Helping you to better handle the truth
By Ben Buckley
Photos by Ben Buckley
Information bombards us every day in the form of news, advertising, and entertainment.
This wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that our brains evolved to hunt and gather food on the savannah, not to sort out large amounts of information and separate truth from opinion. As a result, our human brains are prone to many biases and heuristics that can lead us to believe things without good reason. This isn’t to say that humans are not capable of sound reasoning, but it takes a conscious effort. The purpose of my column will be to outline a few of the fallacies and persuasion techniques used in the media, and how to avoid being taken in by them.
With everyone discussing the news on the internet, it’s more important than ever to know the difference between a valid argument and a fallacy. Formally, a fallacy (pronounced “phallus-ee”, so get your giggling out of the way now) is an argument where the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. More helpfully, a fallacy is when you try to argue for some proposition, but you bring up facts that have no bearing on whether the proposition is true.
To illustrate this, I am going to start with a statement that I hope we can all agree on: one plus one is two. This statement is true no matter which language you translate it into; if you say “eins plus eins gleich zwei,” it is still true. The truth remains if you say it with a sarcastic tone in your own voice, if you write it out in sticks and stones, if you shout it on a street corner, or if you append it to the end of a misogynistic YouTube comment. It remains true no matter who says it, whether it’s you, your grandmother, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Adolf Hitler.
It’s even true if you include it in a fallacious argument: If you say, “The moon is made of cheese, therefore, one plus one is two,” the argument as a whole is a fallacy, but that doesn’t change the fact that the conclusion is true. This means that if I come along and say, “one plus one can’t be two — Hitler believed one plus one is two, and he was evil!” I am wrong, because I’m using irrelevant information to try to conclude that one plus one is not two. You’re probably familiar with the “argumentum ad Hitlerum” — a popular fallacy on the internet — and a special case of “argumentum ad hominem,” (a case in which one attacks an opponent instead their argument).
If this all seems condescendingly obvious, bear in mind that what holds for “one plus one equals two” holds for any true statement, and what holds for “one plus one equals three” holds for any false statement. In practice, fallacies are covert, and they come up when dealing with more complex real-world topics. This is no excuse to stop exercising basic reasoning skills. As long as a fallacy continues to persuade an audience, it will continue to be used. It is my hope that, through this column, I can help make the most common fallacies a little less effective.
