Putting the Cart Before the Horse

Lecture 11 in the course "Argumentation" that I'm listening to as I commute is titled, Moving from Cause to Effect. During an argument you might try to prove B by claiming A is true and that A causes B. This is perfectly valid if A really does cause B but often we're wrong. It could be that A is just a sign  for B. For example a Robin is correlated with Spring but not the cause. It would be wrong to claim spring is occurring in December just because I see a robin. Professor Zarefsky gives five common ways that Cause is misapplied.

1. Has a Correlation been confused with a Cause?
A robin is a sign or correlated with Spring

2. Is there a common cause behind A & B?
Perhaps C causes both A & B so it would be wrong to claim A causes B. It's popular to say guns cause crime but actually criminals cause crime and might use a gun (or a knife, or ...)

3. Post Hoc Fallacy - did B just happen to occur after A?
An example given was a tax cut passed by congress and soon thereafter tax revenue declined. See, we told you so said the opponents, a tax cut caused less taxes gathered. Post Hoc replied the other side, the tax law has not yet gone into effect so it could not have effected revenue, there must be some other cause.

4. Have Cause & Effect been reversed?
Instead of guns causing crime it may be that an upsurge in gun sales is a result of people wanting protection from an increase in local crimes and muggings.

5. Are there significant intervening or counteracting causes?
Reality is rarely as simple as A -> B. Typically there are many different causes for B as well as some causes that mute or cancel B.  'A' might also have many side effects other than B. An example given was that companies want to make the most profit but also have to obey laws and regulations such as environment, equal opportunity, etc. One might argue, Joe can't be incompetent because his company has not fired him. But the company may be afraid of a lawsuit and keeps paying Joe even though he is a waste of money.

Bottom Line

Interesting how something as simple a concept as cause and effect can actually be quite tricky to get right.

Get a Silly Answer

Yesterday I talked about Topoi - a collection of stock issues that can be used in any debate. Issues have the potential to invalidate a claim by showing that it's irrelevant or poorly defined or that the cure is worse than the disease. When a claim is made and is disputed, the focal point of the disagreement is called a stasis (stases in the plural).

According to the lecture series, "Argumentation", in the classical theory of rhetoric and law there are four types of stases, four types of counter-claims. Consider the claim: "You stole my car".

1. Stasis in Conjecture - dispute the "fact" of the claim
(I was never near your car.)

2. Stasis of Definition - dispute the interpretation the claim
(I did not steal your car, I borrowed it)

3. Stasis of Quality - cite a greater good to justify your action
(Yes I "stole" your car, but it was to drive someone who was dying to the hospital)

4. Stasis of Place - dispute the forum for discussion; this is not the time nor place for debate
(How dare you accuse me of theft in public! I'll see you in court!)

The fourth stasis, Place, is like a trump card; it postpones debate to a future time & place and makes no admission of guilt or innocence. Stasis type 1, Conjecture, is total denial. You lie sir! With type 2, Definition, you admit that you did something but disagree on the interpretation. With type 3, Quality, you admit guilt but claim extenuating circumstances.

Bottom Line

This lecture showed that your reply to a claim is very important. You can safely refuse to reply (#4. I want my lawyer or I plead the 5th Amendment) but if you issue a denial (#1) which is proved false, then you've blown your reliability and won't have much credibility to make a defense using stases 2 or 3. Likewise you lack credibility if your reply is ambiguous, "I did not use your car, but if I did use it then I only borrowed it, and if I did steal it then it was for a good cause." To be credible you have to pick one stasis, 1 or 2 or 3, and stick with it.

Ask a Silly Question

In high school I enjoyed a class on public speaking which covered such topics as how to stand, what to do with your hands, developing self confidence, and formal debates. I wish my long-ago lessons on debate techniques had covered the material I'm learning now with my current commuting lecture series, "Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning". This series began slowly with a history of debate theory and proof but things became interesting in chapter 5 with Resolutions and Topoi.

Professor Zarefsky asserts that there are only four kinds of claims:
1. Resolution of Facts - Bush (or Gore) really won the Florida election of 2000
2. Resolution of Definition requiring interpretation - Abortion is (or is not) murder
3. Resolution of Value requiring judgement - The current congress is ineffective
4. Resolution of Policy involving action - the Government should spend more (or not) to stimulate the economy

Most formal debates deal only with the fourth type - Policy issues, e.g. Proposed: we should do X.

Now the classification above is not that exciting but it allows for an analysis of Topoi (stock issues). For each type of resolution there are known issues that can always be raised against the claim:

A. Fact
1. What is the criterion for determining truth? 
(For the Florida election there were recounts, questions over how to count hanging chads, etc. Ground rules, themselves disputed, for how to count the votes.)
2. Has the criterion been met? 
 (The Associated Press did a recount and found that either man could be the winner depending on the criterion used for which votes got counted or disqualified)

B. Definition
1. Is the interpretation relevant?
(In the abortion debate, if a fetus is not a person then murder does not apply.)
2. Is it fair?
(is the comparison using words with a lot of bias behind them?)
3. How should we choose amongst competing interpretations?

C. Value
1. Is the value truly good or bad as alleged?
(Is ineffective government actually a bad thing?)
2. Which competing value is preferred?
(Is it better to have an effective government or ineffective one?)
3.  Has the value been properly applied to the specific situation?

D. Policy
1. Is there really a problem? Or is this much ado about nothing?
2. Where is the credit or blame due?(Is the problem solvable? Does anyone have the ability to do something?)
3. Will the proposal actually solve the problem?
4. Will the cost of the proposal exceed the benefits gained?

Bottom Line

The lecture sounded so much better than the notes in the course outline.  I found it fascinating that one need not reinvent the wheel with every proposal. There are existing lists of issues that should always be considered and addressed and resolved. If only our legislatures were taught this and thought about the consequences of new laws before ratifying them.

Can't think of a good insult thou droning elf-skinned malt-worm?

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
- Shakespeare's Macbeth

Have you ever needed a really great insult and nothing came to mind. Well worry no more.

TastefullyOffensive.com offers the following Shakespeare Insult Kit  

If I look at the bottom of the chart I might come up with, Thou yeasty toad-spotted varlot!

Bottom Line

While the chart above is very clever and funny, personally I don't recommend insults. They can wound very deeply and permanently scar a relationship with a friend or relative. When used with strangers you're flirting with violence and inviting a fight. (Unless that is, you use a Shakespearean insult, in which case you'll most likely leave your target very confused).

When the ancient Greeks studied the art of debate and rhetoric they gave a name to verbal attacks against an individual - "Ad hominem". A person might argue, Don't believe what X says because he's an idiot. It's a reputation attack which ignores the topic under debate and proves nothing. Calling a person an idiot, or stupid, or one of the Shakespearean insults above does not win anything - it just hurts.

The Rise of "Logical Punctuation".

“In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the
score.”
-Ralph Richardson (English actor)

Early this year I posted about Punctuation with Quotations in which I discussed the American rules of punctuating quotations. I'd like to revisit the topic since Slate.com claims the "punctuation paradigm is shifting".

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, [...] —almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines.

But people are realizing that the American rules are unnatural. A sentence ends with a period, not period-quote mark. The British style puts punctuation outside of quotes and it is beginning to dominate on message boards, blogs, tweets, etc. And no wonder. Since at least the 1960s a common name for the British style has been "logical punctuation."

According to Slate,

If it seems hard or even impossible to defend the American way on the merits, that's probably because it emerged from aesthetic, not logical, considerations. According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA [Modern Language Association], it was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order "to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space)."

Bottom Line

Personally as one who favors logic, I'll stop feeling guilty about following the British Style.

P.S.
Happy Birthday to my Sister!

Quotations & Paradox

For over two years now I've started with (or used) a quote in every blog post. I think it adds some variety and it's fun searching for just the right quote. So this item on the Internet at Clayton Cramer's Blog struck my funny bone:

A Profound Thought

“The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.”  - Abraham Lincoln

For some reason this reminds me of the Liar's Paradox:

In ancient Greece the fictional speaker Epimenides, a Cretan, said that "All Cretans are liars." So is Epimenides telling the truth?

Wikipedia points out that this example is not really a paradox. It is only a contradiction if you assume Epimenides is honest. If Epimenides is liar, then his statement is false and somewhere there exists an honest Cretan, just not Epimenides himself.

Greek philosopher, Eubulides of Miletus, fourth century BC, discovered a real paradox,

A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false?

Is the man telling the truth about lying (and thereby is lying) or lying about lying (and thereby truthful)?

Statements like this are called self-referential and are the bane of mathematical logic. Another classic is, "A barber in town shaves every man who does not shave himself. So who shaves the barber?"

My speciality while working on a mathematics PhD was Set Theory. In the early days (pre-1900's) the definition of "set" was very loose and you could use any description to describe a set. But like the paradoxes above it was easy to describe impossible or at least very strange sets. Consider the set of all sets. This uber-set would have to contain itself as a member. This gives you an infinite recursion, S is an element of S which is an element of S which is ....

To avoid this pathological set we define X, the set of all sets which DO NOT contain themselves. So is X an element of X? Think about it for a bit and you'll see that X is a paradox, it can not exist.

Bottom Line

While this may look like fun and games, paradoxes like this changed math and science in the 20th century. At the dawn of 1900 it was believed that physical and mathematical sciences were on the verge of discovering the ultimate truths of the universe. But soon Einstein's Relativity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle showed that some physical "facts" are relative to the observer or unknowable.  In mathematics in 1931, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem showed that any system of logic which was strong enough to prove itself valid, would also contain statements like "This statement is false". Thus there could be no system of logic that could prove all statements. There will always be some things which are unknowable.

No True Scotsman

“I am not an Englishman, I was never an Englishman, and I don't ever want to be one. I am a Scotsman! I was a Scotsman and I will always be one.”-Sean Connery (James Bond)

While I “almost” have a PhD in mathematical logic (all but dissertation), I lack training in rhetorical logic. Since ancient Greece, rhetoricians have studied the ways we can lie or dissemble or deceive with speech and writing. Collectively these are called logical fallacies. I’m aware of some of the techniques; for instance:

Poisoning the Well: oppose a position by discrediting the opposing advocate.
“My opponent was once wrong about X, so how can we trust him on Y?”

A Straw man Argument: exaggerating or distorting or misquoting the subject to something that is easily dismissed.
Person A: We should liberalize the laws on beer.
Person B: No, any society with unrestricted access to intoxicants loses its work ethic and goes only for immediate gratification.
(Here the argument has been extended from beer to all "intoxicants" thereby creating a straw man to attack.).

Today I came across a new one called “No true Scotsman”. According to Wikipedia is goes like this:

Teacher: All Scotsmen enjoy haggis.
Student: But my Scottish uncle Scotty McScottscott doesn't like haggis!
Teacher: Well, all true Scotsmen like haggis.

When faced with a counterexample to a claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original claim, this fallacy is employed to modify the original claim to something that is “true” by definition. Think about it, what is a “true” Scotsman? It’s a tautological phrase which is self-fulling. A true Scotsman is one who eats hagis. Who eats hagis? All true Scotsmen.

Today you might see a “True Scotsman” claim in regards to Obama Healthcare. As it starts to unravel, some of the centralist Democrats are distancing themselves from it. But rather than recognize division in the party, one might counter that no “true” Democrat opposes Obama care. Or with Global Warming: no true scientist doubts global warming.

This is solidarity by dismissing the exceptions as irrelevant.

Here is a recent example of changing a label to save the argument: "Avoid the term 'global warming'," Thomas Friedman says. "I prefer the term global weirding.'”
How does one disprove Global Weirding? How can one measure and claim that the world is more weird this year than last!

Bottom Line

Here is Wikipedia’s list of Fallacies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

And a few related articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric