• Non sequitur – Latin for ‘it doesn’t follow’ (e.g., our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was ‘Gott mil uns’). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities.
• Post hoc, ergo propter hoc – Latin for ‘it happened after, so it was caused by’ (e.g., Jamie Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: 7 know of… a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive]pills.’ Or: before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons).
• Meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa).
• Excluded middle, or false dichotomy – considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., ‘sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.’ Or: ‘either you love your country or you hate it.’ Or: ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’).
• Short-term v. long-term – a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., we can’t afford programmes to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?). Slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., if we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: if the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception).
• Confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., a survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore – despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter – the latter causes the former.*
[* Or: children who watch violent TV programmes tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programmes? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children’s programmes now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school?]
• Straw man – caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance – a formulation that wilfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or – this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy – environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people).
• Suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., an amazingly accurate and widely quoted ‘prophecy’ of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but – an important detail – was it recorded before or after the event? Or: these government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all possible revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?).
• Weasel words (e.g., the separation of powers of the US Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else – ‘police actions’, ‘armed incursions’, ‘protective reaction strikes’, ‘pacification’, ‘safeguarding American interests’, and a wide variety of ‘operations’, such as ‘Operation Just Cause’. Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, ‘An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public’).
Knowing the existence of such logical and rhetorical fallacies rounds out our toolkit. Like all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world, not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.
The American tobacco industry grosses some $50 billion per year. There is a statistical correlation between smoking and cancer, the tobacco industry admits, but not, they say, a causal relation. A logical fallacy, they imply, is being committed. What might this mean? Maybe people with hereditary propensities for cancer also have hereditary propensities to take addictive drugs – so cancer and smoking might be correlated, but the cancer would not be caused by the smoking. Increasingly far-fetched connections of this sort can be contrived. This is exactly one of the reasons science insists on control experiments.
Suppose you paint the backs of large numbers of mice with cigarette tar, and also follow the health of large numbers of nearly identical mice that have not been painted. If the former get cancer and the latter do not, you can be pretty sure that the correlation is causal. Inhale tobacco smoke, and the chance of getting cancer goes up; don’t inhale, and the rate stays at the background level. Likewise for emphysema, bronchitis and cardiovascular diseases.
When the first work was published in the scientific literature in 1953 showing that the substances in cigarette smoke when painted on the backs of rodents produce malignancies, the response of the six major tobacco companies was to initiate a public relations campaign to impugn the research, sponsored by the Sloan Ketter-ing Foundation. This is similar to what the Du Pont Corporation did when the first research was published in 1974 showing that their Freon product attacks the protective ozone layer. There are many other examples.
You might think that before they denounce unwelcome research findings, major corporations would devote their considerable resources to checking out the safety of the products they propose to manufacture. And if they missed something, if independent scientists suggest a hazard, why would the companies protest? Would they rather kill people than lose profits? If, in an uncertain world, an error must be made, shouldn’t it be biased toward protecting customers and the public? And, incidentally, what do these cases say about the ability of the free enterprise system to police itself? Aren’t these instances where government intrusion is in the public interest?
A 1971 internal report of the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation lists as a corporate objective ‘to set aside in the minds of millions the false conviction that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer and other diseases; a conviction based on fanatical assumptions, fallacious rumours, unsupported claims and the unscientific statements and conjectures of publicity-seeking opportunists’. They complain of
the incredible, unprecedented and nefarious attack against the cigarette, constituting the greatest libel and slander ever perpetrated against any product in the history of free enterprise; a criminal libel of such major proportions and implications that one wonders how such a crusade of calumny can be reconciled under the Constitution can be so flouted and violated [sic].
This rhetoric is only slightly more inflamed than what the tobacco industry has from time to time uttered for public consumption.
There are many brands of cigarettes that advertise low ‘tar’ (ten milligrams or less per cigarette). Why is this a virtue? Because it is the refractory tars in which polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and some other carcinogens are concentrated. Aren’t the low tar ads a tacit admission by the tobacco companies that cigarettes indeed cause cancer?
Healthy Buildings International is a for-profit organization, recipient of millions of dollars over the years from the tobacco industry. It performs research on second-hand smoke, and testifies for the tobacco companies. In 1994, three of its technicians complained that senior executives had faked data on inhalable cigarette particles in the air. In every case, the invented or ‘corrected’ data made tobacco smoke seem safer than the technicians’ measurements had indicated. Do corporate research departments or outside research contractors ever find a product to be more dangerous than the tobacco corporation has publicly declared? If they do, is their employment continued?
Tobacco is addictive; by many criteria more so than heroin and cocaine. There was a reason people would, as the 1940s ad put it, ‘walk a mile for a Camel’. More people have died of tobacco than in all of World War II. According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020, in part because of a massive advertising campaign to portray smoking as advanced and fashionable to young women in the developing world. Part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking and scientific method. Gullibility kills.