2023-06-10 13:31:41
- Writing
- BBC News World
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We all make mistakes: if you count the number of people in a place and tell me 10 when there are 11, you are simply wrong. But if you say there are round squares, that’s another thing.
In logic, sophisms are erroneous reasonings which have the appearance of solidity.
These are unsubstantiated claims that are often made with such conviction that they appear to be hard facts.
Not only are they incorrect but, used knowingly, they are dishonest.
In fact, the term “sophism” comes from the Latin fallacia, which means “deception” and therefore technically denotes a flaw in an argument that makes it misleading.
The advantage is that once detected, they invalidate the argument.
The philosopher Aristotle, who carried out the first known systematic study of sophisms in his “De Sophisticis Elenchis” (Sophistic Refutations), considered it necessary to know them to arm himself once morest the most seductive errors, and described 13 types of them.
Today, philosophers have lists of hundreds of fallacies.
We have chosen three of them… They concern all politicians, who often use sophistry to justify the unjustifiable or get out of trouble.
The “if for whiskey” fallacy
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An illustration from the cover of “Le Petit Journal”, 1933.
This fallacy owes its name to a speech considered to be one of the most astute in the history of American politics.
Going down in history as the “whisky speech”, it was delivered in 1952 by Noah S. Sweat, a young legislator from Mississippi (USA), who later became a judge and university professor.
Lawmakers had debated whether the drought law should finally be lifted. “I had no intention of discussing this controversial topic at this time,” Sweat commented.
He did it, he said, because he didn’t want people to think he was running away from controversy. “On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue, at any time, regardless of the controversy.”
The funny thing is that he did just the opposite, and so masterfully that he gave the fallacy its name.
Here is the speech (abstract): “I was asked what I thought of whiskey (…) If by ‘whiskey’ you mean the devil’s brew, the plague of poison, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yes, literally take the bread out of the mouths of little children; if you hear the devilish drink that knocks down the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of the upright life and full of grace to the bottomless abyss of degradation (…), then I am certainly once morest him.”
“But if by ‘whiskey’ you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophical wine (…); the drink which allows a man to magnify his joy and his happiness and to forget, if only for a moment, the great tragedies, pains and sorrows of life (…), the sale of which pours into our treasuries countless millions of dollars, which are used to tenderly nurse our crippled little children (…) , so I’m definitely in favor of this drink.”
He concluded by stating, “That is my position. I will not deviate from it. I will not compromise.”
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To be fair, he clarified some things, but not precisely his position.
This is a common tactic in politics: giving an answer to a question that depends on the questioner’s point of view and using words with strong connotations.
This is a fallacy that seems to support both sides of an issue and is used to hide the lack of a position or to dodge difficult questions.
The McNamara fallacy
Another politician, another sophistry.
In this case, it is Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968.
During World War II, McNamara served in the U.S. Army’s Statistical Control Department, where he applied rigorous statistical methodology to the planning and execution of aerial bombardment missions, resulting in improved efficiency considerably.
After the war, he was recruited by the declining Ford Motor Corporation. Thanks to his skills in rational statistical analysis, McNamara achieves dramatic improvements.
When he arrived at the Pentagon, he applied the same rigorous systems analysis that had worked so well for him.
As the conflict in Vietnam escalated, he believed that as long as the number of Việt Cong casualties exceeded the American death toll, the war would eventually be won, and so the Americans set regarding counting the bodies.
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Coffins arriving in the United States in 1965
“Things you can count, you have to count; human losses are part of it”, he writes in his book “In Hindsight: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”. of Vietnam).
But this time he was tragically wrong. He himself would later admit that the overemphasis on a single crude measure oversimplified the complexities of the conflict.
As the saying goes, not everything that can be said counts.
Everything that counts cannot be counted.
And one thing that might not be counted was the audacity of “highly motivated grassroots movements”.
His name has become inextricably linked with the American failure in Vietnam.
In 1972, sociologist Daniel Yankelovich coined the phrase “McNamara’s fallacy”:
“The first step is to measure anything that can be easily measured. That’s good up to a point.”
“The second step is to discard what cannot be easily measured or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is contrived and misleading.”
“The third step is to assume that what can’t be easily measured doesn’t really matter. That’s blindness.”
“The fourth step is to say that what cannot be easily measured does not really exist. That is suicide.”
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Counting is useful, but that’s not all.
The McNamara fallacy is one of the most dangerous traps, as it has been used to guide policy decisions in such vital areas as health and education.
But it is not because the risk exists that we should abandon quantitative measures and metrics; quantification is a valuable analytical tool.
It should be kept in mind, as statistician W. Edwards Deming has pointed out, that “nothing becomes more important just because it can be measured”. “It becomes more measurable, that’s all.”
The main thing is to remember that measuring is not understanding, that reality is multidimensional and that the qualitative has as much value as the quantitative.
The politician’s mistake
The last of our fallacies isn’t as well known, but you’ve probably heard it from a politician or your boss.
His origin is amusing: he was identified in the BBC series “Yes, Prime Minister”, a sitcom which followed the battles between a Prime Minister and his cabinet secretary.
Although fictional, the series portrays what happens behind the scenes of power so well that several British politicians have said it is more like a documentary.
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The “Yes, Minister” series was broadcast between 1980 and 1984; its sequel, “Yes, Prime Minister”, between 1986 and 1988.
The politician’s fallacy was exposed in a 1988 episode and has since been echoed in the UK Parliament, the international media and in all sorts of analysis and discussion.
His model is: “We have to do something, this is something, therefore we have to do this.”
Also known as the politician syllogism, it is a logical fallacy that amounts to concluding, following asserting that some Americans are rich and some poor are Americans, that some poor are rich.
Despite its absurdity, it is used to pretend to have a solution to a problem, even if it is ineffective or even harmful.
In times of economic crisis, for example, it is not uncommon for tax cuts to be announced that do not alleviate the suffering of those most affected, do not address the underlying factors of emergency situation and do not determine how to prevent future crises.
However, these measures are well perceived and, in politics, they are often synonymous with success.
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