I have a motto for this work:  To name it is to tame it.

I search for terms that enable us to label common mental “moves,” especially the faulty ones.  If you have a name for a move, you’re prepared to identify it when it flies by in thought and conversation. That way, you can catch others in weak reasoning, and indeed, keep your own weak reasoning in check. 

Most mistakes, from the disastrous to the merely costly aren’t made for lack of data, but for lack of care in interpreting it. Minds that interpret well make better decisions.  Understanding the mind’s interpretive moves is the key to making better decisions.

This kind of work has a long tradition. Since Aristotle, philosophers have been labeling “fallacies.” William James described philosophy as “an extraordinarily stubborn attempt to think clearly,” which, in practice, is like trekking a winding mountain ridge in the dark, trying to avoid tumbling down the slope on either side.  The fallacies are like faint red warning lights down the slopes wherever we go.  They’re not bright enough to light a clearly delineated path, but they do cast a little color on the soft shoulders where the path gets precarious.

The fallacies originate in a tradition of deductive philosophy that has lost considerable ground over the past two millennia. For Plato and early thinkers, figuring out how to live was going to be a lot like working out the rules of geometry.  By deductive proof you could build from one irrefutable rule to the next, trekking the long path of clear thinking with confidence.

Millennia of confident, but often misguided trekking sometimes way off the trail have revealed that the trail isn’t actually that brightly lit. Fallacies aren’t really about distinguishing true from false but rather stronger from weaker arguments.  If a fallacy points to anything false it’s the form of argument not the argument itself. For example, take the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The phrase translates as “after the fact therefore because of the fact.”  If you won the lottery after reading this column, it would be fallacious for me to assume reading my article caused you to win.  Just because you won after reading my article it doesn’t necessarily mean you won because of reading my article. 

The tricky word is “necessarily.”  In fact, you could have won because you read my article. It’s not that the conclusion is necessarily false, it’s that the means by which I reached it is weak.  Fallacies don’t constrain thinking as much as we might hope.  They’re not like guardrails that make it obvious which next step to take along the path.  They only warn us when the motivation to take a particular step is not probably a sufficiently compelling one.

Philosophers did the earliest work on the fallacies, but by now behavioral scientists have joined the campaign to name and tame.  Work by economists and social psychologists on bounded rationality is in the tradition of naming and taming.  So too is the work of psychological diagnosticians who identify the systematic flaws in thinking experienced by people with mental disorders.

This tradition of formally identifying fallacies parallels a kind of intuitive work we all do. Everyone is a mind reader, monitoring others for slippery arguments and we hope, monitoring themselves for them too. There’s a legacy of colorful phrases that capture aspects of mindreading for fallacies:  The pot calling the kettle black, too big for his britches, counting his eggs before they hatch, misery loves company, sour grapes, damning with faint praise.

Still, ever since seeing the value of this kind of work, I’ve wondered why the fallacies aren’t more systematically part of everyone’s vocabulary.  MD’s are body readers.  They have a very systematic jargon for symptoms and illnesses. Auto mechanics are car readers. They have systematic jargon for car symptoms and malfunctions. We’re all mind readers.  Knowing the fallacies by name would really help tame thinking’s symptoms and malfunctions. Fallacy fluency would be good for us personally, but also for society overall.  If we all knew the symptoms and malfunctions by name, we could stop weak but seductive arguments in their tracks, saving whole populations from costly mistakes and terrible choices.

Very few people are fluent in the fallacies, and I wonder why. It’s not as though the moves that the fallacies name and tame don’t come up in conversation.  They do all day in our slightest personal misinterpretations, our toughest interpersonal disagreements and our largest political conflicts. An enormous amount of human attention goes into figuring out who to trust and whose mind is acting up. But the jargon that would help us sort minds out is surprisingly thin.  We give the jargon less thought that we give computer jargon, even though mind-minding jargon matters more. Why aren’t the fallacies required curriculum in public schools?  And if they were, why would parents be unable to help their children with their homework? Why is the technical jargon of mind reading like a foreign language to most of us?

I suspect there are many reasons. One is that fallacies are thoughts about thinking and as such are one step more abstract than where we tend to do most of our thinking.  Minds are sensitive too. They’re willful, touchy and easily offended. Minds analyzing minds therefore broach touchy subjects. If you’re sharing your thought with me, and I bring up some fallacy that applies to your thinking, I’m moving the topic up a level from your thought, to thoughts about your thoughts. That can feel like one-upsmanship. 

Still, there’s plenty of talk about malfunctioning minds. Nothing warms a conversation up like talk about the cluelessness of someone outside the conversation. You would think we would all be fluent in the fallacies for the fun they provide when applied to other people. 

“Did you hear what Ben said the other day?  Stepped right into a post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy. What a bozo.”

For all of the reasons we might not want to be fluent in the fallacies, two reasons stand out. I’ll cover one here and the other in a later article. 

One is backlash.  One-upsmanship launches competition.  If I’m free to point out the errors in your thinking, you’re free to point out the errors in mine and people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, or at least are reluctant to do so. I don’t want you pointing out my fallacies. 

Truth is, I am ambivalent about the truth.  I’m reluctant to give up the freedom that fallacious thinking affords me to think whatever I want and interpret data the way I please.  In everyday life I don’t necessarily want to think clearly. I want hope more than accuracy.  My instinct to survive is strong, and therefore I might want to think clearly and accurately, but my instinct to alleviate fear and bask in optimism is stronger so I want the leeway to think whatever encouraging thoughts come to me.  Why would I want to hold you to a high standard on accuracy when you could turn the same precision on me?

In a subtle yet fundamental sense we are all eisoptrophobic. We have a fear of mirrors, reflecting our flawed logic back at us.  To mix glassy metaphors, people in glass houses are reluctant to hold up mirrors to others because others can reciprocate.
Of course if you did turn the mirror on me, I could one-up you again, finding a fallacy in your assessment of my fallacies.  But then you could accuse me of some fallacy in my interpretation of your fallacy of your interpretation of my fallacy in my interpretation of your fallacy. 

Better to not even get started, than to deal with that hall of mirrors.

The other problem, which I’ll leave to another article, has to do with a way that each fallacy lights up only one slippery slope off the ridge, but not the other. Fallacies come in opposing pairs. For every caution there’s an equal and opposite caution.  That will take some explaining in an article I’ll call fallacy pairs.