At some point in their careers – usually near the beginning – all philosophy professors teach students how to identify informal logical fallacies. Teaching informal fallacies is one of the most important parts of the job. But for most of them, it’s one of their least favorite parts of the job.
Why?
Teaching Informal Fallacies (and Learning Them)
Because it’s hard to do. More accurately, it’s hard to do well. It’s easy enough to do a typology of fallacies. There are formal and informal fallacies. Within the informal camp, there are fallacies of relevance (e.g., appeal to force), fallacies of ambiguity (e.g., equivocation), and so on. Everything looks clear enough on the page. It’s all laid out in plain language in the tragically overpriced textbook.
But when one moves beyond the textbook examples, it all gets rather unclear. The examples are curated, even outright contrived. By contrast, the real world is messy. People commit fallacies, but they tend not to do it so explicitly or flagrantly. Or they do, but it’s buried in text moving in five directions. Finding informal fallacies in the world isn’t much like the textbook.
And to wit, students don’t like it. It’s boring. It requires more careful judgment in practice than in the exercises. At times this judgment is clouded by one’s political or religious views. In an American context, this most often comes from conservative and/or right-wing Christian students. But it’s not exclusive to these groups. It’s one thing to identify a fallacy in text written by political opponents or on topics where the student doesn’t have a vested interest. It’s quite another to identify fallacies written by fellow members of their political party or religious group.
Appeal to Unqualified Authority
It’s easy to see this in the fallacy of appeal to unqualified authority, often near the top of any list of fallacies of weak induction. A key issue is that professors teaching informal fallacies – and textbooks listing those fallacies – don’t always include the word ‘unqualified’ in the name. Some just call it ‘appeal to authority.’
For this and other reasons, many students come to think any appeal to an authority counts as a fallacy. This is, of course, silly. Lots of sources are qualified authorities on topics they know well. It’s not a fallacy to, for example, rely on the word of a physicist for the answer to a physics question. It’s not a fallacy to rely on the word of a biologist about some aspect of biology. A student with a question about Roderick Chisholm‘s epistemology would do well to consult a philosophy professor who specializes in…epistemology.
The trick, again, is using one’s judgment to figure out which authorities are qualified to speak to particular issues. And judgment here can be clouded in the same ways as elsewhere. This judgment can stumble on, say, political debates about the legitimacy of various authorities, e.g., climate scientists.
Ad Hominem
Dozens of women accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault of varying kinds. A jury found him guilty in early 2020 and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. About 23 women have accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or sexual harassment. These are highly credible accusations from a wide variety of sources. There are, of course, many other examples. When defenders of Weinstein and – especially – Trump hurl personal attacks and misogynistic abuse at the victims, most Democrats have little trouble identifying these attacks as ad hominem fallacies. Does that mean they’ve learned their informal fallacies?
Not exactly. When Tara Reade credibly accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, the fallacy skills flew out the window. What they’d easily recognize as an ad hominem fallacy when it involves someone they don’t like, they lose the ability to recognize when it’s someone they’re going to support for President. The tables turned quickly. The Democrats now use ad hominem fallacies against Reade, like calling her a Russian agent.
As a former philosophy professor, let me assure that this shit is incredibly disheartening. To give another example of an appeal to a qualified authority.
Teaching By Paired Examples
I’ll say a word about how I go about teaching informal fallacies, a method I’ve used with some success. Rather than try to teach the typology of fallacies by itself – or try to teach a set of endless examples – I present students with paired statements for each fallacy. The first one is a standard example of the fallacy, while the second one is something that superficially appears to be a fallacy. But in fact, it’s a piece of good reasoning.
I mentioned one case above: the statement of a qualified authority paired with the statement of an unqualified one. But that can be contentious for the reasons I also mentioned above. As a result, I don’t start with appeal to unqualified authority.
Appeal to Pity
It’s better to start with something like the fallacy of appeal to pity. It’s bad reasoning because it appeals to a feeling in the listener devoid of any link to the truth of the argument’s conclusion. It doesn’t make the conclusion more likely to be true. It’s easy to come up with an example students recognize. It may even hit a bit close to home. Consider this example: “You should’ve given me an A on my paper because I really, really needed that A for my scholarship!”
That’s an example of the fallacy in action. But here’s an argument that superficially looks like an appeal to pity, even though – at least in my view – it isn’t one: “5,000 people suffer from unemployment, and their needs are more urgent than anyone else’s right now. We should prioritize their needs with aid and funding.”
The latter argument might evoke pity in the listener, but there’s still an underlying argument giving the listener reasons to believe the conclusion. The argument is implied, and it involves something like, ‘we should focus aid on the people with the greatest need.’ Maybe those reasons are good and maybe they’re bad, but the arguer is at least attempting to rely on good reasons. Any pity involved merely supports rather than drives the argument. Whereas in the first example, pity was the whole of the reasoning.
Appeal to pity is complicated in a good way, allowing the instructor to talk students through debates over whether certain kinds of moves are always or only sometimes illegitimate. Some people have argued there’s no such thing as a non-fallacious emotional appeal, perhaps even now, and so they might say both my above examples are fallacious. Students may have interesting things to say about that debate.
Hasty Generalization
Hasty generalization allows cases for less contentious pairings. Probably every logic textbook has something like the following example: “I spoke with 7 people in Indiana about basketball, and none of them knew anything about the sport. Hoosiers must not know a damn thing about basketball!”
The problem with this, of course, is that there are about 7 million people living in Indiana and the arguer spoke with only 7 of them. There’s little reason to think that a random sample of a few people from Indiana represents 7 million. But contrast that to this example: “The most recent poll of 300 people indicates 53% will vote for Joe Biden while 47% will vote for Donald Trump.” This is, of course, a very timely example. One can use the names of other politicians in other years.
Superficially, they’re the same example. It’s obvious to students why 7 random Hoosiers can’t represent 7 million. But, if so, how can 300 people represent 100+ million? At this point, I lead the students through a discussion of what’s involved in the science of polling. We talk about the process of making sure the ~300 people represent the 100+ million in terms of, e.g., race, gender, et al. and asking careful questions to determine whether members of the sample are likely voters.
Polling is far from perfect, but it does a way better job reaching solid conclusions than taking random samples. While polling sometimes gets it wrong, it’s not a hasty generalization in any but the sloppiest of polling work.
The Importance of Teaching Informal Fallacies
I’m reluctant to appeal to anything like duty when it comes to college teaching. While some do still retain the idyllic vision of the professor as one who prepares the student for democratic citizenship, many accepted a far more pragmatic – even jaded – vision of the profession a long time ago. I count myself among those, for the most part.
But teaching informal fallacies is one of the precious few direct and obvious opportunities philosophy professors have to give students something they’ll use in almost any career or life choice. Some will always use the skills gained to do nothing more than bolster their existing prejudices. It happens, and professors can’t stamp it out completely.
Others, though, will find great value in it. I’ve found that using paired examples generates much better discussion and deeper understanding than plowing through rote examples or getting bogged down in terms.
