Fallacy Detection Machines

Marking student papers and engaging with student argumentative logic can sometimes be a depressing chore: the meandering and tangental rhetoric, the lazy arguments, and most importantly the uncritical absorption of bourgeois "common sense" can sometimes be depressing.  More depressing is the fact that, by their second semester, first year philosophy students tend to hide their problematic arguments in nice-sounding philosophy lingo: they inappropriately use the terms validity and soundness just because they think it will make their arguments sound better; they scatter appeals to named fallacies throughout their papers.

This over-abundance of fallacy appeals has caused me again to reflect on the problem of informal logic and how, despite the uses of argumentation theory, it is also a problem when it comes to critical thought.  In our haste to teach students about the errors of lazy thinking, we philosophy instructors have often over-emphasized a list of supposed fallacies in a very mechanical attempt to promote critical thinking.  Unfortunately, and as I have always maintained, turning students into mindless fallacy detection machines does not promote critical thinking or engagement with the content of thought.  Examine this paragraph and find fallacies is pretty much the schooling of informal logic classes––I know because I've had to teach more than one of these classes as an adjunct.

One of many books designed to equate reasoning with fallacy detection (and isn't that in itself "equivocation"?)

The obsession with fallacy hunting has now become a serious problem in argumentative logic.  Not only do student papers degenerate into this obsession––and in this degeneration produce nothing in the least bit critical––but it is a problem that has spilled out into the wider critical left.  Leftist internet forums, for example, are filled with individuals who have become fallacy-machines and, having been taught ten or more fallacy names by an informal logic course they took once-upon-a-time or a wikipedia page they read, use this limited knowledge to muscularize their otherwise pathetic arguments.  Conjuring the names of fallacies is the argumentative equivalent of summoning djinn from some holy lamp of perfect logical knowledge to settle a debate.

Let's be clear: there is nothing scientific about argumentative logic and the fallacies it has named.  Those fallacies your average internet argument expert will tick off in a debate are not entirely universally applicable and thus do not possess the foundations to be treated as scientific knowledge despite their claims to the contrary.  I'll let you in on a little secret, as someone who has a doctorate in philosophy and has witnessed the behind-the-scenes machinations of the discipline of informal logic that has bequeathed us with these innumerable "fallacies": they are pretty much an unscientific invention of our discipline, spread throughout other disciplines, and now even into internet troll heaven; they often have very little connection to formal logic (and if there is a "science" to argumentation that it is best found in formal logic, where arguments are reduced to mathematical algorithms, rather than the informal logical abode of fallacy hunting––and the former, I am sorry to say, has only a marginal connection with the latter) and so are often spurious assumptions; sometimes they produce uncritical (and thus eventually unscientific) thinking.

Indeed, if Marx, Lenin, or Mao were to be subordinated to the fallacy machine they would be found wanting.  And if we were to treat said fallacy machine as some meter of scientific veracity then we would have to say that the key theorists in the development of revolutionary science were quite often unscientific.  But neither Marx, Lenin, nor Mao cared about these fallacies because the conception of said fallacies was non-existent when they were writing, nor does the supposed "discovery" of these fallacies really undermine their contributions to the development of proletarian science––this is because, as much as it pains me to admit it, naming the fallacies of informal logic is ultimately a joke.  It is not scientific in any way shape or form; it is little more than a useful tool that is only useful if it is subordinated to a larger appreciation of logic.  And one does not become a great thinker simply by memorizing the conceptual array of fallacies––all this does is turn one into a master of formal style and a clever rhetorician, much like the sophists of Ancient Greece.  So stop treating your knowledge of these fallacies, and your ability to trot them out in an argument, as some sort of brilliance on your part: we know about them in philosophy, and some of us know that the reduction of arguments into the mathematics of formal logic often has nothing to do with your fallacy naming skills.

But maybe we should examine the odd fallacy as critical marxists so as to understand this approach as wanting according to the basis of revolutionary science.  For instance, we marxists understand that social consciousness is dependent on social being… not so with the fallacy machine!  After all, there is a fallacy called the circumstantial ad hominem where it is claimed that it is fallacious to interrogate the social context of someone who is making an argument––that we have to focus on the argument itself and utterly ignore the social position in which the argument has been made.  Thus, the argument of a white supremacist should be abstracted from the fact white supremacism; the argument of a misogynist abstracted from the fact of patriarchy.  Critical philosophers (such as Lorraine Code) have called this fallacy into question and yet still it is part of every informal logic syllabus, treated as scientific even though we should recognize it as parascience.

Or what of the fallacy of poisoning the well?  Fallacy-hunters love to cite this fallacy whenever their enemies produce arguments that forbid them from arguing according to their reactionary plans.  Lenin poisoned the well of argument in his attack on Kautsky; Marx poisoned the well of argument on his attack on Proudhon… Is it unscientific to construct an argument that forbids counter-argument based on bullshit premises?  For it needs to be said: this informal logic fallacy-hunting has little to do with the formally logical construction of premises that leads to a necessary and valid conclusion.

I know this must seem like a boring post, and I apologize for its boringness, but the only reason I am expending so many paragraphs is because I have become extremely annoyed by those people in the internet leftist community who waste their time counting fallacies and imagining they have some sort of universal claim to winning an argument.  They do not and, as much as it is occasionally useful to name fallacies and point out argumentative deficiencies, this practice is not only a far-cry from revolutionary science, but most of the people who practice it don't even understand its philosophical basis from the get-go and, in arguments that cause me to almost tear my hair, apply their "knowledge" of fallacies improperly.

Here's an idea: don't appeal to any fucking fallacy unless you can reduce your argument to sentential or propositional logical symbols.  Oh, am I poisoning the well?  See above!  And see also how this demand is clearly not "unscientific"––anyone who speaks of knowledge of fallacies as "scientific" really needs to study their subject matter.  You can speak of fallacies only if you can reduce arguments to formal propositions and perform logical derivations; otherwise, stop your fallacy-hunting and pretending that you are the guardian of argumentative logic when you are just someone relying on some bullshit names made up by informal logicians with too much time on their hands.

My point here is that, while understanding possible fallacies does teach us how to [sometimes] make our arguments clear and precise––and may indeed be useful in order to occasionally expose the lazy arguments made by our opponents––it also produces an over-reliance on the form of an argument rather than the content.  And though form and content are interrelated, for us marxists it is the content that, in the last instance, should matter the most.  What happens with this obsessive need to concentrate primarily on so-called fallacies is that we end up falling into a type of positivism where our ability to think critically––with a depth of content and insight, with the explanatory dimension necessary for thought to be counted as somewhat scientific––ends up degenerating into a mechanical function where we run an argument through some fallacy machine, crank the lever, and decide whether it is worthwhile based on supposed errors in form.  We generally forget that many of these errors in form, though interesting and perhaps even important to consider, are often debated by various argumentation theorists: indeed, I know of more than one colleague whose work focuses on the problem of informal logic, how it stands in contradiction with intuitive modes of reasoning, how it is not even close to being scientific.

Does this mean I will stop pointing out the possible fallacies in my opponents' arguments?  Probably not: I do think it is important to call attention to the failure in this surface level of reasoning from time to time, if only because it makes me feel like I'm "winning" an argument and thus, hypocritically, feel better about myself.  So in many ways this post should remind me that I cannot rely simply on argumentative form and imagine that I have "scientifically" proved something when all I have done is made the way that someone else has argued a point appear erroneous.