BRIEF media example of language being used in a misleading/deceptive manner
m_h3
Week5ReadingMaterial.pdf
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The Wason Selection Test
A B 3 4
Each card has a letter on one side and a number
on the other. Which card or cards must you turn over
to check that all four cards obey (i.e. are not
violating) the rule:
If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an
odd number on the other side.
3
The Wason Selection Test
DRINKI-
NG
BEER
26
YEARS
OLD
16
YEARS
OLD
Which customer or customers must you investigate to
check that all four people obey the rule:
If a person is drinking alcohol, then that person
must be at least 18 years old.
DRINKI-
NG
COKE
4
The Wason Selection Test
“The tasks that you have just completed are variations on the Wason Selection Task, devised in 1966 by Peter Wason. It was originally developed as a test of logical reasoning, but is increasingly used by psychologists (and others) to analyse the structure of human reasoning. It tests the ability of people to look for exceptions to a conditional rule of the form If P, then Q …
The significant point about this test is that we are incredibly bad at it! Typically, some 75%-80% of people get the test wrong.”
http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/wason/Default.aspx
Note: The correct answer for slide 2 is cards ‘A’ and ‘4’ and the correct answer for slide 3 is the person drinking beer and the person who is 16 years old.
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Conditional Statements & Arguments
What we are going to do this week is look at statements of a certain kind called conditional statements.
First, we will have a look at what conditional statements are, and then we will turn to consider argumentation that involves conditionals.
As we shall see in due course, there is a lot of potential for confusion and fallacies with respect to arguments involving conditionals.
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Necessary Conditions
Definition
A condition C is necessary for the holding of some other condition or state of affairs E if C must hold whenever E holds; in other words, C must be satisfied in order for E to be true.
The availability of oxygen is necessary for human life.
=
If there is human life, then oxygen is available.
=
There is human life only if there is oxygen available.
=
If there is no oxygen available, then there is no human life.
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Sufficient Conditions
Definition
A condition C is sufficient for the holding of some other condition or state of affairs E if C is enough to guarantee E; that, if C is satisfied, it assures the truth of E.
The availability of cheesecake is sufficient for staving off my hunger.
=
If I have cheesecake, my hunger is averted.
=
If my hunger is not averted, then I do not have cheesecake.
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Distinguishing Between Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
A condition can be necessary for some state of affairs without being sufficient for that state of affairs.
Example: The availability of oxygen is necessary for human life, but it is not sufficient: there are other conditions that must be fulfilled if there is to be human life.
A condition can be sufficient for some state of affairs without being necessary for that state of affairs.
Example: Cheesecake is sufficient to stave off my hunger, but it is not necessary: I could eat bread, or grapes, or snails.
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Necessary and Sufficient Conditions Combined
A particular condition may be both necessary and sufficient.
Example: You will go to heaven if and only if you follow my religion.
This is another way of saying that my religion is both a necessary and sufficient condition for going to heaven.
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Conditional Statements
Definition
An “if-then” statement is called a conditional statement.
Example: If the sun shines, then we will go on a picnic.
The first part of the statement (“the sun shines”) is called the antecedent.
The second part of the statement (“we will go on a picnic”) is called the consequent.
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Ordering of Antecedents and Consequents
In ordinary language, the antecedent will not always precede the consequent.
Example: The defendant is guilty (consequent) if the defendant’s fingerprints are on the pistol (antecedent).
Thus, in dealing with conditional statements, focus less on the order and more on what each part of the statement is doing.
You must read carefully to determine what is being presented as the condition (the antecedent) and what is said to follow from that condition (the consequent).
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The Golden Rule of Conditional Statements
The antecedent is a sufficient condition for the consequent, and the consequent is a necessary condition for the antecedent.
Example: When you know, for example, that oxygen is a necessary condition of life, then you also know that life is a sufficient condition for oxygen (i.e., where you find life you know there must be oxygen).
Sufficient for
Necessary for
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Valid Argument Forms Involving Conditional Statements
1. Modus Ponens (Latin for ‘The Affirming Way’)
In a modus ponens argument, the arguer makes a conditional statement, affirms the antecedent of the conditional statement, and draws as a conclusion the consequent of that conditional statement.
Example
P1. If you are human, then you are mortal.
P2. Jane is human.
Therefore,
C. Jane is mortal.
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Valid Argument Forms Involving Conditional Statements
2. Modus Tollens (Latin for ‘The Denying Way’)
In a modus tollens argument, the arguer makes a conditional statement, denies the consequent of the conditional statement, and draws as a conclusion the denial of the antecedent of that conditional statement.
Example
P1. If Joe drank (regular) Red Bull, then he consumed some caffeine.
P2. Joe did not consume any caffeine.
Therefore,
C. Joe did not drink (regular) Red Bull.
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Invalid Argument Forms Involving Conditional Statements
3. (The Fallacy of ) Affirming The Consequent
An invalid argument form that mimics modus ponens. When an arguer commits this fallacy, she does not affirm the antecedent (as in a valid modus ponens); instead she affirms the consequent. In essence, this fallacy mistakenly treats a necessary condition as if it were a sufficient condition.
Example
P1. If you are in Detroit, then you are in Michigan.
P2. You are in Michigan.
Therefore,
C. You are in Detroit.
A → D
D
A
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Invalid Argument Forms Involving Conditional Statements
4. (The Fallacy of ) Denying The Antecedent
An invalid argument form that mimics modus tollens. When an arguer commits this fallacy, she does not deny the consequent (as in a valid modus tollens); instead, she denies the antecedent. In essence, this fallacy mistakenly treats a sufficient condition as if it were a necessary condition.
Example
P1. If you are in Detroit, then you are in Michigan.
P2. You are not in Detroit.
Therefore,
C. You are not in Michigan.
A → D
~ A
~ D
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Summary of Four Common Argument Forms
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Linguistic Phenomena
As we’ve seen, once we’ve determined that a text or speech contains an attempt to persuade by argument, the remainder of argument analysis is largely a matter of interpreting the speech or text as accurately as possible.
When we analyze an argument, we are trying to work out what a speaker or writer intends readers or listeners to understand, and consequently do or believe, on hearing their words.
Phenomena in ordinary language sometimes makes this task more difficult because they obscure speakers’ and writers’ intended meanings and therefore make it hard to tell which statements their sentences are supposed to convey (what people say is not necessarily the same as what they mean, and vice versa).
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Linguistic Phenomena
So aspirant critical thinkers need to be aware of the ways in which language can work to hide writers’ and speakers’ meanings and must train themselves to spot potentially problematic sentences.
This week, we will:
0 Examine some of these problematic phenomena and explain how they work.
0 Specifically, we will look at how words are used to persuade us in order to believe or do certain things, in the absence of giving good reasons for believing in a conclusion.
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Ambiguity
A sentence is ambiguous in a given context when there is more than one possible way of interpreting it in that context – that is, if there is more than one statement it could plausibly be taken to express in that context. There are two types of ambiguity.
Lexical Ambiguity
This is a property of individual words and phrases that occurs when the word or phrase has more than one meaning.
Example: Consider the word ‘match’ and the sentence ‘He is looking for a match’. How does this sentence express lexical ambiguity?
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Ambiguity
When interpreting sentences that are lexically ambiguous, we have to focus on the context in which they are written or said and the consequent probability of each of the possible interpretations being the correct one.
Syntactic Ambiguity
This occurs when the arrangement of words in a sentence is such that the sentence could be understood in more than one way (as expressing more than one statement).
Syntactic ambiguity is often the basis of jokes and newspaper headlines that appear odd. For example, ‘33-year old Mrs. Jones admitted to dangerous driving in Leeds Crown Court yesterday’.
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Vagueness
Definition
Vagueness is a property of words and phrases. It is not the same as ambiguity, but it is often mistaken for it.
Example: When former world leaders U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair used the alleged threat of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a reason to form a coalition of willing nations (a group that was to become known as the ‘Coalition of the Willing’) to invade Iraq and overthrow its government, they traded on the vagueness of the phrase – a weapon of mass destruction could be any weapon capable of killing large numbers of people, but it needn’t be a weapon that has a particularly long range.
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Vagueness
The meaning of a word or expression is vague if it is indefinite or uncertain what is conveyed by the word.
Thus a word may be ambiguous without being vague – as in ‘ball’ (round plaything, formal dancing-party) – or vague without being ambiguous, as in ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (what exactly counts as such a weapon – hundreds of people can be killed in a train or plane crash; does that make trains and planes weapons of mass destruction?).
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Vagueness
Sometimes, someone aware of the weakness of their own position will deliberately leave their meaning vague in order to camouflage that weakness and to evoke strong feelings of approval or disapproval in their readers or listeners.
Many highly charged words that wield rhetorical power in public discourse are used vaguely. Examples include ‘rights’, ‘liberal’, ‘harassment’, ‘racism’, ‘sexism’.
It is hard to discern one perfectly exact meaning for each of these words and it would be unrealistic to expect them to have such a meaning. Their extensions tend to include a cluster of objects, beliefs or actions that are not necessarily unified in any precise way.
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Vagueness
Take ‘left-wing’, for instance. This word conveys various characteristics including:
belief in a permissive society pro-trade union socialist communist pro-feminist anti-war environmentalist activist radical protester progressive Marxist
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Vagueness
One might be aligned with the political left and not hold all of these beliefs or have all of these characteristics. Indeed, a person might have some or even many of them and not be left-wing.
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Vagueness
Example
Make no mistake, the researchers involved in the highly controversial project to map the human genome are involved in a radical project of unprecedented gravity and spiritual significance. Do they venture there with appropriate caution and humility? What they are doing is not even comparable to the research that made the atomic bomb possible, for it goes right to the essence of what we are as human beings. Like Dr. Frankenstein, they are tinkering with life; they are travelling into unknown and sacred regions as no scientist previously has ever dared. The secret wellsprings of life, of our very being as homo sapiens, have ever remained shut up, concealed by eons of either blind but cunning and ultimately unfathomable natural processes, or, as some continue to believe despite the showy displays of science and technology, concealed by the very hand of its Author, the Author of Nature Himself.
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Rhetorical Questions
Definition
Rhetorical questions take the form of a question but indirectly assert a statement (whereas a declarative sentence directly asserts a statement). That is, they are not really used to ask a question, but to make a point in an indirect way.
Speakers and writers often use rhetorical questions when they’re making a point they assume to be obvious, so the answer to the question ‘goes without saying’. However, in many cases the point is neither obvious nor universally agreed. Rhetorical questions obfuscate speakers’ and writers’ intended meanings because they make it more difficult to interpret whether or not a speaker/writer really does support a given claim.
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Rhetorical Questions
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Rhetorical Questions
The main point of the billboard is: (You should) choose vegetarian.
The rhetorical question masks a statement that is used to support that claim. What is it?
P. There is no good reason to eat some animals but treat others like members of the family based simply on species membership.
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Rhetorical Questions
Rhetorical questions are common in polemical newspaper articles and in contributions to internet discussion forums. If you encounter rhetorical questions in texts and speech that you are analyzing, try to rewrite the question as a declarative sentence.
You should resist the temptation to employ rhetorical questions in your own arguments.
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Irony
Definition
Speakers and writers sometimes express their claims using irony. This takes the form of language that, taken literally, would convey the opposite of what they wish to convey, or something otherwise very different from it.
Example: It is pouring with rain, very windy and cold. Mr. Jones says, ‘Mmm, lovely weather today’.
Mr. Jones is probably being ironic, and intends to comment that the weather is lousy. It is important to be aware of the possibility of irony. In order to ridicule a position they are opposed to, speakers and writers sometimes sarcastically pretend to espouse that position; but it isn’t always obvious that they are doing so.
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Irony
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Irony
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Irony
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Irony
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Implicitly Relative Sentences
Consider the following sentences:
• It is the best of its kind.
• Great Uncle Eddie is a fast runner.
• Taxes are high.
• The rent on our flat is low.
Definition
Sentences such as these represent another potential problem for the critical thinker striving to work out exactly what a speaker or writer intends to convey by their words. The sentences are implicitly relative. They make a comparison with some group of things, but that comparison is not explicitly mentioned.
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Implicitly Relative Sentences
If such sentences are interpreted without the recognition of their implicit relativity, then there is the possibility that they will be interpreted as making a comparison with a group other than that intended by the writer or speaker.
Great Uncle Eddie is not a fast runner when compared with Usain Bolt and thus interpreted the claim would be false.
But when compared with other 74-year- olds, many of whom haven’t broken into a run for many years, he is a fast runner and the claim is true.
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Implicitly Relative Sentences
Once we recognize such claims as implicitly relative and interpret them accordingly, they are more likely to have a definite truth-value. But not always.
Implicit relativity is often compounded by other sources of vagueness. For example, even if we do know what comparison class is being invoked in the case of Uncle Eddie, it is by no means clear just how much faster a person must be than the average person of that class in order to be fast relative to it.
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Problems With Quantifiers
Definition
Quantifiers are words that tell us how many/much of something there are/is, or how often something happens.
Not all quantifiers specify an exact quantity of the thing; rather they provide a rough guide.
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Problems With Quantifiers
Examples of Quantifiers:
• All men drive too fast.
• Politicians are often self-serving.
• Few doctors support health reform.
• Nearly all the students passed the course.
• She likes hardly any of her fellow students.
• No examiner should take bribes.
• Lots of computers develop faults.
• Nine hospitals will close at the end of this year.
• She never closes the door behind her.
• There are adequate computing facilities in fewer than half of the country’s schools.
• He always writes his own speeches.
• Most women would choose to stay at home with their children if they could afford to.
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Problems With Quantifiers
There are three potential problems with quantifiers:
1. Speakers and writers don’t always use quantifiers with sufficient precision, so that the statement they intend to convey is unclear and open to misinterpretation and rhetorical abuse. Example: ‘All celebrities are filthy rich’. Such a claim is questionable, but will probably be stated with more precision once clarification is sought.
2. Some quantifier-words are themselves vague. Suppose, for instance, that a person claims ‘Some doctors support the decriminalization of cannabis’. What does ‘some’ mean here?
3. People often omit quantifiers. Consider the claim: ‘Today’s students are dedicated to their studies’. The plausibility of such a claim will depend, in part, on how many we are talking about!
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More Abuse in Language
Definition
Pseudo-profundity is the art of sounding profound while talking tosh (Stephen Law, see: http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2011/06/pseudo- profundity-from-believing.html).
Essentially, pseudo-profundity refers to superficial (‘pseudo’) cases of profound and deep insights by marketing experts, life-style consultants, new age gurus and even academics.
As Law explains, it is not hard at all to sound profound on almost any topic. He offers some suggestions on how to do this.
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More Abuse in Language
(1) State the incredibly obvious and do it slowly: Law suggests that one select from the big themes of life, love, death and money. Then, state some obvious facts slowly, e.g. Death comes to us all; We all want to be loved; Money is used to buy things.
(2) Generous use of jargon: The illusion of profundity can be deepened and extended by throwing in lots of jargon into the mix. Make up some words that sound like ordinary words, but these new words should differ in a way that is not fully explained. For instance, don’t say people are happy or sad but rather say people have ‘positive or negative attitudinal orientations’. After inventing some jargon, ‘translate’ dull, ordinary truisms into your newly invented language. Dull, ordinary truism: Happy people tend to make other people happy. Sexier ‘translation’: Positive attitudinal orientations have high transferability.
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More Abuse in Language
(3) Use attractive words like ‘energies’ and ‘balance’: This will suggest to others that you have discussed a deep mechanism that could be harnessed and used by others. E.g. An article that has the title “Harnessing positive attitudinal energies within the retail environment”.
(4) Defend your new language with bits of itself: If someone asks you what ‘positive attitudinal energy’ is, respond by defining it with other jargon you have come up with. That way, no one will be able to figure out what you really mean. E.g. Positive attitudinal energy is the meta-spiritual life force within us all.
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More Abuse in Language
(5) Pick two words/phrases that have opposite meanings and combine them cryptically: For example, sanity is just another kind of madness, life is often a form of death, the ordinary is the extraordinary. Or, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength (the three slogans of The Party in Orwell’s 1984).
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More Abuse in Language
Example 1
“What is that thing in our life that by remembering we can experience real happiness and real joy? Every human being wants to experience
joy in their life. There is one joy that the world gives, and there is another joy that is the real joy. Truth. Consciousness. Supreme joy … When this consciousness comes into contact with the Truth, the joy that you will derive, the joy that will come forth, is its own unique
experience” (unnamed modern guru)
= (more or less)
If you tell the truth, you will be happy.
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More Abuse in Language
Example 2
“Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: ‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’” – George Orwell, Politics and The English Language.
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More Abuse in Language
Definition
Bullshit – “It is … [a] lack of connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as the essence of bullshit” (Harry Frankfurt – On Bullshit; a copy of Frankfurt’s essay has been uploaded on Canvas).
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More Abuse in Language
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More Abuse in Language
This past Saturday, several hundred thousand prospective college students filed into schools across the United States and more than 170 other countries to take the SAT—$51 registration fees paid, No. 2 pencils sharpened, acceptable calculators at the ready. And as part of the three-hour-and-45– minute ritual, each person taking the 87-year-old test spent 25 minutes drafting a prompt-based essay for the exam’s writing section …
Les Perelman, the recently retired former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, has got a doozy. To do well on the essay, he says, the best approach is to just make stuff up. “It doesn’t matter if [what you write] is true or not,” says Perelman, who helped create MIT’s writing placement test and has consulted at other top universities on the subject of writing assessments. “In fact, trying to be true will hold you back.” So, for instance, in relaying personal experiences, students who take time attempting to recall an appropriately relatable circumstance from their lives are at a disadvantage, he says. “The best advice is, don’t try to spend time remembering an event,” Perelman adds, “Just make one up. And I’ve heard about students making up all sorts of events, including deaths of parents who really didn’t die.” …
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More Abuse in Language
“What they are actually testing,” he says, “is the ability to bullshit on demand. There is no other writing situation in the world where people have to write on a topic that they’ve never thought about, on demand, in 25 minutes. Lots of times we have to write on demand very quickly, but it’s about things we’ve thought about. What they are really measuring is the ability to spew forth as many words as possible in as short a time as possible. It seems like it is training students to become politicians.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2013/10/sat_essay_section_pr oblems_with_grading_instruction_and_prompts.html
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Is there an Ethic in relation to Beliefs?
“Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live…
To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” – William K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief (1877).
