Sometimes Fallacy Friday comes late. When that happens we’ll just turn it into “Silly Argument Saturday”. Hopefully that won’t be very often. But anyway let’s down to discussing some silly arguments. Also known as: fallacies.
Moving the Goalpost: This is when someone effectively changes the rules of a debate to make it unwinnable. This refers (usually) to evidence for or against a position and the practice of demanding more or “better” evidence when presented with the evidence they asked for originally. An example of this could be Christians asking for evidence of evolution and when presented with sufficient evidence, then immediately asking for more or another type of evidence.
Post Hoc Argument: 1 thing happens and something else happens afterwards. “It rained… but we had been praying for rain. Thus we caused the rain, WITH our prayers!” This fallacy is what happens when people look for the “reason” why something (“the primary thing”) happened and “discover” that something else (“the other thing”) had happened at more or less the same time, and decide to say that the other thing caused the primary thing.
Shifting The Burden of Proof: When someone rejects a claim made by you, and you demand that the person prove your claim wrong, ESPECIALLY when you merely asserted that your argument or stance was right, but didn’t provide evidence. The person who rejects your claim doesn’t have an obligation to prove your claim wrong, especially if the claim you are making is an extraordinary claim (as religions are, for instance). You are to provide evidence for your own position, not demand that others prove you wrong just because they disagree with you.
These 3 arguments are very common and can be seen on a variety of sides in a multitude of conflicts. Do you know of any other common “silly arguments” that you’d like to see covered?
Not sure if they count as “arguments” but two dishonest debating techniques that always irritate me are the “Gish Gallop” (Throw in dozens of unsupported assertions and demand detailed refutations to bog your adversary down) and False Equivalence (especially the Atheism is equivalent to a religion argument).
I have no idea what the name for this tactic is, but one which especially irks me is one frequently exhibited by AGW-deniers, either in response to a point, or as some sort of a “point”: Assumes a (typically? absurd) “solution” to AGW, and because there is a (typically? obvious) problem with that alleged-solution, concludes AGW (the problem) isn’t real, blah, blah, blah…
For example (this is a paraphrase of a commentator on another blog not so far away, albeit some years ago): “Not everyone can festoon their house with dozens of windmills, so Global Warming is a fraud.”
This sounds like a form of “Argument from Consequences” mixed with “TINA/There is no alternative”.
It’s annoying to deal with isn’t it?
Using my paraphrased example, it seems, to me, to be at best a loose “Argument from Consequences” — the (conveniently unstated) premise was existence of AGW (the nutter’s a denier), not “festooning all homes with many windmills”. He’s not only moved the goalposts, but changed the game being played (so to speak).
It’s also not quite “TINA” for similar reasons, albeit I certainly see how it looks like a combination of the two. But, somehow, not quite…
Now that I think of it, Richard Dawkins once made a similar-ish complaint about some evolution-deniers (creationists), something along the lines of (again, very much a paraphrase) “It is not a valid argument to say that because you don’t believe the premise, the premise cannot be true” — describing something that is not-unlike the tactic I’m whinging about.
And yes, it is very annoying!
I’m currently wandering down a Flat Earth rabbit hole, and those people make some profoundly silly arguments. Usually of the form:
1. P
2. Q is a fraud perpetuated by [religious group] to bring about [new world order] by suppressing [completely irrelevant or insignificant idea] which you can find out about from [even less coherent blog] and [YouTube videos] and did I mention [secret society] is associated with [prominent person] currently or formerly of [pro-Q organization]?
I’m not really doing it justice: I wound up connecting the end of the rant back to Q. Scattershot rambling at will is hard. I’ll re-frame it thus:
1.
foreach (worldview as belief) {print belief;
feelings(P)->truthiness += feelings(belief)->truthiness;
if (feelings(P)->truthiness > feelings(¬P)->truthiness)
break;
}
2. Therefore, P
Also popular:
1. I intuit P.
2. I am right.
3. No true Scotsman disagrees with me.
4. Therefore, ¬P is insufficiently Scottish.
Though my favourite has to be:
1. Only first-hand experience is trustworthy.
2. Photographs and videos are not first-hand experience.
3. Therefore, photographs and videos showing ¬P are untrustworthy.
4. Here are photographs and videos showing P.
5. Therefore, P.
While this adventure started out fun, overall it’s been disheartening. These aren’t people you can actually teach, they’ve been hiding from the cold of the unknown in the warm embrace of truthiness for too long.