Nicholas Kristof: Dumb or Dumber?

In his column today New York Times resident moron Nicholas Kristof "argues" in favor of a military strike by the US on Syria. I use quotation marks around argument because, as we will see, Kristof doesn't really have anything intelligent to say on this topic, and instead must resort to a bunch of False Dilemmas, Straw Men, Inconsistencies, and Non Sequiturs. Let's take a look.

Kristof begins by suggesting that the only alternative to fully supporting the Obama administration plan for military strikes on Syria is to do nothing. He writes:

To me, the central question isn’t, “What are the risks of cruise missile strikes on Syria?” I grant that those risks are considerable, from errant missiles to Hezbollah retaliation. It’s this: “Are the risks greater if we launch missiles, or if we continue to sit on our hands?” [Emphasis added]

This is a clear example of a Straw Man combined with a False Dilemma. The Straw Man occurs when he suggests that people who are opposed to a US strike on Syria are in favor of doing nothing. This is complete nonsense as many people have suggested other options for dealing with the ongoing civil war. Here are two: one from a former diplomat named Robert A. Pastor, and another from columnist David Sirota. One may disagree with the effectiveness of these approaches, but it is a false dilemma of gross proportions to suggest that the only two options are drop bombs or do nothing.

Kristof continues by suggesting that a limited bombing campaign would stem the violence in Syria. Ignoring the almost certain civilians casualties from these strikes, Kristof's claims make absolutely no sense on their face:

In Syria, it seems to me that cruise missile strikes might make a modest difference, by deterring further deployment of chemical weapons. Sarin nerve gas is of such limited usefulness to the Syrian army that it has taken two years to use it in a major way, and it’s plausible that we can deter Syria’s generals from employing it again if the price is high.

By Kristof's own estimates, 165 people are killed daily in Syria, and the death toll from the Syrian conflict has been estimated at around 100,000. By contrast, the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria killed about 1500 people (I say "alleged" because we still don't have strong evidence other than reports from US officials that a chemical attack occurred, much less that the Syrian government was responsible). Following Kristof's logic, even if we could magically eliminate the Syrian government's chemical weapons capacity without harming any innocent civilians, this would have almost no impact on the magnitude of human death and suffering caused by the civil war. As others have noted, the Obama plan would not do anything to resolve the conflict, but would merely be a "face-saving" exercise for the US government.

Kristof does suggest and support the possibility of a more robust attack on the offensive capabilities of the Syrian government writing:

The Syrian government has also lately had the upper hand in fighting, and airstrikes might make it more willing to negotiate toward a peace deal to end the war. I wouldn’t bet on it, but, in Bosnia, airstrikes helped lead to the Dayton peace accord.
Missile strikes on Assad’s military airports might also degrade his ability to slaughter civilians. With fewer fighter aircraft, he may be less able to drop a napalm-like substance on a school, as his forces apparently did in Aleppo last month. [Emphasis added]

In his own comments he admits that he doesn't think a military strike would achieve the goals he wants to achieve in Syria! If so, why is he advocating such an attack? Furthermore, if we were successful in degrading the military capability of the Syrian  government, we would then be actively promoting one of the biggest concerns Kristof has about Syria:

The longer the war drags on in Syria, the more Al Qaeda elements gain strength, the more Lebanon and Jordan are destabilized, and the more people die.

Kristof seems to fail to understand that one of the major forces opposing the Syrian government are folks allied with Al Qaeda. Thus, weakening and degrading the Assad regime would only strengthen Al Qaeda in Syria! Thus, Kristof's own argument in internally inconsistent! As Atrios notes, Kristof's plan seems to boil down to:

1. Bomb
2. ????
3. ????

This means Kristof's logic is sub-underpants gnome.

And for this reason I ask again, "Is Kristof dumb or dumber?"

Greenwald on Terrorism and Straw Men

In yet another brilliant opinion piece Glenn Greenwald discusses and dissects some of the media responses to the horrific killing of a British soldier in Woolwich. In particular, Greenwald looks at how his own commentary on the killing is straw-manned by his opponents. He also hypothesizes some reasons for why people respond to him in the way they do.

To begin with, the killing in question occurred on May 22 in broad daylight outside a military barrack in Woolwich which is southeast of London. According to eyewitnesses, the victim was hacked to death in broad daylight by two assailants. The victim has since been identified as Drummer Lee Rigby, of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. Many in the media and the government have been describing and treating this as an act of terrorism, but Greenwald rightly questions wether such a description is applicable. In particular, he notes that:

...the victim of the violence was a soldier of a nation at war, not a civilian. He was stationed at an army barracks quite close to the attack. The killer made clear that he knew he had attacked a soldier when he said afterward: "this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

In other words, can attacks on soldiers at military barracks of a nation at war ever be described as terrorism? One of the most common definitions of terrorism involves the idea of attacking civilians to achieve political goals. If we accept this definition, then it is very hard to classify this as an act of terrorism. However, as Greenwald notes, if we broaden the definition of "terrorism" to label this an act of terrorism, then much of what the US and the UK do in the middle east would also fit under that definition as well.

...given that the person killed was not a civilian but a soldier of a nation at war (using US standards), it is difficult to devise a definition of "terrorism" that encompasses this attack while excluding large numbers of recent acts by the US, the UK and many of their allies and partners.

At this point, Greenwald then looks at the way his position is straw-manned (misrepresented and distorted) by others. This discussion is particularly interesting as Greenwald tends to accurately predict when he will be straw-manned by others. Writing in his earlier column he noted:

I know this vital caveat will fall on deaf ears for some, but nothing about this discussion has anything to do with justifiability. An act can be vile, evil, and devoid of justification without being "terrorism": indeed, most of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, from the Holocaust to the wanton slaughter of Stalin and Pol Pot and the massive destruction of human life in Vietnam, are not typically described as "terrorism". To question whether something qualifies as "terrorism" is not remotely to justify or even mitigate it. That should go without saying, though I know it doesn't.

Greenwald then immediately quotes Andrew Sullivan's comment on this earlier article. This is of interest because Sullivan misrepresents Greenwald's position in exactly the manner Greenwald predicted he would. In his response, Sullivan writes (as quoted by Greenwald):

"How can that legitimize a British citizen's brutal beheading of a fellow British citizen on the streets of London?" He then added: "The idea that this foul, religious bigotry . . . is some kind of legitimate protest against a fast-ending war is just perverse." He concludes with a real flourish: my "blindness to the savagery at the heart of Salafism", he decrees, "is very hard to understand, let alone forgive".

This is a clear and unambiguous misreading and misrepresentation of Greenwald's position, and is as clear an example of a Straw Man as one is likely to find. This, of course, raises the interesting question of how someone could so dramatically misread Greenwald. I, myself, don't have any good answers, but Greenwald has a hypothesis:I think the answer lies in the very first sentence Sullivan wrote when responding to my column:

"I really have to try restrain my anger here." It's an intensely emotional reaction, not a rational one. He, and so many others, are deeply invested on a psychological and personal level in protecting the narrative that Islam is a uniquely violent force in the world, that Muslim extremists pose a threat that nobody else poses, and that the US, the West and its allies (including Israel) are morally superior and more civilized than their adversaries, and their violence is more noble and elevated.

This is an intriguing hypothesis, but as I am not a psychologist, I will leave it to my readers to determine what they think about this interesting and important issue.

I will conclude this post by noting that what Sullivan has done here is a good example of the last two of the five filters in Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model of the Media. These are the Flak and Jingoism filters. Flak is criticism aimed by elites (Sullivan) at those who raise questions about the establishment narrative (Greenwald). Jingoism is an unreflective unthinking patriotism that sees everything the US does as good and noble, and everything doen by our opponents (even if it is the same act) as supremely evil and immoral. Both of these filters helpfully explain why Sullivan would produce exactly the sort of article that he did produce in response to Greenwald.

Michael Shermer is an important figure in the atheism and skeptical community, but of late he appears to have gotten a wee bit...grumpy. In a recent screed for Scientific American he goes after what he sees as a liberal war on science. Rebecca Watson and PZ Meyers have done a great job of attacking the substance of the claims Shermer makes, but I want to look at the many fallacies he commits over the course of his article.

The first fallacy is the enormous Straw Man contained in the title of the article. Shermer is claiming that there is a liberal "War" on science, but the first major piece of evidence he cites is the fact that 41% of Democrats appear to believe that the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago and 19% deny anthropogenic global warming. These statistics are certainly disturbing, but it is unclear how they constitute a "War." As Rebecca Watson astutely notes:

Does this equal a “liberal war on science”? Hardly. A lot of people believing something inaccurate does not mean there’s a war – a war requires action, and conservatives are the people who are performing the actions: namely, introducing and sponsoring antievolution bills. While I’m sure that some Democrat must have introduced an antievolution bill, my Google skills have failed to turn one up. Bill after bill in state after state, conservative Republicans are the ones who are attempting to legislate their religious beliefs.

The next major fallacies arise when Shermer discusses liberal attitudes towards energy policy:

...progressive liberals tend to be antinuclear because of the waste-disposal problem, anti–fossil fuels because of global warming, antihydroelectric because dams disrupt river ecosystems, and anti–wind power because of avian fatalities. The underlying current is “everything natural is good” and “everything unnatural is bad.”

First, Shermer seems to be guilty of Missing the Point, because for each of the sources of energy on the list, the objections raised are legitimate and significant concerns. No one is denying the reality or effectiveness of these energy methods, but there are clear, scientifically documented side-effects for each of them. There is a waste-disposal problem for nuclear power, fossil fuels do contribute to global warming, etc. Any sensible energy policy should needs to take these scientifically proven problems into account when figuring out how best to provide for the nation's energy needs. That people point out that these problems exist is clearly not anti-science as Shermer would have us believe. Shermer is also guilty of a serious Inconsistency when he mentions global warming. A few paragraphs before he had criticized liberals for their anti-global warming attitudes, and now he is criticizing them for their concerns about global warming. So, according to Shermer, one is engaged in a war on science if one ignores global warming and one is engaged in a war on science if one acknowledges global warming and seeks solutions to mitigate it. Finally, the passage also commits a straw man in accusing people who seek a more sustainable energy system of committing the naturalistic fallacy.

The last topic Shermer address concerns attitudes towards genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and it is here that his argument makes the least sense. He writes:

Try having a conversation with a liberal progressive about GMOs—genetically modified organisms—in which the words “Monsanto” and “profit” are not dropped like syllogistic bombs. Comedian Bill Maher, for example, on his HBO Real Time show on October 19, 2012, asked Stonyfield Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg if he would rate Monsanto as a 10 (“evil”) or an 11 (“f—ing evil”)? The fact is that we've been genetically modifying organisms for 10,000 years through breeding and selection. It's the only way to feed billions of people.

This one is a bit subtle, but Shermer appears to completely miss the point. First, he claims that liberals are anti-science about GMOs, but all the examples he provides are not of people being opposed to GMOs, but of people being opposed to the activities of a particular corporation, Monsanto.  Shermer seems completely ignorant about the difference between these two sorts of criticisms, and thus his entire attack in this paragraph is a massive Straw Man. This is quite surprising because there is a great deal of incorrect information about GMOs that often gets repeated by folks on the left, but Shermer doesn't discuss any of this, instead presenting arguments that address completely different points.

I must say that after reading Shermer's post I am, frankly, disappointed. I have read and liked Shermer's work in the past, but when I see an essay like this that commits so many logical fallacies in such a short space, I am forced to rethink my earlier opinions of the man and his work.

The gun control opponents go there.

In the wake of the horrors at Sandy Hook, many gun owners in America have gone off the deep end. Not wanting to acknowledge the clear correlation between gun ownership and gun violence in the US, these individuals have taken to arguing that even a modest attempt to limit the accessibility and availability of drugs guns is tantamount to a fascist takeover of the US. This phenomena is, oddly enough, not just a product of folk on the right wing (as evidenced by the Drudge Report headline) but also folks on the left. For example, Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger" has made a similar claim in a blog post titled, "Obama to follow in footsteps of Hitler, Stalin with 'executive order' disarmament of the American people."

In both cases these authors are guilty of a variety of fallacies. First up is the Slippery Slope fallacy. All these authors are explicitly arguing, "Restrictions on guns today, totalitarian dictatorship tomorrow." In fact, Mike Adams begins his post by making the following claim,

It's official. President Obama is going to march America down the dark halls of history by following in the footsteps of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and all the other gun-grabbing madmen who have exploited fear to achieve the total concentration of power in the hands of dictatorial government.

Adams further goes on to suggest that the Government wants to take everyone's guns so that they can then exterminate the entire population. Lest you think I am strawmanning Adams, here are his own words:

It's all coming out. This is their true agenda: mass murder and / or genocide. Those who support gun disarmament of the American people are supporting mass murder: Michael Moore, Piers Morgan, Biden, Obama, Cuomo... they are all proponents of mass murder. They are the very same kind of people who once supported Hitler and Stalin, and now they're creating a new Hitler in Barack Obama, the would-be dictator who is thrusting America straight into a new civil war.

If we think about the claim here for just a second, it should be clear how absurd it is. Why would the government need to take guns in order to kill the populace (ignoring for a moment the question of why the government would want to eliminate its tax bases)? The US military spends more money than every other military in the world combined. The military has no shortage of extremely powerful weapons (far more powerful than anything even the most hardened gun lover might have). If they wanted to exterminate the population, they could just do it. Why would they need to confiscate guns first? What use is an assault rifle against a tank or a predator drone? For these reasons and others, it is clear that this larger argument is a good example of a slippery slope.

Moving on, these articles are also nice examples of Straw Men in that they seem to be grossly misrepresenting the gun control position. As far as I know, the gun control debates are not about handguns or hunting rifles. The debates are about assault rifles with high capacity magazines. The government is not trying to take everyone's guns away, they are merely debating the possibility of limiting access to devices whose only purpose is killing large numbers of people very quickly. This is obviously a contentious issue for many people, but it is unclear to me what purpose making such weapons available to the general public could possibly serve other than ensuring that people are killed by them. In any case, to claim, as Adams does that the government wants to get all your guns is a straw man.

I will conclude by noting the obvious False Analogy of comparing Obama to Hitler or Stalin. Not much needs be said here, but the situation Obama is confronting today is radically different from the situations confronting Stalin and Hitler. To suggest that there is a similarity between the two is to commit a false analogy. 

Fox News: At It Again

I was very busy the last few weeks with Thanksgiving and then recovering from Thanksgiving so I haven't had a chance to post. As my critical thinking classes transition into a discussion of the media, I am going to try and post more media related posts in the upcoming days.

I want to begin by looking at a post by MediaMatters discussing one of the latest atrocities committed by Fox News. The following interview with J. Christian Adams on Fox and Friends from December 1 concerns a report recently issued by the Government Accountable Office on the feasibility of relocating detainees from the Guantanamo facility in Cuba to the US. The report (PDF) basically says that the US does have sufficiently secure prisons to house these detainees if it so chooses. Needless to say, this report is seen as an enormous threat by Fox, and Adams, through the use of a number of fallacies, tries to argue that this report is actually evidence of a grand conspiracy to smuggle terrorists into the US so that they can be released onto American streets (for what reason is never made clear, something to do with Obama being a Muslim, but nothing more detailed than that). Let's take a look at the video, and I will then discuss some of the major fallacies that it commits.


Perhaps the most obvious fallacy comes at the end when Adams suggests that:

I think the long-term plan here is to integrate them into the regular prison population where they can radicalize the other prisoners. And eventually, these people -- some in the administration -- want to just release them into the United States.

This is a clear an unambiguous example of a Straw Man. There is literally not a single person in the entire US who thinks that terrorists should just be released into the United States, so for Adam to claim otherwise is to just invent a position that has no relation to reality in order to scare and frighten people.

A second major fallacy is the Suppression of Relevant Data that occurs during Adam's discussion of the Uighurs. For some quick background, the Uighurs are Chinese Muslims who were picked up by the US during the early years of the war on terror. These individuals (15 in total) were determined to pose no threat to the US or its citizens, and in 2003 were scheduled for release from Guantanamo. This 2005 story from the Washington Post nicely summarizes their plight:

In late 2003, the Pentagon quietly decided that 15 Chinese Muslims detained at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be released. Five were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs. The other 10 were deemed low-risk detainees whose enemy was China's communist government -- not the United States, according to senior U.S. officials. 

For Adams to describe these individuals as "terrorists" is extremely misleading, and really does a disservice to viewers of Fox News by withholding important information about the case from them. This is because if Adams were to accurately explain what is going on, he wouldn't be able to engage in the scaremongering he does, and Fox News would have one less way to attack and criticize the Obama administration.

Strawmanning Telecom Immunity

On December 16, 2005 The New York Times published an article revealing that the US government, in collusion with all major telecommunications firms operating in the US, had engaged in a massive effort to illegally eavesdrop on the phone calls of US citizens. This article, already delayed several months to help Bush win reelection in 2004, demonstrated that for many years the US government had illegally eavesdropped on numerous calls (the exact number is not available since, like most of this stuff, it is classified). Despite this clear and widespread pattern of law-breaking, enormous efforts were made to immunize everyone who had participated in this lawless activity. In 2008, for example, a law was passed that retroactively immunized these telecom firms from lawsuits and criminal prosecution for their collusion with the US government in committing these illegal acts. Then, just yesterday, the Supreme Court blocked any possible legal recourse against these illegal activities by declining to review a lawsuit that had been filed against these telecom firms.

In much of the coverage of this issue, there is an enormous amount of straw manning. A Straw Man is a fallacy in which one intentionally distorts or misrepresents an opponent's position. We can see an excellent example of this in CNN's coverage of the Supreme Court refusal to review the issue. The headline for the article reads:

Court upholds U.S. gov't immunity in terror eavesdropping

And the first paragraph of the article says:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday left in place a law that allows the Justice Department to stop suits against telecommunications companies for participating in wiretaps of potential terrorists.

Both the headline and the opening paragraph completely distort the issue in question. Literally no one has ever suggested that the US government not spy on suspected terrorists. The issue here is that the government was not spying on suspected terrorists, it was spying on everybody regardless of any suspicion or evidence that the people being eavesdropped on were terrorists. To claim otherwise as CNN does in its article is to straw man opponents of illegal wiretapping as terrorist sympathizers when nothing could be further from the truth. The Supreme Court was not upholding the right of the government to eavesdrop on suspected terrosists, it was upholding the right of the government to eavesdrop on anyone for no reason. This is why this case is such a big deal because it demonstrates the further erosion of civil liberties that has occured since the terrorist attack of 9-11. That CNN so grossly misreports this issue is another telling sign of how broken the media system in the US really is.

Here is Glenn Greenwald discussing the issue and providing his, as always, insightful analysis.

Reality is not a democracy

In a rather bizarre article trying to argue that plants aren't alive (yes, really), Henry Morris III, CEO of The Institute for Creation Research provides a very nice example of an Ad Populum. An ad populum is an appeal to popularity in which one argues that because a certain belief is widely held or popular it must be true. That this kind of reasoning is fallacious should be obvious: just because a bunch of people believe something, doesn't make it true. Reality is not a democracy. Here is the ad populum:

If that were the only battle to fight, the scientific accuracy of the creationist model would be rather easy to demonstrate. In spite of the generations-long effort of the academic world to foist evolutionary naturalism on the world, 46 percent of the U.S. population still believes that “God created human beings in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years” (Gallup poll released June 1, 2012). Intuitively and observationally, people “know” that plants and animals are not the same and that human beings are vastly different from everything else on the planet.

There are a number of fallacies in this passage besides the ad populum, but let's deal with that first. Here, Norris is trying to argue to that because many (though less than half) Americans don't believe in evolution this is somehow evidence of the falsity of that theory. Again, just because many people believe something, that doesn't make it true. In this case, it seems clear that 46% of Americans are just wrong.

Furthermore, this fact about popular opinion doesn't actually support Morris' thesis that plants are not alive. Even if 46% of Americans don't believe in evolution, I imagine that if you polled these people they would all think that plants are alive. The opinion of people about the truth or falsity of evolution tells us nothing about their opinion on whether or not plants are alive. This is a good example of a non sequitur.

Lastly, we can see a good example of a straw man in the last sentence. I (and I imagine most evolutionary biologists) would certainly agree that it is obvious that plants and humans are different. Just look at them.

Maybe not this guy.

However, these radical differences don't tell us anything about common descent. In fact, evolutionary theory does a very good job of explaining how the diversity of life we observe on our planet all descended from a common ancestor. To claim otherwise is to misrepresent the claims of proponents of evolution.

h/t to Pharyngula

The Discovery Institute Straw Mans Peter Singer

One of the major challenges in identifying and recognizing many fallacies is that they often depend on a degree of ignorance in the reader. That is, the fallacy works because the reader is ignorant of the truth. This is often the case in false dilemmas where one may not be aware of other options, and it is particularly problematic in the case of Straw Men. A Straw Man is a deliberate misrepresentation of an opponent's view, and this misrepresentation can be difficult to recognize unless one is familiar with the view being distorted. A good example of this comes from a recent article by Wesley J. Smith posted on the Discovery Institute website. This article is critical of a recent award given to the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer by the Australian government. In developing this criticism of the award Smith attacks the views of Peter Singer, enumerating the many flaws he sees with the ethical positions Singer adopts. One such criticism is the following:

• Singer supports using the disabled in medical experiments: In 2006, Singer enraged animal rights activists over the use of monkeys in researching cures for Parkinson’s disease. But he would have said the same thing about using human “non-persons.” In fact, he often has. For example, when asked by Psychology Today about the benefits that chimps provided in developing the hepatitis vaccine, Singer said that disabled humans should be used in such research instead.

Now I happen to be fairly familiar with Singer's work having first encountered it when I was a TA in graduate school (h/t to Lara Denis), so I immediately recognized this as a Straw Man of Singer's actual position. Fortunately, Smith provides a source for his claim, so we can look at what Singer actually said:

PT: Let's take a specific case. Research on chimpanzees led to the hepatitis B vaccine, which has saved many human lives. Let's pretend it's the moment before that research is to begin. Would you stop it?
PS: I'm not comfortable with any invasive research on chimps. I would ask, Is there no other way? And I think there are other ways. I would say, What about getting the consent of relatives of people in vegetative states?
PT: That would cause a riot!
PS: Well, if you could really confidently determine that this person will never recover consciousness, it's a lot better to use them than a chimp. I agree, it doesn't go over well, and people throw up their hands in shock and horror. But I'd like them to explain why it's better to lock a fully-conscious, self-aware chimp in a seven-foot cage in solitary confinement than to experiment with someone lying unconscious in a hospital ward.

Now Singer's views are certainly provocative, but in this passage he doesn't actually advocate the use of disabled humans for scientific research. Firstly, his claim is limited to people in a persistent vegetative state, not disabled people generally, such as someone with MS or who uses a wheelchair. Secondly, he only suggests that these individuals be used under certain very limited conditions (no chance of recovery, full consent of the family). Lastly, he is not actually advocating this position, but merely posing it as a challenge to those who advocate the use of animal research. If we think research on a chimpanzee is moral, then why do we not also think it is more moral to use humans in a persistent vegetative state? It is certainly a provocative and challenging argument, but it is an argument, and the proper way to respond is to evaluate the premises and the inferences to the conclusion. The tactic of Smith, by contrast, is to simply Straw Man the position so that it looks completely ridiculous.

The take away from all this is that when one is reading or listening to comments critical of someone else's viewpoint it is always a good idea to take a look at the position being criticized to ensure that the reconstruction and criticism of it is accurate.

Nonsense about the Higgs boson

In the wake of the recent announcement concerning the discovery of what appears to be the elusive Higgs boson, some have taken this as an opportunity to speculate wildly about the nature of the cosmos. A great deal of this is due to the unfortunate labeling of the Higgs boson as the "God Particle." One author who has taken this approach is Mike Adams, the self-labeled Health Ranger who has written a long post on this topic at his website. Adams is very taken with what he describes as "Consciousness Cosmology," and sees this as a correction of a major defect in the scientific community. In discussing this defect he creates a number of straw men, and it is these I want to focus on. For starters:

Yet, as I hinted above, there's still something missing from all this: Consciousness. Without consciousness, the universe cannot be fully explained, as consciousness is increasingly emerging as a fundamental force impacting the very fabric of reality. This is really, really frustrating for many scientists because, for starters, the majority of them don't even believe in the existence of consciousness. Stephen Hawking is famous for his rather short-sighted remarks that people are mindless, soulless beings -- "biological robots" -- and that religion / spirituality is a realm for "people who are afraid of the dark." [Emphasis added]

Setting aside the merits of Hawking's view of human nature, it seems clear that he nowhere describes humans as "mindless." In fact, Hawking is one of our greatest illustrations of the power of the human mind; demonstrating that mere physical limitations are no barrier to studying and contemplating the cosmos. Though I am not familiar with Hawking's view, I take it that he is merely claiming that all the properties of the mind and consciousness can be reduced to neurophysiological properties of the brain, a philosophical view sometimes referred to as reductive materialism. Again, this is not the same as claiming that consciousness doesn't exist.

Furthermore, it seems clearly false to say that the majority of scientists don't believe in consciousness. In fact, to say that one doesn't believe in consciousness is itself a self-refuting statement. To borrow a little Descartes, if one has beliefs, then by definition one is conscious. Thus, it is clearly a straw man to say that a majority of scientists don't believe in consciousness. All scientists believe in consciousness, it is just that the particle physicists don't see any use in referencing consciousness to do particle physics.

Continuing, Adams again misrepresents the state of modern physics when he writes:

Gaining a deep understanding of this may be exceedingly difficult for human beings to achieve. It may, in fact, be beyond the capabilities of biological beings with limited neurological capacity. Nevertheless, I believe that the more modern science understands about the Higgs boson, quantum theory, particle physics and cosmology, the closer science will be to initiating a scientific study of consciousness.

The Straw Man here is in the claim that scientists are not actively engaged in studying consciousness. If this were true, then it is unclear what neurologists and psychologists are doing. They may not be studying consciousness in the way Adam's thinks they should, but to claim that they are not studying it is a gross misrepresentation.


One final (in the sense of what I will discuss here) misrepresentation/straw man occurs when Adam's writes:

Where there is life, there appears to be consciousness, and if there's one thing most physicists and cosmologists agree on, it's that life is ridiculously abundant across the cosmos.

First, life and consciousness are not equivalent concepts. Bacteria and archaea, for example, are certainly alive, but it seems quite a stretch to suggest that they have consciousness. Furthermore, there is absolutely no evidence that life exists anywhere but here on earth. We haven't even discovered life on other planets or moons in our solar system, let alone in other star systems. We have certainly made some promising discoveries that increase the liklehood of extra-solar life, but we certainly haven't discovered any to date.

So, these are just the straw men in an article ridiculed with logical fallacies. I will continue discussing some of the other fallacies in this article in later posts.

Either you're with or or against us

A False Dilemma (sometimes called a false dichotomy) is a fallacy in which one artificially restricts the options available to one's rhetorical opponents. That is, one suggests that there are only two options when in fact there are a wide spectrum of potential choices available. The following video clip provides a nice montage of former president George W. Bush employing one of his favorite rhetorical fallacies, the False Dilemma:

These clips come, of course, from the period after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack and were a core component of Bush's anti-terrorism rhetoric. This strategy was first laid out in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2011 (Bush made a similar false dilemma in this address which can be found on page 5). That this is a false dilemma should be obvious. One can certainly be opposed to terrorism and yet disagree with the how the US responds to it. For Bush to suggest that there are only two possible options is as clear an example of the false dilemma as one is likely to find.

As in the clips above, it is very common to combine a False Dilemma with a straw man. In setting up a false dilemma one makes one of the horns of that dilemma a straw man, thus pushing people to adopt the alternative horn. This is what we see in the above example. Bush is suggesting that if you do not support the US 100% then you are a hater of freedom and a terrorist. This again provides more rhetorical force for Bush's preferred option which is uncritical support for the US and its anti-terrorism policies.

Just to pile on a bit more, it is also worth mentioning that the US commitment to global freedom is fairly questionable as this piece from Glenn Greenwald highlights.

Sex Ed and Straw Men

During the 2008 Presidential Campaign, the Republican nominee John McCain released the following ad:

This is a great example of a Straw Man. A Straw Man is a fallacy in which one attempts to win an argument or debate by intentionally misrepresenting the position of one's opponent. This misrepresentation generally takes the form of assuming that the opponent adopts the most extreme version of a view possible. The idea here is that it is much easier to knock down a straw man than a real person, so one creates a false version of an opponent's position; a version that is much easier to knock down. This is a fallacy of course because, when one commits a Straw Man, one is no longer arguing with a real person, but with a false construct one has created in one's own mind.

In the clip above, the McCain campaign is suggesting that Barack Obama supported a bill to teach kindergartners about sex, something that, on the face of it, sounds wildly inappropriate. It makes it sound like Obama was supporting something along these lines (NSFW). However, if we look a little more closely at what the bill Obama supported actually did we can see that the above campaign ad seriously distorts Obama's position. And this, of course is exactly what one does when one Straw Mans.

As a final note, I want to stress the importance of employing the principle of charity when engaging in debate or discussing someone's views. That is, when reconstructing someone's position or argument you should always give the most charitable interpretation of that position possible. In this way, Straw Men are avoided, and genuine debate and discussion can occur.