alternatives.

Democracy? In the EU the procedure is that the government leaders and president of the member countries come together in conclave in Brussels, and after long discussions and long nights they come with their nominations for the presidency of the European Commission and for some other important functions and then the parliament gives its consent. Of course, this is the theory, for in practice it is so that only Germany and France decide and that the other government leaders are simply assessors. Actually, what the parliament thinks is unimportant. For isn’t it so that elections are hold only for keeping the people quiet? So, instead of nominating Timmermans (or one of the other acceptable candidates) as president of the European Commission, Macron and Merkel proposed the German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen, a person who is hardly known outside Germany (and who is the minister of an army known for its broken aircraft and submarines and guns with crooked barrels, and a shortage of everything that an army needs, including soldiers). So when I was in the theatre in Antwerpen a week ago, I couldn’t help to draw a parallel between the opera and the election soap in Brussels: Just as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth first murdered Duncan, the King of Scotland, and then Banquo, their possible rival, in the same way Macron and Merkel first killed Timmermans (too strong) and then Democracy (a future danger). Is there a case of power politics in a “democracy” that is more cynical than what happened there in Brussels? But look what happened to Macbeth and his wife ...

Now it’s up to the parliament to accept the nomination of von der Leyen or not. At the moment that I publish this blog it was not known yet what it will do. Is it important? Sometimes it’s not the facts that count but the intentions are, even if these facts didn’t happen.

A little ethics

Usually I am too late when I want to pay homage to a philosopher, like two weeks ago, when I paid a tribute to Jürgen Habermas. Usually you publish a tribute just before the birthday or other relevant date of the philosopher concerned or soon after the death of the person, but I always miss the news, so also in such cases. I am the kind of person who’ll hear about the end of the world ten years after it happened, so to speak. But this time I am ahead of the fact, for when browsing on the Internet, I discovered that next month on 6 August it will be fifty years ago that Adorno died; in Visp in Switzerland. Now I could wait yet three weeks before publishing my homage, but last week I wrote already about Adorno on occasion of my trip to Frankfurt. Therefore I just write this tribute as a continuation of that blog. Moreover, a philosopher of his standing certainly deserves two blogs. This is the more so, since Adorno still is one of the most popular philosophers in Germany. Also outside Germany his work still is often reprinted, especially his main works Dialectics of Enlightenment (written together with Max Horkheimer), Negative Dialectics (which is more a work for specialists, to my mind) and his Minima Moralia. Just this latter work is Adorno’s most popular book. Even more than 100,000 copies have already been sold in Germany! It has been translated in many other languages as well and also there it is often reprinted. Any philosopher who had such a success can be proud of it. It’s this book I want to write a little bit about as a tribute to Adorno.

Adorno was born in Frankfurt as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund but later changed his name to Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (Adorno was his mother’s family name). He studied philosophy, sociology, psychology and musicology in Frankfurt (where he met Max Horkheimer) and elsewhere. He became a teacher at the University of Frankfurt but in 1933 he was forbidden by the Nazis to lecture any longer. Therefore Adorno decided to emigrate and returned to Germany only in 1953, although he had visited his home country already a few times again since 1945. He spent most of his time in exile in the USA. It was during these years abroad that Adorno begun to write his aphorisms and mini-essays that later would be published as his Minima Moralia (MM for short). Originally Adorno wanted to give the MM to Horkheimer on his 50th birthday, but it was not yet finished then and finally it was published in 1951 in Germany. The title refers to the Magna Moralia that supposedly had been written by Aristotle, although now this is called into question. Apparently Adorno wants to say with the title that the book contains very small (minima) ethical remarks (moralia), to be distinguished from Aristotle’s big (magna) ethics.

The structure of the MM is very different from Adorno’s other books and articles. While these are longer or shorter treatises, the MM consists of 153 short pieces or statements that can each be read on its own: Just open the book on an arbitrary page and start to read – and to think of course. And there is always something to think, for Adorno never writes a word without giving it a wider intention. The book is also a kind of mirror of the author’s experiences, as the subtitle expresses: “Reflections from a damaged life”. Note that when Adorno wrote his book, his country (and most of Europe as well) lived through one of its darkest periods in history: The violence and destruction by Nazism and fascism. So Adorno writes how life must not be and the book has become, as some call it, a negative moral philosophy; a moral philosophy after the holocaust. It’s your task as a reader to transform this into a positive ethics: Make good by criticizing what is not good.

Of course, I tried to trick to open the book on an arbitrary page. In my Dutch edition it was page 99, where I read in reflection 72: “How so many things are inscribed with gestures, and thereby with modes of conduct. Clogs – ‘floppies,’ slippers [in English] – are made so that one can slip them on one’s feet without using the hands. They are monuments to the hatred of bending over.” I have italicized what especially stroke me in this aphorism. What a chance that I just saw this passage, for it says much about present society. In a sense it says how we gradually become alienated from actual life; from how things come about. Basic actions are taken away from you so that you don’t know any longer how basic things come about in life. Go to a supermarket. Do you still know where your food comes from and how it is produced? Take cheese. In the past you bought it from a farmer; then you bought it from a dairy shop, which got its products directly from the farmer. Then you bought your cheese in a supermarket, but you still bought a whole cheese or a piece of it. But today, you can buy there only (or nearly only) slices of cheese. You even don’t recognize the original cheese in it any longer, and you are spared the effort to slice the cheese yourself. Look further around in the same supermarket. Most food is readymade for you, prepacked. You don’t even have to cook any longer. But it’s true, you’ll not get your fingers burnt.

Adorno’s Minima Moralia in German: https://web.archive.org/web/20131114172541/http://www.offene-uni.de/archiv/textz/textz_phil/minima_moral.pdf

Adorno’s Minima Moralia in English (I quoted from this source): https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/index.htm

On Adorno

The Adorno Monument in Frankfurt am Main, Germany

When I was in Frankfurt in Germany, lately, I wanted to see also the Adorno monument on the grounds of the Goethe University there. For for a long time Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) has been one of my philosophical and sociological heroes, and actually he still is a little bit. And wasn’t Adorno one of the founders of the famous “Frankfurt School”, once an important current in philosophy and sociology with Jürgen Habermas as its most important “product” (to use an anti-Adornian term)? And it were, among others, Adorno’s ideas that inspired in the 1960s the student movement and its leaders like Rudi Dutschke – the man who said that a real revolution is not a sudden change of society (often based on violence) but that it’s a “long march through the institutions of power”, so a slow internal change by taking nonviolently the seats of power. By the way, this idea that wasn’t unreal at all, as is exemplified by the political career of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, another leader of the 1968 student movement, who later became one of the leaders of the Green movement in Germany and France, deputy mayor of Frankfurt (indeed) and leader of the group of the Greens in the European Parliament. As such I see the green movement as the intellectual legacy of the student movement of the 1960s; and if so it has been inspired indirectly by Adorno’s ideas.

But back to Adorno himself. I must say that his ideas are often not easy to understand. I remember that his book Negative Dialectics stood for more than ten years on my special shelf with books “yet to read”. Then I decided to remove it from there, for if you haven’t read a book for ten years since you bought it, you’ll never read it. When leafing through the book and reading some fragments, I found it actually obscure. I understood hardly a word of it. Also his Dialects of Enlightenment, which he wrote together with Max Horkheimer – his co-founder of the Frankfurt School –, is not an easy book, but I read it with interest and pleasure. In this book – published for the first time in 1947 in Amsterdam, after a pre-publication in 1944 in New York – Adorno and Horkheimer defended the thesis that Nazism was a logical consequence of the Enlightenment. When they wrote it, the thesis didn’t sound implausible but now more than 70 years later it seems too simple. With the same persuasiveness that Adorno and Horkheimer defended their thesis one can object that the Enlightenment was flexible enough to overcome Nazism, or that it were just its ideas that overcame Nazism. Another thesis in the Dialectics of Enlightenment is that capitalist society represses expression of individuality and tries to make everybody the same and uniform and to bring everybody on the same line, for instance because this should be better for massa consumption (one of the pillars of capitalism in the 20th century). I think that this thesis has more substance and still applies to the society of the 21th century. Look how social media like Facebook try to manipulate us and try to make us like what they like! In view of this, Dialectics of Enlightenment is still a book worth to read but then one must try to translate what Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in the 1940s to society as it is in 2019. When you succeed to do so, the book is still modern.

Adorno didn’t write only obscure texts that are difficult to understand. Although also his Minima Moralia isn’t always easy, this book with 153 mini-essays about life and society gives you time to think and when you still don’t understand what you read, just try the next mini-essay.

Adorno’s most well-known contribution to sociology and social research is his The Authoritarian Personality, written together with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford. In this book the authors develop the famous F-Scale, a method to test whether a person is inclined to be authoritarian and to have fascist ideas. In the meantime this work is classic, and in view of the rise of right-wing populism it is still relevant. As the copywriter of Verso Books writes about it: “It ... marks a milestone in the development of Adorno’s thought, showing him grappling with the problem of fascism and the reasons for Europe’s turn to reaction.”

Adorno was a many-sided philosophical and social thinker and researcher, but not only that. He was also a composer, musicologist and literary critic, but to write about this is outside my competence.

On occasion of his 100th birthday the Goethe University in Frankfurt erected in July 2003 a monument for Adorno (see the photo above). The monument was created by the Russian artist Vadim Zakharov. “[He] described the desk and accompanying paraphernalia as ‘the true expression of Adorno’s personality’. ...  [Zakharov] chose to present the philosopher by documenting his ideas. Thus the functioning desk lamp symbolises his propensity for working at night and the ticking metronome his achievements as composer. Likewise, the edition of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) [indeed the book that I couldn’t read], placed on an otherwise remarkably tidy desk, represents his philosophical works; manuscripts and sheets of music indicate the main foci of his work. Quotations from Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951) and Aesthetic Theory (1970) are engraved into the paving slabs surrounding the glass cube. They provide insights into Adorno’s thinking and inspire visitors to reflect on his philosophical ideas.” (quoted from https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/68260839/The_Adorno_Monument). The jury that chose the monument from six entries was enthusiastic about it. Nevertheless, it was marked by controversy, for– paraphrasing Adorno – who are you that you see yourself worth enough to value someone else? Do you think that you are better than that person? (same source). But who am I, then, that I have written this blog about Adorno?