David Kellogg Characterising What ChRIS CLÉiRIGh Was Doing As Cowardly

David Kellogg wrote to ChRIS CLÉiRIGh on sys-func on 8 Mar 2024, 08:40:

Here are two arguments against posting "informal logical fallacies" instead of actual linguistic (theoretical and practical) work on our list. See which you find more convincing.

a) The posting of informal logical fallacies facilitates petty one-up-manship; it's something people (overwhelmingly white men) do instead of real research, because it yields smugness and self-satisfaction without responsibility — and without results. (It is also cowardly because, as we saw with your very first example, it means you can insinuate and hint at names instead of engaging flesh-and-blood thinkers and their actual arguments!)

b) Informal logic, like formal logic, is simply one form of logic. But logic is, by its very nature, an abstraction based on millennia of historical generalisation. Logic always requires some kind of mediating system of concepts — always domain specific — before it can be applied. This is why one kind of logic obtains in arithmetic (where differences are always significant) and a different kind in statistics (where differences can be insignificant). This is why we have one kind of logic in the human sciences (where societies that look after the old, the poor, and the sick are considered more evolved) and a different kind in biology (where the survival of the infirm tends to devolution and extinction). As Vygotsky said, a "Marxist psychology" would be as sterile as a Marxist mineralogy:

(Personally, I find BOTH of them convincing; I suppose that means I am either tone-deaf or tone-unpoliced....)

and to Sys-Func on 9 Mar 2024, at 08:19:

Notice that ALL of the responses to my initial response to Chris's "tone policing fallacy" have been responses to a). That was the argument which included words like "one-up-manship", "smug", "self-satisfaction", "cowardly" to characterise what Chris was doing. …

Blogger Comments:

[1] An argument for posting types of informal fallacies to the sys-func list is that it may help scholars to identify fallacious arguments, and to thwart the bullies who use them. 

[2] To be clear, in presuming that either of the alternative arguments is "convincing", this is an example of the false binary fallacy:

A false dilemma, also referred to as false dichotomy or false binary, is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available. The source of the fallacy lies not in an invalid form of inference but in a false premise. This premise has the form of a disjunctive claim: it asserts that one among a number of alternatives must be true. This disjunction is problematic because it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting the viewer with only two absolute choices when in fact, there could be many.

[3] To be clear, these are examples of the argumentum ad hominem fallacy:

Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

[4] This is the exact opposite of what is true, since it is not possible to identify the fallacies in an argument without engaging with the actual argument in order to determine its validity.

[5] To be clear, this mistakes different fields in which logic is applied for different types of logic. Logic is reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity, wherever it is applied. The examples provided for the human sciences and biology are not different types of logic. The former is a value judgement of types of societies, and the latter is a self-contradictory misunderstanding of evolution which posits that survival leads to extinction.

[6] This misunderstands the fallacy of tone policing – which is arguing by

focusing on emotion behind (or resulting from) a message rather than the message itself as a discrediting tactic.