http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFeXWxXt19E&feature=watch_response
Here I’ll be examining a particular manner of fallacy which lately, I’ve been encountering more and more. It’s so common that I am compelled to believe that it must have an official name, but I don’t happen to know what that is. If at some point, someone finds out, please let me know and I will add the name in an annotation right about here. For the time being, I’ll just call this the Spontaneous Reframing Fallacy.
This is a kind of Strawman used as a Red Herring, except that instead of strawmanning the position of the individual it is being used against, it strawmans the subject of disagreement. It occurs when the Strawman is timed to distract from the actual point of contention under discussion, in the interest of pretending that the two of you have, all this time, actually been in disagreement about something else entirely. So let us first revisit these terms: Red Herring, Strawman.
A Red Herring is a kind of logical fallacy which, instead of answering a question or argument, strives to distract from it.
“Well of course Bush and Cheney profited from the invasion of Iraq
“We all did? All of us? Every last one of us? Even those who have died in the fighting?”
“Oh, well, if you don’t grasp this, there isn’t much hope for you. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you but people die in war.”
<Hold up!>
“I’m quite well aware that people die in war, and when they die in war, I am hard-pressed to see how they can profit from it. And if they did not, in fact, profit, then it wasn’t all of us which makes the statement that we all profited from it incorrect. So are you willing to admit that you misspoke?”
A Strawman, on the other hand, is a kind of fallacy which tries to create the appearance of refuting your position by subtly accusing you of holding a fundamentally different position; a fundamentally different position which perhaps resembles yours cosmetically, but which is nonetheless fundamentally different.
“I lament the corruption in this country.”
“Well why bother living in a country you hate so much?”
<Hold up!>
“I don’t hate the country. I object to its corruption. There’s a difference. Pay attention.”
So for an example of a spontaneous reframing, let me use an example from a discussion I had recently. I had expressed the sentiment that no religious claim holds up under scrutiny which is why every religion dedicates itself to the end of avoiding and discouraging scrutiny. Someone disagreed with me, making the insistence that Christianity does hold up. I asked if he would be interested in testing that assertion. He said he would be, so I asked him to present me with a Christian claim which he believed held up.
He immediately commenced to shower me with tired, hackneyed rhetoric we’ve all heard hundreds of times.
I expressed surprise at his...generosity. After all, I had asked for a single claim to scrutinize and he provided me with a selection. So I took my pick. Among his claims was the one that the United States
Now a big pet peeve of mine is the common practice of claiming that one knows something, with no comprehension whatsoever about the significance of this word (know). Belief can rest on personal experience (indeed, on virtually anything), but knowledge must be demonstrable. You can believe whatever silly little thing floats your boat, but if you can’t show something—if you can’t demonstrate it—then you don’t know it and you have no business claiming that you do. You can accurately claim that you believe it, but not that you know it; not unless you can demonstrate it.
If you make a claim and I ask how you know it, and you say that you just do, what you are demonstrating is that you have no comprehension whatsoever what it means to know something.
So when you make a claim and I ask, “How do you know that?” I’m inviting you to make with the demonstration. This question (“How do you know that?”) is the form such scrutiny takes.
So in all honesty, I brought more than scrutiny. You see, the evidence doesn’t just fail to support this claim; it refutes it. So I indicated this claim and asked this fellow what he thought Benjamin Franklin meant when he said, “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”
His response was to tell me that, although Franklin
<Hold up!>
I wasn’t saying that. I was not trying to make an appeal to authority against the “merits” of Christianity, whatever they may be. I was making an evidence-based argument against his claim that this country was founded entirely by Christians. I was simply showing that, given the fact that surely Benjamin Franklin of all people counts as a founding father, and given the fact that Benjamin Franklin was demonstrably not Christian, this claim that the United States was founded entirely by Christians does much more than break down under scrutiny. It utterly disintegrates with just a dash of actual evidence, unless that evidence is very rigorously cherry-picked.
I can only conclude that the only reason this fellow accepted this claim in the first place was due to a lack of scrutiny.
Incidentally, if anyone’s interested in scrutinizing this claim I just made about BF, I will refer you to the 1758 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack. I guess, technically, you could say that he didn’t actually say it, but rather wrote it, but nonetheless, it is clearly his sentiment.
Next example:
“You really should accept Christ into your heart. I mean, it would be a real pity if you went to hell to burn eternally after you died just because you were too proud for your eyes to be opened to the truth of this world.”
“Uh, first, simply calling something ‘the truth’ does not make it true. Second, any god who would arrange someone’s infinite, eternal torture for refusing to engage in special pleading and unreasonable credulity is a brutal tyrant I want no part of. Besides, there is no hell.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Well, hell, by definition, is a place of eternal fire. Fire, by definition, is a chemical reaction—a reaction between molecules—which means that for there to be fire, there must be molecules, all of which are part of the flesh, which I’m told we leave behind when we die.
“Hell is also, by definition, a place of torture. Torture depends on pain, which is a warning signal that something is wrong with the body—with the flesh; a signal carried along the nerves to the brain where it is processed and endowed with an emotional significance. That means that, in order to experience pain, one must have both nerves to carry the signal, and a brain to process it, both of which are part of the body—of the flesh—which I’m told we leave behind when we die.”
“Well that’s true about fire in this world. The fire in hell is different.”
“Well that means that it is fire which is not fire; something which does not fit the defining characteristics of fire, but which we nonetheless call fire just the same. In that case, it makes just as much sense to call hell a place of disco, however fitting some might consider that.”
“Well say what you will, but I prefer to live in a world surrounded by mystery and wonder.”
“Bullshit.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well because you worship one of the gods of the gaps, who are extraordinarily anti-social beings. They always make it a point to live at an epistemic distance, just out of sight. They live in the wind until we figure out that wind is just air molecules in motion. They live in thunder, until we figure out that thunder is just high pressure air meeting low pressure air. They live at the tops of impassable mountains, until one day when those mountains suddenly become passable. Then they have to go live somewhere else.
“They live in the clouds, until one day when we suddenly figure out how to fly. They live in the space above a planet, until we figure out that the world is round, which means that living above it means living around it which places the planet pretty much in just a hole—a gap—in heaven. Then they have to make due with living within each of us in ways that vigorously avoid scrutiny, or as abstract philosophical concepts no one can ever seem to establish agreement over the precise meaning of.
“Basically, the god of the gaps is born or invoked whenever you take everything you don’t currently know, everything unknown, all the answers you don’t currently have, lump them all together, and rubber-stamp them [GOD], thereby insisting that they are known. ‘Why does the wind blow? I don’t know. It must be God.’ ‘How did the Universe come to exist? I don’t know. It must be God.’ ‘I don’t know what it is. Therefore, it must be God. Therefore, I do know what it is.’ ‘It is unknown, therefore it is known.’ Now if you sincerely believe that God is the answer to all, then you believe that you know the answer to all, so where’s the mystery? What do you have to wonder about?”
“Look. I have a right to be religious.”
<Hold up!>
“I have yet to suggest otherwise. The subject of our discussion is the problems with the reasoning utilized in your arguments. Do you have the right to be religious? Absolutely. Do I have the right to point out the problems in you reasoning? Absolutely.”
Next example:
“They should teach intelligent design in biology classes in order to cover both sides of the controversy.”
“There is no controversy. ID is not a viable scientific concept.”
“Yes it is.”
“No. It’s not an explanation.”
“Yes it is.”
“Let me explain something here. The only way something gets to be called a scientific explanation is if it describes an empirical, verifiable, falsifiable, testable process. ID doesn’t do that.”
“Yes it does.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What’s the process?”
“That an intelligent designer of some sort made everything.”
“And in the course of making everything, what process did the designer use?”
“I don’t know. The designer works in mysterious ways.”
“Well that process, which you just admitted you don’t know, is the very focus of science. If you can’t describe a process, then you don’t have a scientific explanation. This is why intelligent design is not science. There are only two kinds of creationist claims: those which don’t lend themselves to testing and therefore have no utility, and those which do lend themselves to testing and have failed it. Until you get a process figured out, you don’t have a scientific explanation, and therefore you don’t have an alternative to evolution which does describe a process. You can’t replace something that works with nothing that doesn’t.”
“...Well science isn’t everything.”
<Hold up!>
“You might try paying attention. The subject of our disagreement is not what constitutes everything, but what belongs in a science class. Yes, I agree that science is not everything. It’s not art. It’s not literature. It’s not philosophy (although it has roots in philosophy). It is, however, everything that has any place whatsoever within a science class, and that’s the subject here.”
So basically, the Spontaneous Reframing fallacy is clung to out of a desperate aversion to this admission: “You have a point.”
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