Non sequitors and other "debate techniques"...

[Shipwack]

Ray Mcgovern, when he was confronting Rumsfeld today, refuted Rummy's spin by calling it (rightly so), a "non sequitor".

This is one of the techniques the neo-cons use to spin their lies. I'm trying to educate myself in these techniques so I can more easily refute them. I found one excellent reference that lists and explains 42 types of logical fallacies. at Are there any others? So far on my own I have (with help from dictionary.com and the above link):

non sequitor - A conclusion that does not follow from the initial premises or evidence.

Rumsfeld (on what proof he had that Saddam had WMDs)- "It’s easy for you to make a charge, but why do you think that the men and women in uniform every day, when they came out of Kuwait and went into Iraq, put on chemical weapon protective suits? Because they liked the style?"

The assertion is that because the -troops- believed Saddam had WMDs, the Administration was correct in declaring Saddam had WMDs.

ad hominem attack - an attempt to refute an argument by disparaging the person making the point.

LIMBAUGH: Assailing a journalist who had criticized Nixon: "Michael Gartner, portraying himself as a balanced, objective journalist with years and years of experience faking events, and then reporting them as news--and doing so with the express hope of destroying General Motors in one case and destroying businesses that cut down trees, the timber industry, in another." (TV show, 4/27/94)
From the FAIR.org archives

straw-man argument - the attacker restates the others position, twisting it into something that is easily refuted, and acts as if the original position is disproved.

"Senator X says that we should not fund the attack submarine program. I disagree entirely. I can't understand why he wants to leave us defenseless like that." example from nizkor.org

Those are 3 of them... anyone else have any favorite examples/techniques? And where can I learn more about these? College philosophy 101?

::edited to correct first link::

[Ian David]

1. See also: CARL SAGAN'S BALONEY DETECTION KIT

CARL SAGAN'S BALONEY DETECTION KIT


Based on the book The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan
http://www.powells.com/biblio/7-0345409469-1

Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric

* Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.
* Argument from "authority".
* Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavourable" decision).
* Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
* Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).
* Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).
* Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
* Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).
* Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)
* Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").
* Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.
* Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.
* Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
* Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).
* Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").
* Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).
* Confusion of correlation and causation.
* Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack..
* Suppressed evidence or half-truths.
* Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"


More:
http://www4.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html

[stepnw1f]

2. Hey... THANK YOU (nt)

[bananas]

3. You posted the wrong link

Your link to "excellent reference that lists and explains 42 types of logical fallacies" is to the home page of http://www.dcscripts.com/ and I don't see anything there about logical fallacies.

[Shipwack]

4. Corrected now

OOps! Sorry... thanks for the heads up.

[bananas]

8. You might also be interested in "Innumeracy"

a book written in 1989 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679726012/102-1581179-8270553?v=glance&n=283155
browse around his website http://www.math.temple.edu/~paulos

[Warpy]

5. Try the Fallacy Zoo

you'll find every right wing "debate" technique listed with examples.
http://www.goodart.org/fallazoo.htm

[C_U_L8R]

6. Fascinating...

reads like the Republican Playbook.

What a shifty corrupt bunch they are.

[Jade Fox]

7. I've been trying to figure out what it is....

when someone goes on the attack and you smack them back, they immediately revert to playing the victim. It must be they perceive their attack as some sort of justify able defense based on past oppression. The Christian Right is honing this one to a fine point. They start out with the assumption of a War on Christianity, and then attack others. (There was a great cartoon posted here a few weeks ago showing a gay man minding his own business while a Christian comes up and whacks him. The gay man ignores the Christian so the Christian whacks him again twice. The gay man says, "Stop that!" and the Christian points at him crying, "Anti-christian!"

Anyway, it's another Wingnut Whiner technique gaining ground.

[Coexist]

9. this is a really cool thread - bookmarking for later

thanks.

[Igel]

10. But many of these fallacies, while forbidden in logic,

are also established techniques in rhetoric. There the validity of the conclusion isn't at question, but how you sway the audience is key. Logical arguments sometimes don't sway the audience. And then there's discourse pragmatics, in which the actual text may state one thing and seem lead to one conclusion, but the only possible correct conclusion is actually something different. Logic deals with meaning and conclusions, and assumes that what the text of the syllogisms say is all there is; pragmatics deals with how meaning is construed, noting that far more than simple words determine meaning. Pragmatics has to be prior to logic.

All three have their use.

Here's a standard problem in semantics(introductory semantics is based on first-order logic). Somebody asks if you have any kids. "Yes, we have two." That's Then it turns out you have three kids. But if you have three kids, obviously you have two kids: The existence of three entails the existence of two. But the person answering is uncooperative, and therefore untrustworthy. He all but lied. It's different if somebody says, "Hey, we're having a party, we need to borrow a couple of chairs. Do you have any?" "Yes, we have two." In fact, the guy sees there are a dozen in your garage when he picks up the two chairs, but no falsity's perceived. This speaker's cooperative; the question wasn't the logical yes/no question it looked like, and "12" would have been inappropriate, even if the existence of 12 chairs --> existence of 2 chairs. Questions can be challenges or insults, a request for information, or a denial of a proposition. Logic only sees the text, not the meaning, and when there's a mismatch between the two it goes astray. It's why logicians like logical formalisms: they're clear, and the rules for interpretation are explicit.

As for the first example, it's unclear that Rumsfeld's answer's a non sequitur. It depends on what the text of the question was and the context it was asked in. "What proof did you have that Hussein had WMDs?" is ambiguous, in context. If it's a simple, neutral request for information, Rumsfeld's reply is clearly a non sequitur, even though not providing the information may move the conversation along better. If the question was interpretable as equivalent to the statement, "I don't believe you really thought Saddam had WMDs, prove me wrong," then the reply is reasonable. The first part of his reply says it was interpreted as the latter, and clearly so: he uses the word 'charge'. Perhaps Rumsfeld misunderstood the reporter's intent. But it's hard to apply logic to conversation that way.

The other two ... eh. Rhetoric says such things are fine, for the purpose; and just because it's a fallacy doesn't mean the conclusion is false. That's sort of the problem with fallacies, and why they're ok in rhetoric, where the goal is persuasive speaking, not valid conclusions.

[BuyingThyme]

11. The great thing about today's non-sequitor is that anybody actually

listening would have noticed that it went full circle (back in to the realm of sequitity, if I might be permitted to make up my own word).

Rumsfeld asked why the troops were equipped with anti-chemical garb, and, of course, the answer was because Rumsfeld lied them into being so. So, maybe it wasn't a non-sequitor after all.

[Gabi Hayes]

12. always love the discussions of propaganda techniques, but....

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=non+sequitor&btnG=Google+Search

[BuyingThyme]

15. Damn, I hate that.

Takeover.

[Shipwack]

14. I agree, for the most part...

It might have more accurately described as "circular logic", than a non sequitor, though non sequitor is technically correct since saying that the troops wore body armor can't be used to logically prove that Saddam had WMDs...

Then again, I'm a word geek, and like splitting hairs... :)

[EstimatedProphet]

13. Try the Fallacy Files too

Http://www.fallacyfiles.org