Logic and Science

 

Let us compare two different hypothetical exchanges.

 

Person A: The moon is made out of green cheese.

 

Person B: You dimwitted fool, you ignorant, know-nothing, moron, you addlepated twit.  Cheese is a man-made product, formed by the fermentation of milk solids, which is perishable.   It grows mold and goes bad over time.   The moon was not made by man and has been observed in the sky for thousands of years.   Parts of it have broken off and fallen to earth and these are clearly made of rock.   You would know this if you weren’t such a silly, brain-dead loser, who is as ugly as a monkey’s behind and smells like a cross between a garbage dump, a rendering factory and a sewer to boot, who comes from a long line of horse thieves and whose mother turned tricks.

 

That was the first exchange.   Now here is the second:

 

Person C: I don’t think anthropogenic climate change is something we should be alarmed about.   Climate has never been constant but is constantly going through cycles.   These are caused by factors that are almost entirely outside human influence.   Mankind has learned to adjust to the ever-changing climate and historically has done much better in warmer periods rather than cooler periods.   It makes no sense to treat carbon dioxide, the natural product of our own exhalation and the food which vegetation relies upon, as a pollutant.

 

Person D:  I am terribly sorry but I cannot accept that because you are not a climatologist.  

 

Which of the two, Person B or Person D, responded with an ad hominem argument?

 

If you answered “Person D”, then congratulations.   You understand the difference between an insult and the logical fallacy known as the ad hominem argument.   Either that or you reasoned that the abusive language of Person B was so over-the-top that it had to be the other guy.   Most people, I suspect, unless they used the latter reasoning, would have answered with “Person B.”

 

To insult somebody is to speak about him in a disparaging, contemptuous way.   Person B, in the first exchange, did this to Person A with spades.   He did not, however, rest upon his crass, offensive, name-calling to rebut Person A’s statement, but provided actual reasons for rejecting the suggestion that the moon is made out of cheese.    Person D, by contrast, was polite to the point of excess, even going so far as to apologize for not agreeing with Person C.   At no point, however, did he speak to the reasons Person C gave for opposing climate change alarmism.   Instead, he based his refusal to accept Person C’s position entirely upon Person C’s lack of credentials as a scientific expert in the area of climatology.   His answer, in other words, spoke entirely “to the man” (the literal translation of ad hominem), rather than to the man’s arguments.   This is the essence of the fallacy known as the argumentum ad hominem.    

 

The confusion of an insult (a defect in manners) with an ad hominem (a defect in logic) is a fairly common mistake, one that has been observed for years.   This year, however, I have noticed there has been a plethora of other mistakes in the usage of logical terminology, usually from people whom I would have expected to know better.     Take the argumentum ab auctoritate, for example, the argument from authority.    Whether this constitutes a valid argument or a logical fallacy depends upon a number of qualifying circumstances.    Its validity or fallaciousness aside, however, it is identified by the form “X says Y, therefore Y”.    An argument about authority, such as one that take the form “First X said Y, now X says non-Y, therefore X has contradicted himself”, is not an argument from authority.    In discussing the big mask controversy earlier this year, I found myself accused of making an argumentum ab auctoritate when I was in fact using the latter form of argument to call into question the medical authorities when they began demanding mask use of us.   I have also seen, in the same type of discussion, actual arguments from authority made, but confused with arguments from evidence.   This is precisely what citing an article in a medical journal amounts to when it is offered as the sole answer to reasoned arguments against mask wearing, regardless of whether or not the article itself even speaks to, let alone rebuts, the specific points that had been made against mask wearing. 

 

The last example, you will note, is the mirror image of the ad hominem used by Person D in our illustration above.    Person D’s argument could be expressed as “C has no scientific credentials, therefore C cannot be believed”.   The argument of the person who has no answer to a set of reasoned arguments but to cite an article in medical journal could be expressed as “E has scientific credentials, therefore E must be believed.”   The equation of scientific credentials with authority, either requiring belief when it is present, or negating belief when it is absent, not only defies the rules of logic, but contradicts the fundamental nature of science itself.   Science, properly understood, does not speak with this kind of authoritative voice.   It investigates, seeking answers to the questions “how does this work” and ultimately “how can I make this work for me”, but while it can rebut and say “this is not so”, it can never authoritatively pronounce “this is so.”   Anything that does make the latter kind of pronunciation, is not science.

 

One of the paradoxes of the Modern Age, is that while the advent of rationalism would seem to have stacked the ancient debate about which has epistemic priority, logic, the rules determining the validity of arguments, or evidence, in favour of logic simply by throwing out two whole branches of evidence, tradition and divine revelation, altogether, reducing what remains on the evidence side to the historical and the empirical (scientific), in the long run it has seemed to have had the opposite effect.    Science is now customarily awarded an authority it never claimed for itself, while the basic rules of logic have been neglected and discarded.   Michael Oakeshott noted almost a century ago, that rationalism had introduced a radical change in what reason itself was understood to be.   It had meant one thing from ancient times through St. Thomas on to Richard Hooker, but rationalism had redefined it into something else altogether.   Science also underwent a radical redefinition at the beginning of the Modern Age but evidently, if “science” is now speaking with the voice of authority, it has undergone a second one much more recently.

 

At the risk of committing the ultimate blasphemy of the age, might I suggest that neither reason nor science has been improved by any of these redefinitions, and that we ought to go back to the original meanings of both?