9 Four Reasons There are No Fallacies?

A cavalier and confident formalist approach to fallacies is no longer standard; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports instead that it has proven more profitable to explore fallacies without appealing to formal languages. In other words, a nonformal approach to fallacies has become standard over the years since this chapter was written. Thus the notions queried in this chapter seem no longer to be in vogue and the criticisms of cavalier formalism with regard to fallacies are unnecessary, though not incorrect.

Karl Lambert, William Ulrich, and Gerald Massey were all formal theorists and developed their critical accounts of fallacies from that perspective. Lambert and Ulrich held that all that needed to be said about poor arguments was that they were not formally valid; one did not need ‘fallacy’ as an additional category. Massey held that to show that a fallacy occurred, one would need to demonstrate that poor arguments failed to be formally valid. But, given the asymmetry between valid and invalid arguments, it was not possible to formally prove invalidity. It was from a formalist standpoint, then, that these logicians argued against the very notion of fallacy. I argued that their accounts are flawed; it is fair to say that that conclusion is accepted today.

A 2017 search of Philosopher’s Index revealed more than six hundred articles with “fallacy” or “fallacies” in the title. However, many of these works do not seem to be about fallacies as a general theme; rather they treat a distinct topic (miracles, evolution, the mind/body problem), alleging one or more mistakes (‘fallacies’ in a broad sense) in the treatment of that topic. My casual survey revealed intriguing names of fallacies I had never heard of – the neurological fallacy, the moralistic fallacy, the unintentional fallacy, the reverse inference fallacy, and the great mind fallacy, to name just a few. Fallacies have not gone out of fashion.

In his recent book The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, Michael Lewis describes the collaboration of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Working over many years first in Israel and then in North America,
Tversky and Kahneman described a number of characteristic errors in reasoning. Lewis reports that their work provoked considerable criticism, much of it due to the fact that they were arguing that there were types of reasoning errors that people commonly make. In other words, people often reason incorrectly. That conclusion was energetically resisted in some quarters. Reading Lewis’s account, I was reminded of the charitable resistance to allegations of fallacies. Somehow, people do not like to see others accused of systematically flawed reasoning; they seek an interpretation according to which these mistakes are not happening. And they suspect the accusers of being in some sense ‘smart alecks’ – pretending to know more about accurate thinking than the average person and to detect errors ordinary people cannot recognize for themselves. It remains a temptation. I submit that the reasoning in this chapter, usefully supplemented by the evidence provided by Philosopher’s Index indicates that fallacies are not to be vanquished by the technique of presuming that other people are basically rational. I argue for a modest principle of charity and for attention to details of speech, text, and context. This approach to interpretation will not eliminate fallacies; nor would I wish to do that. When this chapter was written in the nineteen eighties, principles of interpretation were central to the problem of fallacies. Both for explaining and identifying particular fallacies and for fallacy theory, they remain so.

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Reacting to the proliferation of texts and courses on informal fallacies, a number of people have recently voiced concern about the lack of rigor and consensus in the area. Some have gone so far as to argue that there are no informal fallacies at all, that there is no way to show any argument invalid, that fallacies exist only in the pages of textbooks and the minds of logicians, or that fallacies are products of uncharitable interpretation.¹ Such revisionist views raise important questions. But though provocative, they are not correct – or so I shall argue here.

By definition, a fallacy is a mistake in reasoning, a mistake that occurs with some frequency in real arguments and that is characteristically deceptive.² This means, not that a person who uses a fallacious argument necessarily intends to deceive his audience but that the fallacious argument itself is deceptive, in the sense that it strikes many people as cogent, though it is not.³ An arguer may recognize his fallacious argument as fallacious and intend to deceive others with it, or he may think that it is a cogent argument and use it in all sincerity. Since a fallacy in the logical sense involves a mistake in reasoning, in order to commit one, a person must be reasoning. Colloquially, false beliefs are often termed fallacies, but traditional logical usage restricts the term to reasoning errors, a usage followed here. In order to commit a fallacy, a person must reason from one or more claims to others. In the present context, this is to say that a person who commits a fallacy must be arguing. Furthermore, not just any mistake in reasoning counts as a fallacy. A fallacy is a mistake that is of a kind: it is repeatable, and repeated in other contexts.⁴ A mistake in reasoning which is idiosyncratic and unlikely to be repeated does not qualify as a fallacy, even though it is a mistake in reasoning.

There is, then, a tacit empirical claim in saying that an argument involves a fallacy. Indeed, some who are sceptical about fallacies base their scepticism on empirical considerations. They agree that such moves as post hoc and ad hominem would be mistakes were they ever to occur, but believe that real arguments seldom or never include them. Saying that a fallacy is deceptive and that it is a mistake of a kind which occurs relatively often commits the critic to empirical claims as well as logical ones. If one invents a mistake in reasoning and invents an example in which it occurs, one will not thereby have invented or discovered a fallacy – not unless that so-called fallacy seems to many people at first blush not to be one.

From these considerations we can see that there are many potential problems about fallacies. To say that an argument exemplifies one or another fallacy commits a critic to an interpretation of an arguer as reasoning in some specific way; to a logical judgment that the reasoning embodies a mistake; to a classification of that mistake as being one of a type; and, implicitly, to the empirical claim that the mistake is of a type repeated elsewhere and is deceptive in the sense that people tend not to recognize it as a mistake.

These points are no doubt of considerable pedagogical significance. Identifying and diagnosing a fallacy is no simple matter. Given the complexities involved, and given the additional problem that actual arguments may, on different interpretations or even on the same one, illustrate several distinct fallacies at once, there may be important reasons against teaching critical skills by beginning with fallacies. Combine these features with the point that the counterfeit presumes the real, so that fallacies presuppose pertinent concepts of good argument, and it is easy to understand why many people object to teaching argument or critical thinking through fallacies analysis. However, while recognizing the importance of these points, we need not grant wholesale revisionist claims about fallacies. From the fact that the identification of fallacies is a complicated matter it does not follow that there are no fallacies at all. Like the a priori elimination of evil, the a priori elimination of fallacies has a certain charm and appeal, but the results depart from common sense.

1. Formal Invalidity as the Whole Story

In their text, The Nature of Argument, Karl Lambert and William Ulrich express considerable scepticism about fallacies. Their approach is to dispute informal fallacies only; the formal ones are to rest secure. Lambert and Ulrich begin by saying:

Only two things can go wrong with an argument – it can be invalid or it can be unsound. If an argument is invalid, then it has a counterexample; whether or not it is also an instance of an ‘informal fallacy’ is beside the point.⁵

This is clearly a deductivist account; the authors presume that connections between premises and conclusion can be appraised in only one way: for deductive validity. The presumption is that a premise/conclusion connection is legitimate if the argument is formally deductively valid and not otherwise. A more pluralistic view of argumentation would require a more complex analysis. When working through Lambert and Ulrich’s account, it is useful to keep their presumption in mind. The difficulties that arise from within this limited view are aggravated if a more pluralistic theory of argument is adopted.

Lambert and Ulrich claim that formal invalidity and only formal invalidity constitutes a mistake in reasoning. If we can show that an argument is formally invalid, then we know that it is not a cogent argument; on this account any further remark to the effect that it also exemplifies an informal fallacy will be ‘beside the point’. Lambert and Ulrich continue:

Even when one learns to recognize alleged examples of the various ‘fallacies’, it is difficult to see what common factor makes them all instances of the same fallacy’.⁶

Identifying this common factor is easy in the case of arguments that are formally invalid, because two arguments which exemplify the same mistake will have been formally represented in such a way that we can see that they have the same form. In the case of purported informal fallacies, Lambert and Ulrich say, this is not so easy.

The question raised is important because, as we have seen, a fallacy embodies a mistake in reasoning which is of a kind. Given that two arguments both make mistakes in reasoning, when is it true that they make the same mistake? It would seem that a formal approach will give a straightforward answer to this question. An informal or nonformal approach may not. Lambert and Ulrich go on to explore the question with reference to one of the standard informal fallacies, the ad hominem.

In the ad hominem someone uses a fact about a person’s character to discredit his claims or his argument. Lambert and Ulrich put forward a case of this type:

1. Mr. Jenner claims that evidence E is strong evidence that Mr. Nixon is guilty of obstruction of justice.

2. Mr. Jenner was a member of a commission that recommended the legalization of prostitution.
   Therefore,

3. E is not strong evidence that Mr. Nixon is guilty.⁷

There is an interpretive matter to note here. This model represents the conclusion held as a claim that the attacked arguer’s view is false. But often people use facts about character to allege that claims made are less credible than they might be when made by other people, or that they should not be accepted. There are more modest conclusions and might plausibly be defended by ad hominem allegations in inductive contexts.⁸ The matter is significant because the issue of sensitive interpretation in fallacies analysis is one on which fallacies critics have frequently been attacked.

The purported ad hominem argument has a simple logical form, according to Lambert and Ulrich. It is of the form:

• A

• B

• Therefore,

• not-C

Lambert and Ulrich are sure that the argument is of this form, and no other. Clearly this form is not that of a formally valid argument. Hence, Lambert and Ulrich conclude, the argument is not sound. It exemplifies a mistake in reasoning which is a formal mistake. The authors maintain that the description of the ad hominem has no bearing on the identification and analysis of this mistake.

The authors unhesitatingly presume that their particular way of formalizing the argument is correct. That is, their representation captures all features of the argument that are relevant to the deductive appraisal of the connection between its premises and its conclusion. This is a premature assumption, as we shall see with a vengeance when we come to Gerald Massey’s account of proofs of invalidity. Compare the authors’ sample argument with the following invented and trivial little argument:

1. The table in the corner is brown.

2.  Everything which is brown is not green.
   Therefore,

3.  It is not the case that the table in the corner is green.

This argument is apparently also of the form ‘A,B, therefore not-C’. Yet it is deductively valid in the straightforward sense that if both premises are true, it is logically impossible for the conclusion to be false. Using Lambert and Ulrich’s approach, we could conclude that the above argument is invalid. Apparently it has the same logical form as the ad hominem argument which they invented; they said that argument was invalid due to its form. What has gone wrong is that a proposed formalization ‘A,B, therefore not-C’ does not capture those features of the argument (meaning of colour words) that make it deductively valid.

Lambert and Ulrich point out that there are many arguments that have the form ‘A, B, therefore not-C’ and that do not constitute ad hominem arguments. From this they infer that classifying an argument as ad hominem is not useful: this classification does not properly characterize the mistake in reasoning which is involved in it. However, all of this presumes the adequacy of Lambert and Ulrich’s formal analysis. Since that analysis can be used to claim even that the valid argument about the brown table is invalid, there must be something wrong with the account.

That an argument can be formally represented as having the form ‘A, B, therefore not-C’ will indicate that it contains incorrect reasoning only if that formal representation is an apt way of representing the argument. This point is absolutely central. A formalization is an apt way of representing the argument only if it represents all those features relevant to the logical appraisal of the argument. An analysis along the ‘A, B, not-C’ line shows us nothing of importance about the argument. To complete their account of the example, Lambert and Ulrich would have to show that their formalization is the only appropriate one; that this is a way, and the only way, of capturing the kind of reasoning used in the argument. They did not appreciate the need to accomplish this task, and it is, to say the least, unlikely that they could complete it.

We may show that an argument cannot be proved valid according to one formal representation and using one formal system, but the question remains whether there is another representation and/or another system which would give a different result. These problems arise even within the narrow formalist and deductivist framework that Lambert and Ulrich employ.⁹ It is not so easy as Lambert and Ulrich suppose to show that an argument is formally invalid. Problems would be aggravated considerably were we to broaden our notion of what is relevant to the workings of arguments so as to include the possibility of cogent nondeductive arguments and of nonformal terms as playing a key role.

Lambert and Ulrich have not provided a knockdown formal refutation of the argument they put forward as an example of ad hominem. Their account presupposes a narrow theory of argument and, even within the bounds of that narrow theory, raises as many questions as it answers. The authors suppose that their analysis is uncontroversially correct and go on to ask what an informal fallacies analysis might add to the supposedly watertight account. They compare their first invented argument to another.

1. Jones maintains that socialism is wrong.

2. Jones is a rich stockbroker.
   Therefore,

3. It is not the case that socialism is wrong.

And they comment: Someone who gave this argument would probably be trying to persuade us that socialism is not wrong by getting us to distrust or dislike Jones. This argument has the same logical form.

• A

• B

• Therefore

• not-C

So it is indeed invalid … but this does nothing to characterize the informal fallacy of argumentum ad hominem because these two arguments also share the same form with:

1. The sky is blue.

2. Grass is green.
   Therefore,

3. It is not the case that tigers are carnivorous.

This argument, although it is an instance of the same formal fallacy, has nothing to do with attempting to discredit a person’s views by discrediting his character. Thus, if there is a fallacy of argumentum ad hominem, there must be a way of characterizing it according to which the first two arguments above are instances but the third is not. It is, however, difficult to see that these two arguments have anything in common other than their logical form, and the fact that those who offered them had certain base motives, namely, to discredit someone’s views by discrediting his character. ¹⁰

And yet it is allowed, in the last sentence quoted, that the two prospective ad hominem arguments do have something in common. They share the feature that in both there is an attempt to discredit someone’s views by discrediting his character. Now interestingly, this is precisely the feature that informal logicians select for attention when criticizing ad hominem arguments as fallacious. Lambert and Ulrich refer to it as a ‘common motive’ behind the arguments. This description makes it appear as though what the two arguments have in common apart from their (alleged) common form ‘A; B; therefore not-C’ is a psychological matter. The arguers who would use such arguments would share a motive.

But such terminology is tendentious and misleading. The feature has to do with the content of the arguments. In both, the premises specify a fact about a person, a fact commonly thought to be deleterious, and in both the conclusion is that some view held by the person is false. The arguments have in common that in both premises about the (deleterious) character of people are used to support a conclusion to the effect that an opinion held by those people is incorrect. This matter of content has nothing to do with the motives of the people who would put forward such an argument, which could be anything at all. The common feature is one of content; that is straightforwardly apparent. The matter of motive is one of speculation.

Lambert and Ulrich claim that this common feature (allegedly motive) cannot serve to characterize any mistake in reasoning that both arguments involve, because ‘some attempts to discredit a person’s views by discrediting his character involve valid argument’. They promptly invent one such, which has as two of its premises the following statements:

If Jones is a rich stockbroker and he maintains that socialism is wrong, then he is lying. If Jones is lying, then socialism is wrong.¹¹

A deductively valid argument can be ad hominem, if an ad hominem argument is any argument in which the falsity of someone’s view is inferred from considerations which include reference to disreputable aspects of his character. For Lambert and Ulrich this consequence amounts to a reductio of the idea that the ad hominem description could be of any use in the appraisal of reasoning. For them, deductive validity and invalidity are the whole story about reasoning from premises to a conclusion. On this view, it would be absurd for an argument that had the paradigm virtue of deductive validity to have anything wrong with it.

That the description offered for ad hominem arguments could apply to a deductively valid argument is interesting, seldom noticed, and perhaps important. However, in some sense this is not a surprising result. The two purported ad hominems had something in common. The common element was not a matter of formal structure as that is conventionally identified; it was one of content. For the same content, a variety of structures are possible. For any argument which is based on an illegitimate connection between X and Y, one can also produce a deductively valid argument by adding a premise to the effect that X and Y are connected in just the way the argument would require. That is the strategy of inserting the associated conditional as a missing premise. The amended argument does in a sense make the same point as the original one: the feature of deriving falsehood or lack of credibility of belief from aspects of character is preserved. Yet the amended argument is deductively valid and hence not fallacious.

But what does this strategy prove? Lambert and Ulrich, presuming the definitive correctness of their formal analysis, infer that neither the ad hominem classification nor any other classification from informal logic can show anything about such arguments. However, that fact is open to another interpretation. That ad hominem arguments can be made into deductively valid ones by inserting the associated conditional as a missing premise shows that assessing arguments solely for formal deductive validity may show us precious little about their merits. Lambert and Ulrich do not establish their point concerning the examples they discuss. They do not succeed in demonstrating their strongly negative position about informal fallacies.

What has been discussed is the part of Lambert and Ulrich’s treatment where ‘they say it’. There is also another part where they ‘take it back’, with qualifying remarks like the following rather confusing statement:

There may be errors in reasoning that have nothing to do with the arguments representing the reasoning, even though of course any logically invalid argument will correspond to some error in reasoning.¹²

And:

No such argument (as begging the question) is fallacious, but anyone who argued in this way would be making some kind of mistake. We are not suggesting that there is no value in investigating the various sorts of mistakes in reasoning that people are prone to make; on the contrary, this is an area where interesting and fruitful discoveries are waiting to be made. Rather, we are suggesting that until a general characterization of informal fallacies can be given which enables one to tell with respect to any argument whether or not it exhibits one of the informal fallacies, knowing how to label certain paradigm cases of this or that mistake in reasoning is not really useful for determining whether a given argument is acceptable.¹³

These are puzzling qualifications, apparently inconsistent with the tenor of the main account. But given the fundamentally flawed nature of that account, such qualifications do not merit further attention here.

2. Formal Invalidity as No Story

In several provocative articles, Gerald Massey has argued that it is not possible to prove an argument invalid. In 1975, in ‘Are There any Good Arguments that Bad Arguments are Bad?’, Massey defended an asymmetrical account about proofs of validity and invalidity.¹⁴ Given an argument in natural language, if we paraphrase it correctly into the symbols of a correct formal system, and show it to be valid according to the rules of that system, we know that the argument is valid. Thus, formal logic can be used to demonstrate the formal validity of arguments couched in natural languages. But for demonstrations of invalidity, Massey maintained, matters are not so simple. Suppose that we paraphrase an argument into the symbols of a correct logical system and find that it turns out to be an invalid argument in that system. Have we shown that the argument is invalid? We have not, because we do not know that there is no other system such that it would turn out to be valid in that one. The question of whether the paraphrase is the only logically revealing one remains open, as does the question of the possibility of a correct logical system in which a logically revealing paraphrase of the argument would turn out to be valid.

The reason for the marked asymmetry between showing validity and showing invalidity should now be apparent. To show that an argument is valid it suffices to paraphrase it into a demonstrably valid argument form of some (extant) logical system; to show that an argument is invalid it is necessary to show that it cannot be paraphrased into a valid argument form of any logical system, actual or possible.¹⁵

Massey’s account was welcomed by some informal logicians who thought this took the formalists down a peg or two. The account could be interpreted as showing that formal analysis presupposes nonformal judgment as to the appropriacy of a paraphrase and the aptness of the logical system to which the argument is referred. (For informalists, this will be the right moral to derive from the story. I later argue for this view.) We might see Massey as an ally, witting or unwitting, of those who advocate a nonformal approach to the analysis of arguments. He allowed in his paper that we can show arguments invalid in a logically trivial way by showing that the premises are true and the conclusion false and also, in subsequent discussion, that we may often have reasons for, or intuitions regarding, the inadequacy of arguments. However, Massey remains adamant that such ‘low level’ nonformal judgments do not amount to a theory of invalidity and that judgments of invalidity remain unfounded, theoretically.¹⁶ Massey would require formal grounding for theoretical security.

Judgments of invalidity might come to be properly grounded, were a logical grammar of a special kind to be found. In such a case, we would have assurance that some paraphrase of an argument was the correct one, and that the rules according to which that paraphrase came out as invalid were the right rules to apply.

… the egregious asymmetry between proving validity and proving invalidity will persist until one or more programmes, such as Natural Logic, have been successfully implemented.¹⁷

Any alliance between informal logicians and Massey is premature and would not be to his taste. For him a theory is a formal theory, and a judgment without a theory is only a slight improvement on no judgment at all.

An informal logician who sought consolation in Massey’s 1975 paper would be disappointed by his 1981 article, ‘The Fallacy behind Fallacies’.¹⁸ In that paper Massey criticizes both informal and formal logicians for their attempts to teach students to find fallacies. He explicitly links his view to his earlier account of validity and invalidity.¹⁹

In his informative treatise on fallacy, Hamblin succinctly describes a fallacious argument as an argument that seems valid without being so. It is with fallacies so defined that I will hereafter be concerned.

Note first that fallacious arguments are invalid. Hence a theory of fallacy presupposes a theory of invalidity. Therein lies the rub. But, as I claimed above and have argued for elsewhere, a theory of invalidity has yet to be developed. It is not surprising, then, that treatments of fallacy eschew theory. There is no theory on which they could be based.

Essentially, Massey employs the following argument:

1. Whatever else fallacies are, they are invalid arguments.

   So,

2. To show that an argument is a fallacy, we must first show that it is invalid.

   And,

3. There is no formally adequate method of showing that an argument is invalid.

   So,

4. We cannot in any theoretically adequate way show that an argument is invalid.

   Therefore,

5. There is no adequate theory underlying fallacies.

Fallacy analysis is sloppy and in a theoretical mess, because it presupposes well-founded judgments of formal invalidity and these cannot be made.

… whereas logical theory underwrites validity verdicts, the case for invalidity verdicts (where the trivial logic- indifferent method is inapplicable) rests at bottom on intuitive judgments of invalidity altogether unsupported by theory.²⁰

Let us examine Massey’s argument. The first premise, linking fallaciousness and invalidity, would strike many people as obvious. However, it poses problems. First, invalidity is not a necessary condition of fallaciousness, provided that begging the question is a fallacy.²¹ Many arguments that beg the question are formally valid, and in some what explains their begging the question is the very same thing that makes them formally valid: they contain a premise which is logically equivalent to the conclusion. Unless Massey has an unorthodox view about begging the question, this phenomenon poses a problem for his account. We cannot begin our account of fallacies by assuming that all fallacious arguments are invalid unless we are prepared to rule out question begging as a fallacy from the very start. The problem can be extended to other fallacies with a dialectical component, such as straw man. A sample argument such as:

1. Indeterminists hold that human actions are entirely random.

2. Entirely random actions are not responsible actions.

3. Indeterminists hold that humans are responsible for their actions.

   So,

4. Indeterminists hold an inconsistent position regarding human action.

   Therefore,

5. Indeterminists hold a false view.

can no doubt be represented as a deductively valid argument. With some manipulation, it can be represented as formally valid. Nevertheless, due to the content of the first premise, the argument may commit the straw man fallacy. The question as to whether it does concerns the accuracy of that premise as an account of the indeterminist position. Given that a straw man argument might be cast as a deductively valid argument, and given that straw man has long been thought to be a fallacy, we have another reason for questioning whether invalidity is a necessary condition of fallaciousness.²² Some traditional fallacies can appear even in deductively valid arguments, because they have to do with general features pertaining to content (as we saw with ad hominem, above) or because of dialectical aspects, as with the straw man case. These are not formal features.

Nor is it clear that invalidity is sufficient for fallaciousness. By all but the most adamant deductivists, it is allowed that there are some cogent arguments that are not deductively valid. If there is even one cogent inductive argument, then that is a non-fallacious argument which is not deductively valid. Hence, deductive invalidity is not a sufficient condition for fallaciousness. In fact, for different reasons, neither Hamblin nor Massey presume that invalidity would be sufficient for fallaciousness. Invalidity in the deductive sense is neither necessary nor sufficient for fallaciousness.

The terms ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ are used in a number of different senses even by logicians. The following three are pertinent here:

1.  An argument is valid if its premises are properly connected to its conclusion and provide adequate reasons for it. It is invalid otherwise. (Umbrella validity)

2.  An argument is valid if its premises deductively entail its conclusion, such that given the truth of those premises the falsity of the conclusion is a logical impossibility. It is invalid otherwise. (Semantic validity)

3.  An argument is valid if its conclusion is formally derivable from its premises using the rules of a correct logical system. It is invalid otherwise. (Formal validity)

On any theory of argument other than deductivism, it is only umbrella validity that is of general relevance for argument appraisal. Given a pluralistic theory, the fact that an argument is semantically or formally invalid is, by itself, quite insufficient to establish the claim that the argument is fallacious²³. An inductively strong argument is semantically and formally invalid, but that does not show that it is fallacious.

Looking back at Massey’s own central argument, we can see that premise (1) does not hold; Premise (2) gets its support from (1) and is therefore unsupported; premise (3) is what Massey argues for in his 1975 paper. There is no formally adequate way of showing an argument to be formally invalid, because given its invalidity according to some system, the possibility remains open of its turning out to be formally valid according to some other system. This point may be granted if by ‘formally adequate method’ we mean ‘method that is formal and that does not presuppose any significant preformal judgments’. If we grant premise (2) for the sake of argument and grant premise (3) as understood, there is still a gap in the inference from (2) and (3) to (4). The problem is in moving from not having a formally adequate method to not having any theoretically adequate method. This move reveals Massey’s formalist predilections. Anyone who thinks that respectable nonformal theories are possible will not accept this move and will not move to the final conclusion either.

Massey’s work is extremely important. It reveals the consequences of taking an entirely formalist account of validity and argument appraisal to its limits. Many share Massey’s beliefs about the relationship between fallaciousness and invalidity and many endorse his formalist account of validity and the idea that any theory worth its salt is a formal one. For such people, Massey’s work leaves an important and profound problem.

From the perspective of a pluralistic theory of argument and a nonformalist concept of theoretical adequacy, Massey’s argument against the fallacies is far from conclusive. His point about invalidity is important and telling against the sort of insensitive formalization Lambert and Ulrich used. It shows the need to detect the linkage which is supposed to be there, to distinguish between those features of the argument which are relevant to its logical appraisal and those which are not. We need a paraphrase which captures all of the logically relevant features. The formal invalidity of a particular paraphrase shows nothing unless we are sure that paraphrase has captured the logically significant features of the original argument. Judgment on this matter is not formal.

Massey is unwilling to assume that ordinary human beings, ordinary philosophers, or even ordinary logicians have a preformal capacity to make these judgments about what is and what is not relevant to the deductive appraisal of an argument. He appears to use ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ solely in a formal sense, to such a degree that he makes such comments as:

… consider arguments (7) and (8).

(7) John took a walk by the river.
John took a walk.
(8) Tom, Dick and Harry are partners.
Tom and Harry are partners.

 

Davidson deserves credit for showing how to translate (7) into standard predicate logic in such a way as to get a valid argument form. (Davidson’s translation turns on quantification over events, something that some philosophers find objectionable, but that is another matter.) Ante Davidson, no one seemed able to supply such a translation, and so argument (7) was deemed invalid.²⁴

This passage illustrates Massey’s tendency to conflate semantic and formal validity and to attribute this conflation to other logicians and philosophers. Before Davidson’s logical discoveries, arguments (7) and (8) were semantically valid but were (perhaps) not known to be formally valid.

Massey’s problem arises only within a strictly formalist framework. If we are willing to grant that people understand arguments and are capable of appreciating how these arguments work so as to be able to construct correct formal paraphrases of them, the problem does not arise. Granting that we understand an argument and see what sort of connection that argument depends on, we can sometimes show an invalid argument to be invalid by paraphrasing it into the terms of an appropriate formal system and employing the standards of that system.²⁵ If we are not willing to grant that people sometimes understand arguments well enough to do this, Massey’s point will hold. But then, on such a view, many other problems arise as well.

Rolf George takes this approach in a postscript to a recent paper. He reminds his readers that, in addition to having the capacity to understand sentences, people have the capacity to understand arguments.

Consider, for instance, John 8:47, where Jesus argues

He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not,

because ye are not of God.

 

Might we be wrong about the form of this argument? Is it really conceivable that there is a clever translation into an extant formal language that shows it to be valid, or a hitherto undreamt of formal language that would yield a valid argument form? Perhaps such a formal language will be revealed to us in the fullness of time, but assuredly, it will surpass all understanding. For present purposes we can be confident that we can properly discern the (unique) form of that argument and find it to be ‘denying the antecedent’.²⁶

The passage strikes me as more subtle than George admits. Paraphrasing, we arrive at ‘if you are of God, you hear God’s words; you are not of God; therefore you do not hear God’s words. ‘ The paraphrase uses, crucially, the placement of ‘therefore’ to identify the conclusion ‘you do not hear God’s words’. With this paraphrase, we can see that the argument is an example of the formally fallacious move of denying the antecedent. It is this correct paraphrase that George’s comments presume. (An incorrect paraphrase would lead one to find a different argument with the conclusion, ‘you are not of God, ‘ and that argument would be a valid modus tollens.)

Formal proofs of invalidity are sometimes possible, given the correctness of necessary preformal assumptions, However, these are neither necessary nor sufficient to ground a theory of fallacies, They are surely relevant to parts of such a theory; if available, they offer part of the story of fallaciousness for some deductive arguments, because dialectical considerations are often relevant to fallaciousness (as in begging the question and straw man) and because only common and deceptive reasoning errors will count as fallacies, they offer only part of the story, even for these cases,

3. The Argument From Sloppiness

With only occasional exceptions, fallacies have been the subject more of textbooks than of treatises. Textbook treatments of fallacies are often poor.²⁷ Arguments are cited briefly and carelessly interpreted; little is said to justify an interpretation or an allegation of error; points made in explaining one ‘fallacy’ may be contradicted in another part of a text where a different ‘fallacy’ is being discussed; different texts may define differently what is called the same fallacy. Such problems are regrettable. From them, some have inferred that fallacies would make an important subject of study; others have concluded that there is nothing to the subject.²⁸ Before introducing his argument about invalidity in ‘The Fallacy Behind Fallacies’, Massey began to argue in this way. He said:

The myriad and intricate schemes for classifying fallacies suggest that there is little theory behind the science of fallacy. This suggestion misleads only by implying that there is any theory at all behind it. The unvarnished truth is this: there is no theory of fallacy whatsoever. I will return to this claim shortly.²⁹

A more extended version of this theme is found in Maurice Finocchiaro’s recent paper, ‘Fallacies and the Evaluation of Reasoning’.³⁰

Finocchiaro begins by saying that, for the appraisal of arguments in natural language and extra-formal contexts, the formal approach faces a difficulty,

stemming from the well-known fact that formal validity is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the favorable evaluation of an argument. It is not sufficient because it excludes neither question-begging arguments nor self-contradictory ones (i.e. arguments with inconsistent premises). It is not necessary partly because of the Toulmin-type objection that most good arguments most of the time (in the empirical sciences, legal contexts, humanities, and everyday life) are not formally valid, and partly because formal validity presupposes fully reconstructed arguments which in human reasoning are the exception rather than the rule.³¹

Unlike Lambert, Ulrich, and Massey, Finocchiaro is not working within a formalist frame of reference nor even within a deductivist frame of reference. He endorses a version of the Spectrum Theory. A fallacies approach is, in principle, more compatible with such theory than a purely formal approach.

However, Finocchiaro notes, there are defects in many, if not all, textbook accounts of fallacies. Finocchiaro’s first complaint about standard textbook treatments of fallacies is that there are too few real examples. (He sees these defects in texts by Salmon, Kreyche, Cohen and Nagel, Fearnside, Holther, and Beardsley.) He also states that the few real examples used are poorly interpreted. Granting these points for the moment, the question remains open as to what we wish to infer from them. Finocchiaro draws a sweeping conclusion:

The conclusion I wish to draw from such ‘consultations’ is not that errors in reasoning are probably not common in real life, but that there are probably no common errors in reasoning. That is, logically incorrect arguments may be common, but common types of logically incorrect arguments probably are not.
The problem I wish to raise here is, do people actually commit fallacies as usually understood? That is, do fallacies exist in practice? Or do they exist in the mind of the interpreter who is claiming that a fallacy is being committed? ³²

The inadequacy of textbook treatments leads Finocchiaro to conclude that there are probably no real fallacies in practice; that fallacies exist only in the minds of logicians. This line of thought may be termed the argument from sloppiness.

The argument from sloppiness is hasty, to put it mildly. If examples of fallacies are contrived, unrealistic, or in other ways inadequate, that is regrettable to be sure. One should point this out and refrain from using such texts, even if by using them one can swell student enrollments. But these deficiencies do not make it likely that no texts on fallacies are adequate, that no text on fallacies ever could be adequate, that there are no fallacies in real life, or that fallacies exist only in minds of logicians.

Finocchiaro of course did not sample all texts. Notably he omitted several in which the authors are primarily interested in fallacies and try to offer many real examples such as Howard Kahane’s Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric and Ralph Johnson and Anthony Blair’s Logical Self-Defense. He included others in which the authors are primarily interested in deductive logic and included a short section on fallacies merely as a gesture in the direction of practicality or completeness.

Even if all extant texts on logic and argument were to contain sloppily done sections on fallacies, this deplorable inadequacy would not make it very likely that ‘there are no common types of logically incorrect argument’. Trivially, straw man would be a common type of logically incorrect argument were this to be the case. Also, a plausible explanation of such textbook inadequacy would be that philosophers are poor empiricists who tend to be lazy about collecting examples from colloquial or non philosophical sources and who use each other’s examples or invent cases, rather than doing empirical work. There is ample evidence from other areas of philosophy to support this alternative explanation. Finocchiaro’s statement that textbook accounts of fallacies should include a discussion of real examples, sensitively interpreted, can scarcely be disputed. However, his inferences from the supposed inadequacies of several texts in this regard are shaky indeed.

Finocchiaro’s next criticism of the fallacies approach to argument appraisal is that texts are usually hasty in their provision of grounds for deeming the ‘disputed practice’ fallacious. He bases this charge on his own theory of the correctness of arguments.³³ It goes as follows:

if a fallacy is defined as a type of common but logically incorrect argument, the various types would have to be the following: (1) arguments claiming to be deductively valid but which are actually invalid; (2) arguments claiming to be inductively strong but which are actually inductively weak; (3) arguments claiming to have some inductive strength but which have none. There is no way for an argument to be a fallacy without falling into one of the three above-mentioned classes.

This theory of argument is put forward briefly and given no defense. The account does not accommodate question-begging arguments. Nor does Finocchiaro define the contested term ‘inductive’. On this theory of argument, criticism will almost certainly be a precarious business, because so much depends on whether an argument ‘claims’ deductive validity, inductive strength, or merely some strength in a broadly inductive sense. Natural language has no reliable devices for indicating whether such connections are intended, and many arguers lack the requisite philosophers’ concepts. Which of Finocchiaro’s levels of appraisal is appropriate in a given case will often be unclear. This point is worth noting, for Finocchiaro tends to use the interpretive problems which arise from his particular theory of argument as general problems for understanding the fallacies.

When we interpret an arguer as having committed the formal fallacy of affirming the consequent, we must interpret him as reasoning from the assertion of a conditional and its consequent to its antecedent. We must regard him as ‘implicitly claiming’ that the antecedent follows deductively from the assertion of the conditional and the consequent. In many contexts in which we might make such an allegation, alternative interpretations will be possible. For instance, we might regard the person as reasoning to the best explanation, as in ‘Q; the fact that P would explain the fact that Q (worded as ‘if P then Q’); therefore (no other explanation of Q being possible) we may presume that P.’

Contrary to his own prior admonitions, Finocchiaro offers no example to illustrate this suggestion. But in principle it is easy to see that this different, non-deductive interpretation would often be possible. If someone says:

 

I think there’s going to be a fall election, because if there’s a fall election, there’s a lot of government propaganda in the spring and, you know, this spring, there has been quite a lot of government propaganda.

 

either the affirming-the-consequent account or the inference-to-an-explanation account would be possible. We can represent this line of thinking as ‘G, because if G then L, and L’, and take it as a deductive argument – one intended by the arguer as deductively valid. We then find the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Alternately, given the occurrence of ‘I think’ and the fact that the imminence of an election could in fact explain prior government propaganda, it would be plausible, and more charitable, to read the comments as constituting a non-deductive argument in which an inference is made from a fact to a hypothesis which would explain that fact. On this interpretation, there does not seem to be a fallacy. It is clear that the alternative line of interpretation which Finocchiaro proposes would be plausible some of the time. But he owes us a real example. Furthermore, the fact that this alternative, eliminating charges of affirming the consequent as presuming uncharitable interpretation, is sometimes plausible, does not show that it is always plausible.

Finocchiaro goes on to contend that ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ allegations are also based on sloppy and insensitive interpretation. Both Salmon and Copi describe post hoc as a mistake in which one infers from the bare fact that B followed A, the conclusion that A caused B. Finocchiaro says of their accounts:

No justification is given why these interpretations are preferable to the following: ‘concluding that B was caused by A partly because B followed A’, or ‘the inference that one event is the cause of another from the fact, among others, that the first occurs earlier than the second’. These latter interpretations should be preferred because they are more accurate in the sense that they correspond more closely to a type of reasoning in which people actually engage.³⁴

Again, Finocchiaro supplies no examples. He says that his interpretation would correspond more closely to reasoning that people actually use, but he does not back up this statement either with empirical evidence or with a priori reasoning of the type some philosophers have used in support of principles of charity. He does not offer criteria to indicate which missing premises we might add to supplement the stated claims which, as stated, are open to an interpretation according to which they constitute a fallacious argument. Whether or not people often engage in post hoc reasoning is not something one is entitled to stipulate from a philosophical armchair. Finocchiaro suggests that those who identify post hoc as a fallacy make the mistake of interpreting what is offered as a ‘weak’ inductive argument as though it has been put forward as a ‘strong’ inductive argument. On his view, the fallacy emerges only because of this interpretive error: the critic employs a contentious and less than sympathetic reading of the discourse. Perhaps this is true, but Finocchiaro offers no evidence in support of his suggestion that people are claiming a weak inductive connection between the evidence and the conclusion claim.

A final allegation regarding the tendency of philosophers to interpret tendentiously is made with reference to such fallacies as appeal to force and appeal to pity. Finocchiaro quotes Copi’s descriptions as ‘appealing to force or the threat of force to cause acceptance of a conclusion’ and ‘appealing to pity for the sake of getting a conclusion accepted’.³⁵ In such cases, he says:

these could non-prejudicially, but along the same lines, be described as ‘appealing to force or to pity to cause acceptance of a certain proposition or to cause a certain action’. When so described, they can be seen to be methods, among others, of which giving an argument is one, in order to cause acceptance of a certain proposition. Being nonarguments, they cannot be logically incorrect arguments.³⁶

Here Finocchiaro tries to draw a fine distinction, between using a statement as a premise to win acceptance of a further statement as a supported conclusion and using a statement to win acceptance of a further statement that is not exactly a conclusion to be drawn from evidence. The claim is to be believed as a nonlogical, nonrational result of understanding that first statement. This subtle distinction can doubtless be made, but will be difficult to apply in practice. If we are distinguishing types of arguments and non-arguments on the basis of what arguers and speakers ‘claim’, it difficult to see that any but the philosophical elite would have the conceptual sophistication to ‘claim’ what the distinction requires. A critique of Copi’s account that depends solely on its problems of application is quite compelling.

Finocchiaro might have made essentially the same point in a much simpler way. If a person is to be interpreted as offering a fallacious argument, she must be interpreted as offering an argument. In many contexts, it is quite unclear whether people are in fact giving arguments. They may say one thing and then say another, and we may have no clear idea as to whether the first claim is to provide a reason for the second or not. In Introduction to Logical Theory, P.F. Strawson put the point this way:

… I have in mind such expressions as ‘that is to say’, ‘in other words’, ‘more briefly’. ‘I mean’. These are expressions which we sometimes (though not always or only) use on occasions on which we should describe ourselves, not as inferring or arguing, but rather as, say putting into other words something that has already been said, or repeating it with something left out, or summarizing it, or making a precis. There is no sharply definite line separating those steps which we should call steps in reasoning and those steps which we should describe in one of the alternative ways I have listed. ³⁷

In such cases, seeing people as offering arguments is problematic, and therefore interpreting them as offering fallacious arguments is problematic as well.

Consider, for instance, the following, spotted on a billboard near Salem, Ontario.

Jesus Christ died for our sins. Trust him.

These short statements might be regarded as elements of an argument, in which case we could regard that argument as an enthymeme having the missing premise ‘Anyone who died for our sins should be trusted’. Enthymeme or not, the statements might be taken as constituting an argument committing the fallacy of appealing to pity. Whether this allegation of fallacy is appropriate depends on our sense of whether the point of the message is that one should infer from Jesus’ suffering on the cross to a conclusion that Jesus should be trusted. One might defend such an interpretation by pointing out that Jesus’ death on the cross was extraordinarily painful; as an innocent and suffering being with a human body, Jesus was at that point pitiful. One might contest such an interpretation on the ground that Jesus went to heaven and, for that reason, was not a being who should be pitied. Thus, we may interpret these statements as offering an argument based on pity, or as offering an argument not based on pity. Alternatively, we might regard the billboard as simply making two statements with no intended inferential relationship between them.

There are many cases in which discourse can legitimately be interpreted in several ways. Interpretive issues extend far beyond the fallacies of appeal to force and appeal to pity. Interestingly enough, Finocchiaro’s own paper illustrates this kind of interpretive under-determination. Toward the end of the paper, he claims that, despite the difficulties he has found with fallacies analysis, finding errors in arguments offers more insight than finding them to be correct. He suggests that ‘negative evaluation is methodologically more significant’ than positive evaluation. Having given some reasons in support of this view, Finocchiaro adds these two sentences:

This corresponds to conclusions reached by other philosophers in other contexts. For example, Karl Popper and his followers have stressed the primacy of falsification and criticism as opposed to confirmation and justification in science; Henry W. Johnston Jr. has argued that, in philosophy, critical arguments are more fundamental than constructive ones; and Imre Lakatos has stressed the methodological importance of refutation in mathematics.³⁸

If these comments are intended to offer support for the greater insight yielded by negative evaluation, one might accuse Finocchiaro of the fallacy of misusing authority. But if they are just added remarks, made to add interest to the view, such a charge would be inappropriate. Which interpretation – argument or non-argument – is appropriate is a moot point which could be argued either way. Some interpretive issues just are moot: life and language are like that. The problem does not arise only for fallacies.

That we cannot achieve a reliable consensus about the identification of fallacious arguments in such a case shows, not that our logical understanding of fallacies is poor, but that the distinction between arguments and nonarguments is sometimes difficult to apply. It is entirely likely that some alleged appeals to force and pity are most plausibly interpreted in a way which does not make them out to be arguments. But with no examples, Finocchiaro offers no evidence. Even if he had cited examples, one could point out that some cases are not all. Strictly speaking, this problem is not about fallacies as such but about the openness of much discourse to diverse interpretations.

Finocchiaro goes on to hypothesize that there is a certain progressive pattern to philosophers’ misinterpretations of natural reasoning. An inductive argument is misrepresented as deductive, a weakly inductive argument as strongly inductive, and a nonargument as an argument. The pattern of misinterpretation pursued by those who find fallacies is

that of exaggerating the strength of the connection claimed between various assertions, or of creating one where none is claimed.³⁹

This critique of fallacies analysis rests on a controversial and undefended theory of argument. Despite Finocchiaro’s attacks on texts for having inadequate examples, his own account has singularly few. His hypothesis about fallacies is based on a hasty inference from the fact that some texts are found to be inadequate and that some classifications have been hasty.

Here, we have a premature and hasty analysis. Yet Finocchiaro boldly states:

the conclusion to be drawn from the above discussion is that the concept of a fallacy as a type of common but logically incorrect argument is a chimera, since the various disputed practices usually referred to as fallacies are either not common or not logically incorrect or not arguments.⁴⁰

This sweeping conclusion is simply not warranted by the evidence put forward.

Finocchiaro moves us away from formalism and deductivism. He acknowledges that, given the possibility of good nondeductive arguments, the fallaciousness of an argument wi1l not follow simply from the fact that it fails to be deductively valid. He recognizes the role of interpretation in fallacies analysis. Before appraising reasoning by whatever standard, we have to determine what reasoning is used. That is an interpretive problem. We also have to determine somehow what standard of appraisal (deductive, inductive, or other) should be applied to the argument. If this interpretive work is done carelessly, a charge of fa1lacy will be poorly supported. Often interpretation is careless and such charges are implausible. Some examples and explanations offered in texts and other sources are sloppy and unconvincing. But it is a large leap from these claims to the revisionist view that there are no fallacies at all. In fact, that revisionist view is strictly speaking incompatible with Finocchiaro’s analysis, because he is commited to the claim that one particular fallacy – the straw man – occurs frequently in the pages of logic textbooks.

4. Charity as Eliminating Fallacies

There is one popular way to link Finocchiaro’s demand for more sensitive interpretation with his conclusion that there are no fallacies, and that is by appealing to a strong principle of charity. We might adopt a model of interpretation according to which the best interpretation of an argument is always that interpretation which makes it out to be the best argument. It is always possible to construct a version of an argumentative passage which contains no mistakes in reasoning. As explained earlier, one can simply insert the associated conditional as a missing premise. And there are a variety of moves that can be employed.

In any case in which discourse can be construed either as offering a poor argument or as offering no argument, we always opt for the latter. Even where there is an argument, sentences that are in fact irrelevant to the conclusion can be interpreted as comments which do not belong to the real premises so that irrelevance does not occur. Where indicator words make these moves interpretively implausible, supplementary premises can be added so that inference gaps are always filled, and any errors remaining are errors in belief, not in reasoning. Where appropriate, conclusions of the supposed argument can be qualified so that less is claimed and less support is needed. Arguments can be taken as being of an inferentially unambitious type, as Finocchiaro proposed for alleged cases of the post hoc fallacy. Using a combination of such strategies, apparently fallacious arguments can be rendered as non-fallacies by charitable interpretation.

Finocchiaro does refer approvingly to charity. However, he does not explicitly endorse a version of it so strong that it would in every case require one or more of the above moves. Others have not been so cautious. The principle of charity is often stated so ambiguously and used so sweepingly that its application would eliminate fallacies, both formal and informal.⁴¹

Strong charity will suffice to eliminate fallacies. If our over-riding goal in interpretation is to interpret discourse so as to make it maximally ‘sensible’, then it will be to avoid alleging that a speaker or writer has made an error in reasoning. Thus, if strong charity is adopted as the guiding principle of interpretation, there will be few if any fallacies. But strong charity can be resisted for other reasons. Moderate charity, which is sensible and usable for genuinely interpretive purposes, will not suffice to eliminate fallacies.

Consider the following example of a chain letter, cited by Gerald Nosich in his text, Reasons and Arguments.⁴²

TRUST IN THE LORD WITH ALL YOUR HEART AND HE WILL ACKNOWLEDGE AND HE WILL LIGHT THE WAY.

This prayer was sent to you for luck. The original copy is from the Netherlands. It has been around the world ten times. The luck has been brought to you. You’re to receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter. ‘This is no joke.’ You will receive it in the mail.

Send copies of this letter to people you think need good luck. Do not send money, do not keep this letter. It must leave you within ninety-six hours after you receive it. Please send twenty copies and see what happens to you on the fourth day.

This chain comes from Venezuela and was written by St. Anthony De Calif, a missionary from South America. Since this chain must make a tour of this world, you must send twenty copies, identical to this one photostated. Either to one of your friends, parents, or acquaintances.

An officer received $70,000. Don Colbert received $30,000 but lost it because he broke the chain. While in the Philippines General Welch lost his life six days after he received this letter, he failed to circumstance the prayer. However, before he died he received $775,000.

After a few days, you will receive a surprise. ‘This is true even if you are not superstitious.’ Take note of the following:

Constantine Black received the chain in 1933. He asked his secretary to make twenty copies and send them. A few days later he won a lottery in his country for two million dollars.

Carlos Crocbite an office employee received the chain, he forgot it. A few days later, he lost his job. He found the chain and sent it to twenty people and five days later he received a better job.

Doris Merchild received the chain and did not believe in it. Nine days later she died. FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER SHOULD THIS CHAIN BE BROKEN.

The context and wording of this letter make it clear that the various anecdotes are supposed to support two conclusions:

1. A person who, within ninety-six hours of receiving the letter, sends out twenty copies of it to appropriate people, will receive good luck within four days of receiving the letter because he has treated the letter appropriately.

2. A person who, within ninety-six hours of receiving the letter, does not send out twenty copies of it to appropriate people will receive bad luck because he has not treated the letter appropriately.

To support (1), four cases of individuals who received the letter and then had good luck are cited. To support (2), four cases of individuals who did not behave properly after receiving the letter and had bad luck are cited.

Both post hoc and hasty inductive reasoning are involved in the use of these anecdotes to support (1) and (2). No plausible use of a moderate charity principle can avoid this. The purpose of the letter is to convince the recipient to send off the appropriate number of copies in the right way; the need to convince him or her of (l) and (2) arises directly from this. The only evidence in support of these tacit conclusions is anecdotal. In every anecdote a sequence of events is described, with the clear implication (made explicit in one case) that the prior event caused the latter event. To interpret the letter as non-fallacious, as doing something other than repeating post hoc fallacies, we would have to ignore very considerable contextual and textual evidence. The point of such a letter is to frighten people into compliance. The stories told are to achieve this. Causal claims are required, and the anecdotes are the only basis for them, in the written letter. Knowing what we do about the writers and readers of chain letters, there is no other plausible interpretation of this discourse which avoids the charge of fallacy. Only a principle of charity so strong as to outweigh all other relevant factors in interpretation could give a different result for this passage. Such strong charity is not a plausible principle of interpretation.

5. Concluding Comments

Formal invalidity is not the whole story about fallacies. It may be possible to show formal invalidity, provided we are willing to make preformal assumptions about paraphrasing, but doing that will not be sufficient to yield a theory of fallacy. There are many reasons for this conclusion. Some fallacies, such as begging the question and straw man, can be committed even when an argument is valid. Also, many arguments are non-deductive and standards of deductive validity are irrelevant to their appraisal as adequate or inadequate. Furthermore, the issue of proper interpretation looms large for fallacy theory. A proper theory of interpretation is needed – ruling out strong charity and incorporating moderate charity. Revisionism about fallacies has been tempting because there are so many unresolved and relevant issues in the theory of argument. However, such revisionism is unwarranted and premature. There is no fallacy behind fallacies.

Notes

1. Karel Lambert and William Ulrich, The Nature of Argument, (New York: Macmillan, 1980 argue there are no informal fallacies. Maurice Finocchiaro, ‘Fallacies and the Evaluation of Reasoning’ (American Philosophical Quarterly 18 (1981), pp. 13-22) suspects that fallacies occur only in textbooks. Gerald J. Massey, ‘Are There any Good Arguments that Bad Arguments are Bad?’, (Philosophy in Context, 4 (1975), pp. 61-77); ‘In Defense of the Asymmetry’, (Philosophy in Context, 4, Supplement, pp. 44-56); and ‘The Fallacy Behind Fallacies’, (Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, (1980), pp. 489-50;) claims that fallacy theory falls apart because we can never demonstrate formal invalidity. Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms, (Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1978) and L. Jonathan Cohen, ‘Are People Programmed to Commit Fallacies?’ (Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 12, pp. 251-274) and ‘On the Psychology of Prediction: Whose is the Fallacy?’, (Cognition, 7, pp. 385-407) adopt principles of interpretation that would eliminate or virtually eliminate fallacies.

2. For similar definitions, see John Woods and Douglas Walton, Argument: The Logic of the Fallacies (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1982): ‘a fallacy is an argument that is a tricky deception because it is incorrect, even while it has a tendency to seem correct’. See also C. Kirwan, Logic and Argument (London: Duckworth and Co., 1978), p. 269: ‘in logical parlance fallacies are not false propositions but incorrect arguments (non sequiturs) which seem to be correct and fallacy is not falsity but incorrectness’. S.F. Barker, in the third edition of Elements of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall, 1981), says ‘A fallacy is a logical mistake in reasoning. When there are premises and a conclusion that, through some logical error, is mistakenly thought to be proved by them, then and only then, is there a fallacy in the logical sense.’ For empirical evidence that people commit a variety of inductive fallacies, see Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, by social psychologists R. Nisbett and Lee Ross. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1980.)

3. In ‘A Comment on Fallacies and Argument Analysis’, T. Carroll contends that a similar definition of mine makes deception an essential element of fallacy in such a way that the arguer must intend to deceive the audience if he or she is to be arguing fallaciously. This criticism fails to distinguish between deceptiveness as a tendency to deceive and actual deception. Actual deception is not required for fallacy; nor is intent to deceive. What is required is that fallacious arguments will themselves be deceptive in the sense that they will have features such that people will tend to mistake them for good arguments. (T. Carroll, ‘ A Comment. .. ‘, Informal Logic Newsletter V, 2, pp. 22-23. Compare my ‘Who Says There are No Fallacies?’, Informal Logic Newsletter IV,3, pp. 2-10. The present essay is an amended and extended version of that article.

4. Carroll points out that my definition is slightly at odds with the usage in which ‘infrequently occurring fallacies’ is an acceptable expression. If there is an element of stipulation in my account I am willing to accept it, and believe it does no harm.

5.The Nature of Argument, p. 24.

6. Ibid., p. 25.

7. Ibid., p. 26.

8. Compare my ‘Ad Hominem: Revising the Textbooks’, in Teaching Philosophy 6 (1983), pp. 13-24. See also the related and excellent paper by Robert Ennis, ‘The Believability of People’, The Educational Forum, March, 1974, pp. 347-354.

9. Gerald J. Massey’s three important articles on this point are cited in note 1 and will be discussed in detail later.

10. The Nature of Argument, p. 26.

11. Ibid., p. 27.

12. Ibid., p. 28.

13. Ibid., p. 28.

14. See note 1 for full references.

15. ‘Are There any Good Arguments that Bad Arguments are Bad?’, p. 66.

16. ‘In Defense of the Asymmetry’, p. 50.

17. ‘The Fallacy behind Fallacies’.

18. Ibid., p. 494.

19. Massey assumes without question that invalidity is a necessary condition of fallaciousness. Discussions by John Woods and Douglas Walton and Charles J. Abate have shown problems with this view. See Woods and Walton, ‘Fallaciousness without Invalidity?’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976), pp. 52-54; Abate, ‘Fallaciousness and Invalidity’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 12(1979), pp. 262-265.

20. ‘The Fallacy behind Fallacies’, p. 496.

21. By dialectical conditions, I refer to the dynamic of discussion and to states of knowledge and belief of the audience to whom the argument is addressed. I suggest that an argument is question-begging if it contains a premise that the audience would not accept unless it already accepted the conclusion. I assume here that the common view that begging the question is a fallacy should not be rejected without prior reason.

22. Here again, I assume that the common view that straw man is a fallacy is to be accepted until compelling reasons are advanced against it.

23. Further information is always needed – at the very least we need interpretive grounds for regarding the argument as deductive. Compare John Woods and Douglas Walton, ‘Fallaciousness without Invalidity?’.

24. ‘The Fallacy behind Fallacies’, p. 495.

25. I say sometimes because the argument might depend on a term such as ‘property’ which is not formalized and not readily formalizable.

26. Rolf George, ‘A Postscript on Fallacies’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 12, (1983), pp. 319-325.

27. The exceptions, such as C.L. Hamblin’s Fallacies (London: Methuen and Co. 1970) and numerous articles by John Woods and Douglas Walton are, of course, notable.

28. For examples see my ‘Ad Hominem: Revising the Textbooks’, and ‘What’s Wrong with Slippery Slope Arguments?’ (Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1983), pp. 303-16) and Leo Groarke’s ‘When Two Wrongs Make a Right’, Informal Logic Newsletter V, 1 (December 1982), pp. 10-13, and, of course, the many articles on fallacies by John Woods and Douglas Walton.

29.The Fallacy behind Fallacies’, p. 490.

30. For full references, see note 1.

31. Fallacies and the Evaluation of Reasoning’, p. 13.

32. Ibid., p. 15.

33. Ibid., p. 15.

34. Ibid., p. 16

35. I don’t wish to imply here my own acceptance of Copi’s definition, only to express doubts about Finocchiaro’s particular way of attacking it.

36. ‘Fallacies and the Evaluation of Reasoning’, p. 16.

37. P.F. Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory (London: Methuen and Co., 1952), p. 14.

38. ‘Fallacies and the Evaluation of Reasoning’, p. 17.

39. Ibid., p. 16.

40. Ibid., p. 17.

41. See Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms, and Donald Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974), pp. 5-20) for very strong principles of charity. A good criticism of such principles in contexts of translation and the attribution of intentional states may be found in Paul Thagard and R.E. Nisbett, ‘Rationality and Charity’, (Philosophy of Science 50 (1983), pp. 250-267.) I discuss these views in ‘A New Approach to Charity’.

42. Gerald, M. Nosich, Reasons and Arguments (Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth, 1982), pp. 58-59.