I found the nifty graphic below over at Flood's place. It is a pithy and pictorial presentation of a point I have been hammering away at online for the last twenty years. Here is a Substack hammer-job. Some say we should give up the fight and let the forces of linguistic decadence obliterate the distinction between posing and begging a question. I am inclined to say that we should fight on against the anti-civilizational forces while well aware that fighting-on may be nothing more than a pointless rear-guard action.
What's with all the contemporary noise about 'whataboutism'?
Example 1. A lefty complains, "Trump is a liar!" A conservative responds, "What about Hillary and Bill and Obama? They are not liars?"
Example 2. A pro-lifer argues that killing the prenatal is immoral and meets with the response, "What about all of the 'pro-lifers' who bomb abortion clinics, terrorize clinic staff, and block women’s legal access into such clinics?”
On one way of looking at it, 'whataboutism' is just the ad hominem tu quoque fallacy. It's old wine in a new, but very ugly, bottle. If the question is whether Trump is a liar, then it is irrelevant to bring in Hillary and Bill and Obama, despite their being egregious and proven liars. Similarly in the abortion case. The violence of a few pro-lifers is simply irrelevant to the question of the moral permissibility of abortion. Or suppose my doctor, who has cancer, diagnoses cancer in me. It would be absurd for me to protest the diagnosis on the ground that the sawbones has it too. What about you, doc?
So can anything good be said about 'whataboutism'?
Let's think a bit deeper about example 1. If a lefty points out Trump's undeniable flaws in an effort to show that he is unfit for office, then it is relevant to bring up Hillary's also undeniable flaws. For if her considerable flaws do not count against her fitness for high office, why should Trump's?
Understood in this way, 'whataboutism' is not the fallacy of tu quoque, but a legitimate charge of double standard. Trump is being held to a higher standard than Hillary.
If the question is simply about Trump's character, then Hillary's is irrelevant. But if the two are competing for the same office, and Trump's defects are cited as disqualifying, then it is relevant to bring up Hillary's. Not to do so would be to employ a double standard.
One conclusion, I think, is that 'whataboutism' is a waste basket term that ought to be dumped. We already have 'tu quoque fallacy' and 'double standard.'
"Donald Trump is the first president in history whose campaign has come under F. B. I.-initiated investigation for collusion with a hostile foreign power. And the person heading that investigation, the F. B. I. director, has been fired." (Timothy Egan, NYT Op-Ed, 11 May 2017)
It might help if you read Rosenstein's Comey memorandum and related documents here. But if you are a lefty, it probably won't.
According to Wikipedia, the argumentum ad lapidem, or appeal to the stone, "consists in dismissing a statement as absurd without giving a proof of its absurdity."
This supposed fallacy takes its name from the following incident reported in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson:
57. Refutation of Bishop Berkeley After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." Boswell: Life
But where is the fallacy? If the good bishop really did maintain the nonexistence of material objects such as stones, then Johnson really did refute him by drawing Boswell's attention to a massive stone and the resistance it offered to Johnson's foot. But of course Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects. He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. If you know your Berkeley you know that what I just wrote is true and that the bishop cannot be refuted by kicking a stone.
Johnson's mistake, therefore, was not that he simply dismissed Berkeley's thesis without argument; his mistake was that he took Berkeley to be maintaining something other than what he in fact maintained, and then went on, stupidly, to refute this other proposition.
Johnson's fallacy was the ignoratio elenchi, not the ad lapidem. The very name 'ad lapidem' shows misunderstanding.
I suggest that there is something fallacious in the very notion of the ad lapidem fallacy. I rather doubt that we have any need to add this so-called fallacy to the grab-bag list of informal fallacies. Surely it cannot be the case that it is always wrong to dismiss a statement as false or even absurd without proof. Some claims are refutable by kicking. Suppose you maintain that there are no pains. Without saying anything, I kick you in the shins with steel-tipped boots, or perhaps I kick you a bit higher up. I will have brought home to you the plain falsehood of your claim. The fallacy behind ad lapidem is the notion that no assertion can be legitimately dismissed, that every assertion, no matter what, must be paid the respect of an explicit discursive rebuttal.
Or suppose sophomore Sam says that there is no truth. I would be fully within my epistemic rights to respond, 'Is that so?' and then walk away.
In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.
We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.
Herewith, the separate post. Plainly, the following is an invalid argument:
1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.
ergo
2. Smith did not kill Jones.
Examples like this appear to support the idea that some appeals to ignorance (or arguments from ignorance) are reasonable and non-fallacious. According to Douglas N. Walton,
. . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty. This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument, but it can be reasonable in the context of the rules of argument in the criminal law. (Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation, Cambridge UP, 2007, 20th ed., p. 47)
I wonder if this is right. Which better represents a criminal process that terminates in an acquittal? Is it the above argument or the following argument?
1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.
ergo
3. The presumption of Jones' innocence has not been defeated and Jones is in the eyes of the law not guilty.
I now think it is the second argument. But note that (i) the second argument is valid, and (ii) there is no appeal to ignorance in the second argument. The validity of the second, enthymematic, argument is obvious when we make explicit the tacit assumption, namely, that
4. If the accused in a criminal proceeding has not been proven to be guilty of the crime with which he is charged beyond a reasonable doubt, then the presumption of innocence has not been defeated and the accused is in the eyes of the law not guilty.
So the second argument is (formally) valid. It also does not represent an appeal to ignorance. One is not arguing that: Jones is not guilty in reality (as opposed to in the eyes of the law) because it has not been proven that he is not guilty. One is arguing that the presumption of innocence has not been defeated. The following are different propositions:
a. Jones is not guilty
b. Jones' presumption of innocence (POI) has not been defeated.
It ought to be obvious that they are different. They are logically independent. Each is consistent with the negation of the other. Thus the following sets are consistent dyads: {Jones is guilty; Jones' POI has not been defeated}, {Jones is not guilty; Jones' POI has been defeated}.
Conclusion
According to Walton, ". . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty. This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument . . ." I think this betrays a misunderstanding of the notion of presumption, and in particular, presumption of innocence.
The presumption is not that a person is not guilty if he has not be shown to be guilty; the presumption is that he is to be treated as if not guilty, if he has not been shown to be guilty. In the case of O. J. Simpson, almost everyone agrees that he is guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Yet he was found not guilty. Obviously, there is a difference between being not guilty (being not guilty in fact) and being found not guilty (being not guilty in the eyes of the law). The presumption of innocence was not defeated in that trial. But that is consistent, as I argued above, with the accused's being guilty.
It is therefore a mistake to think that the POI procedural rule embodies an appeal to ignorance. And since there is no appeal to ignorance here, there is no reasonable or non-fallacious appeal to ignorance.
UPDATE: Dave Bagwill writes,
My grand-dad did not mince words, nor did he suffer fools. When I tried to trick him with verbal technicalities, he would accuse me of "trying to pick the fly shit out of the pepper".
He would have said that about your latest post 'On Ad Ignorantiam and the Law', but he would have been wrong. You made some very fine, fine distinctions in that post that really cut to the heart of the matter. Thanks, and well done. (I've used that book by Walton for years and generally found it useful.)
You're welcome, Dave. My response to your grandfather would be to make yet another distinction, one between hairsplitting and the drawing of necessary distinctions, and then distinguish different kinds of hairsplitting.
One sort of hairsplitting is to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.
But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires.
Walton may be the premier writer on informal logic. His book is apparently well-thought-of. 2007 saw the 20th edition. I'd guess there have been editions since then.
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