30 More Fallacies

Thanks to the budget cuts to education, I am not teaching this summer. While I did consider practicing “would you like fries with that?”, I decided to finish several book projects that have been languishing due to my teaching load. The most recent is 30 More Fallacies, which is a companion to 42 Fallacies.

The book, as the name states, presents thirty fallacies. It is available via Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It is priced at a bank breaking 99 cents (just over three cents a fallacy).

Here is a sample:

Accent, Fallacy of

Description:

This fallacy occurs when a conclusion is drawn from a premise or premises that are ambiguous due to a lack of clarity regarding the emphasis.  Most commonly this fallacy involves an ambiguity arising from a shift in emphasis/accent in the course of the argument. This fallacy has the following form:

1)      Premises are presented that are ambiguous due to a lack of clarity regarding emphasis.

2)      Conclusion C is drawn from these premises.

Ambiguity by itself is not fallacious, but is a lack of clarity in language that occurs when a claim has two (or more) meanings and it is not clear which is intended. The Fallacy of Accent occurs when an inference is drawn from a premise or premises on the basis of a specific sort of ambiguity that arises in three main ways.

The first is that a claim is ambiguous because the intended tone is not clear. For example, the claim “you would be lucky to get this person to work for you” could be high praise or a sarcastic remark depending on the tone used. The second is that the ambiguity arises from a lack of clarity regarding the intended stress. For example, the meaning of the claim “Leslie thinks that Sally has been faithful to him” can shift based on the stress. Stressed one way, the claim can be taken as indicating that Leslie thinks this, but is wrong. A third possibility is that claim is taken out of context. As an example, suppose that the original text was “Among the radical left, Mr. Jones has considerable appeal as a congressional candidate. However, mainstream voters rightfully regard him as a questionable choice, at best.” If someone were to quote this as “Mr. Jones has considerable appeal as a congressional candidate”, then they would be taking the quote out of context.

Perhaps the most used example of this sort of fallacy involves a hard drinking first mate and his teetotaler captain. Displeased by the mate’s drinking habits, the captain always made a point of entering “the mate was drunk today” into the ship’s log whenever the mate was drunk. One day, when the captain was sick, the mate entered “the captain was sober today” into the log. Naturally, the mate intended that the reader would take this emphasis as an indication that the event was unusual enough to be noted in the log and thus infer that the captain was drunk on all the other days. Obviously, to believe that conclusion would be to fall victim to the fallacy of accent.

Example #1

Sally: “I made Jane watch Jennifer Aniston in Just Go With It last night.”

Ted: “What did she think?”

Sally: “She said that she never wants to see another Jennifer Aniston movie.”

Ted: “But you love Jennifer and have all her movies. What are you going to do?”

Sally: “I’ll do exactly what she said. I’ll make her watch Just Go With it repeatedly.”

Ted: “Cruel.”

Sally: “Not at all.  She did say that she never wants to see another Jennifer Aniston movie and I’ll see to that by making sure that she watches that movie rather than another.”

Example #2

Dr. Jane Gupta (on TV): “Though Prescott Pharmaceuticals claims that their VacsaDiet 3000 is ‘guaranteed to help you shed those unsightly pounds’, this claim has not been verified and many of the ingredients in the product present potential health risks.”

Stephen: “Hey, Bob! Dr. Jane Gupta just said that ‘Prescott Pharmaceuticals VacsaDiet 3000 is guaranteed to help you shed those unsightly pounds.’”

Bob: “In that case, I’m going to buy it. After all, Dr. Jane knows her stuff.”

Stephen: “Yes she does. You just missed her-she was on TV talking all about diets and stuff.”

Bob: “I’m sorry I missed that. By the way, do these new pants make me look fat?”

Stephen: “No, your fat makes you look fat.”

Bob: “You wound me, sir.”

Example #3

Employer: “I wasn’t sure about hiring you. After all, you were at your last job just a month. But your former employer’s letter said that anyone would be lucky to get you to work for them.”

Keith: “I will do my best to live up to that, ma’am.”

Employer: “I’m sure you will. Welcome to the company.”

The Fallacies in 30 More Fallacies

Accent, Fallacy of

Accident, Fallacy of

Amphiboly, Fallacy of

Appeal to Envy

Appeal to Group Identity

Appeal to Guilt

Appeal to Silence

Appeal to Vanity/Elitism

Argumentum ad Hitlerum

Complex Question

Confusing Explanations and Excuses

Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

Equivocation, Fallacy of

Fallacious Example

Fallacy Fallacy

Historian’s Fallacy

Illicit Conversion

Incomplete Evidence

Moving the Goal Posts

Oversimplified Cause

Overconfident Inference from Unknown Statistics

Pathetic Fallacy

Positive Ad Hominem

Proving X, Concluding Y

Psychologist’s fallacy

Rationalization

Reification, Fallacy of

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

Victim Fallacy

Weak Analogy

Art & Cannibalism

Image via Wikipedia

Having taught aesthetics since 1993 I am accustomed to hearing about weird and even stupid things in the arts, so I was not even surprised when I saw a bit on cannibalism and art on the History Channel. I had heard about the artists before, but the show inspired me to write a bit about this.

The segment that made the greatest impression was that about Marco Evaristti. This fellow had his fat liposuctioned, turned into meatballs, canned and then served as part of a pasta dinner to fellow artists. The piece was called Polpette al grasso di Marco.

The intent of his work was to explore cannibalism from an artistic standpoint. My own view of the matter is that his approach was more sensationalist than substantive and did not really add much (or anything really) to the aesthetic and philosophical discussion of cannibalism. I am also inclined to regard what he did as not being art. After all, he simply had liposuction, had his fat made into meatballs and served a meal. As such, he was a patient, a purchaser of meat balls, a cook and a host-hardly the stuff of art.

While I have not had liposuction, I have been a patient, I have bought meat balls, I have cooked them and served them at a dinner.In a odd coincidence, I have even had a discussion over cannibalism over meatballs (which began as a discussion over the ethics of eating meat). On the face of it, none of this activities are artistic in nature and hence the burden of proof seems to rest on those who claim it is.

The main distinction between what I have done and what he did was to actually serve his own fat in the meal. While this does technically transform the meal from non-cannibalistic to cannibalistic, it is not clear that this results in an aesthetic transformation of the event. What needs to be shown is that adding such a content to a meal somehow transforms the event into art. After all, serving some beef meatballs to facilitate a discussion about eating meat hardly seems to transform the event into art. Likewise, adding some human fat to the meal does not seem to make that art either.

Interestingly, as I watched the clip showing the artists talking about cannibalism all I could think was this: “you might be talking like artistic intellectuals, but you just ate some guy’s ass fat.”