Episode 22: Fallacy Watch: A Few Induction Fallacies

In this episode April discusses the hasty generalization fallacy, the weak analogy fallacy, and the mistaken appeal to authority. Can you tell she really likes to talk about fallacies?

Episode 22 Show Notes:

A brief description of deductive and inductive reasoning, in case you wondered:
https://www.livescience.com/21569-deduction-vs-induction.html

Some good examples of hasty generalization fallacies:
https://www.bettercognitions.com/articles/hasty-generalization-fallacy-examples/

I don't know about the "Captain Bligh" reference, but this Time article does explain what happened to Captain Holly Graf:
http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1969602,00.html

This "Cranky Uncle" is actually a research fellow in climate science at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University in Australia. I got a couple of good examples of bad arguments from this page.
https://crankyuncle.com/critical-thinking-about-covid-false-analogies-about-cupcakes-and-obesity/

A good source for an explanation of bad arguments:
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/search

The Vicks 44 commercial with a very hot fake doctor:
https://youtu.be/ts0XG6qDIco

The article with a pretty good analogical argument for universal healthcare in the US:
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2019/universal-health-coverage-eight-countries?gclid=Cj0KCQjw8eOLBhC1ARIsAOzx5cG8JkvppAGHwJ6fvyGgP8W3i9Il6DTEbsvoAh5EHgWlxVr91h9Yk7QaAg7yEALw_wcB

A good explanation of when you should rely on experts:
https://fallacyinlogic.com/appeal-to-authority-fallacy/

Pew Research data about how many scientists agree on evolution:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/11/darwin-day/

A careful reading of this will help you understand the division over how many scientists think global warming is a thing:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/isnt-there-lot-disagreement-among-climate-scientists-about-global-warming

AMA's data showing the vast majority of physicians are vaccinated against Covid:
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-survey-shows-over-96-doctors-fully-vaccinated-against-covid-19

The Forbes article discussing the controversy surrounding the actual percentage of climate scientist who agree that climate change is largely caused by humans:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2016/12/14/fact-checking-the-97-consensus-on-anthropogenic-climate-change/?sh=3b6d352a1157

Transcript

Episode 22: Fallacy Watch:  A Few Induction Fallacies

Hi everyone and welcome to Think It Through. Yep, we are still talking about fallacies. Now I know that fallacies are tricky, they can be hard to spot and you might fall victim to one without even realizing it. So the more you know about them, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to, if not totally pinpoint them and call them out, at least recognize that something isn’t quite right about someone’s argument. In this episode I’m going to discuss a few of the most common induction fallacies.   Let’s get right to it, shall we?

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You’re probably wondering, what are induction fallacies? Well, let’s take a step back and talk about inductive reasoning. I discussed inductive and deductive reasoning way back in episode 3, so you can always go back to that one and get a refresher course. To put it simply, inductive reasoning is reasoning from specific examples to a general conclusion. In our lives, we’ve seen and experienced lots of things, and we often come to conclusions about something based on all the examples of it that we’ve seen or experienced. If the same thing happens often enough we determine that it is very likely to be the case. So say, If you own a rental house and your renter pays you on time every month for a year or so, you could certainly conclude that that person is a good person to have in your rental house.  

The difference between deductive and inductive reasoning is that deductive reasoning aims to prove that something MUST be the case; but inductive reasoning is not as precise, trying to show that something is LIKELY to be the case. I mean, your renter could certainly be a good, conscientious person who pays on time every month, but it’s not 100% totally certain that will always be the case. Good inductive arguments use good solid evidence to raise the probability of their conclusions, and you can conclude that your renter will likely continue to pay on time in the future because they’ve consistently done so in the past. And the more they DO pay on time, the stronger your conclusion that they’re a good renter will be.

But induction fallacies occur when the argument is so weak (often based on the quality or the amount of evidence provided) that it fails to show that the conclusion has any likelihood of being correct. Let’s look specifically at 3 types of induction fallacies that we run across all the time—hasty generalization, weak analogy, and mistaken appeal to authority. There are plenty of others, but we will just stick with these ones. 

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One common induction fallacies you run into is called the hasty generalization fallacy. This happens when you come to a conclusion based on too little evidence, sometimes as little as one example of something. Let’s say there’s a young woman whose first real love relationship as an adult ended when her boyfriend cheated on her. She might determine, from that one experience, that all men cheat. Or maybe she comes to the conclusion that she isn’t worthy of a relationship. Either way, she’s guilty of hasty generalization. She had one relationship that ended badly, but that isn’t enough evidence to come to either of those conclusions. 

Hasty generalization can occur when someone uses one really compelling example to “prove” a conclusion. For instance, back in 2010 the United States Navy stripped Captain Holly Graf of her command of the guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens after it was determined she had repeatedly abused her crew, both verbally and physically. There are people who likely already thought that women shouldn’t be in command anyway and used this example to prove their point. But it doesn’t prove that at all; all it does is prove that this ONE woman wasn’t a good commander. It is only one example, and it’s far from what happens normally. It’s true that there are still many more male officers than female, so when a woman military officer loses their command in this way it certainly stands out, even though it’s actually quite rare, and not an indication that women in general are unfit for command.

Or here’s an example of how you might personally fall victim to this fallacy, you go to a new store you haven’t been to before, and you ask a salesperson where to find the shoe department. He stops, looks at you with what appears to your eyes to be scorn, and points to the other side of the store, then goes back to what he was doing without a word. You’re taken aback by what appears to be blatant rudeness, and immediately walk out without buying anything, then post a nasty review of the store on Yelp in which you conclude that the store is staffed with total jerks. Now, you might feel smug and vindicated, but did you come to the right conclusion? Well, you’ll never know because you didn’t stick around long enough to interact with any other employees. All you did was have a perceived negative interaction with one person, and decided on that basis that everyone working there is a jerk. I don’t know if you can tell, but there is a strong connection between this fallacy and our tendency to stereotype others. You know, as in “all men are jerks” or “all women are evil” or “all fill in the blank space with a group of people you hate have this particular negative quality?” Yeah, that. Jumping to conclusions about people based on one or two examples is common, but fallacious. 

So— the way to avoid falling into the hasty generalization trap is to NOT come to a conclusion based on insufficient data. If one example isn’t enough, how many examples do you need? Well, generally speaking, the more the better. I know that sounds a bit vague, and I don’t mean for it to be. But maybe don’t stomp out of a store when you have a negative interaction with one salesperson, and try talking to a few more employees just to see if they are indeed all jerks. Or maybe, before deciding that women aren’t fit for military command because Holly Graf wasn’t, try looking up statistics on how many women officers are in the armed forces, and what percentage of those officers are reprimanded or lose their commands to see how rarely it happens, and conversely, how many get commendations for exemplary service. When you’re not sure if an example is common or rare, it’s time to look for more data.

And watch out for those “compelling examples” because they can be very persuasive. I had a friend who was one of those people who had an extreme reaction to the Covid vaccine earlier this year, and I recall other people hesitating about getting the shot just because of her symptoms, which were pretty intense. But ALL the evidence out there from the millions (and by now billions) of doses that have already been distributed point to the fact that the vast majority of people have a mild reaction, a few have moderate reactions, and some even have no reactions at all to the vaccine. My friend is fine, by the way, and I hope that those people weren’t so affected by that one example that they still haven’t been vaccinated. I hope they saw all the evidence out there and realized their chances of having a similar extreme reaction were very small. 

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The next induction fallacy is called weak analogy. An analogy is when you compare two things that have some similarity for purposes of explanation or illustration. When it’s used in the reasoning process, the arguer compares two or more things and says that they are similar enough that what is true for one thing is also true for the other. This happens a lot in government when legislators are arguing for some kind of policy; they show examples of some policy that’s been put into practice elsewhere and say, look, it worked in that country or state, it could work here. And as long as the other place where the policy is in effect is similar to the place where they want to implement it, it’s not too bad of an argument. You’ve probably heard this analogy about universal health care-- countries where its in place, like Canada and the UK, are often used in arguments saying that those countries are similar enough to the US that universal health care could also work here. Now HOW similar they are is up for debate, and that is the crux of whether or not the analogical argument is relatively strong or weak. In my view, this particular argument is, I would say, kind of in the middle; there are some similarities between all these countries that might support the idea that universal healthcare in some form would work in the US. A 2019 article on the website of the Commonwealth Fund, a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting independent research on healthcare issues, compares both the similarities and differences between eight countries with universal healthcare to show that there are enough options about ways to fund and implement it that the US shouldn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

If the similarities between the two things being compared is too weak to legitimately support the conclusion, then the argument becomes a weak analogy fallacy. Just because two things might have one or more similarities, that doesn’t make them comparable UNLESS those similarities are the things that should be compared for the argument to be strong. Here’s an example of an obvious weak analogy—does anybody remember contact tracing? It’s a way of determining who had been in contact with someone who tested positive for Covid; it worked well in some countries but not so much in the US mostly because Americans don’t really like the government asking them personal questions like who they’ve been hanging around with recently. I mean, I get it…Anyway, Rudy Giuliani once mocked it for being useless, and his argument was that we don’t contact trace for cancer, obesity, and heart disease, so why use it for covid? Well, all those things are certainly diseases, but comparing them to Covid in this way is fallacious because Covid is highly contagious and is passed from person to person through the air, while the other diseases are not. And Dr. Phil made a similar fallacious argument when he said in an interview that we don’t shut down the economy for car accidents and swimming pool drownings, so why should we do it for Covid? Again, this is fallacious--those other causes of death are not contagious, so the comparison doesn’t work. And one of the weak analogies that springs up with regularity in my Facebook feed is some incarnation of this argument: “Guns and hammers are both made of metal and can kill someone. But regulating the sale of hammers would be ridiculous; regulating the sale of guns is equally ridiculous.” I’ve seen similar arguments comparing knives, scissors, or other tools to guns and coming to the same conclusion. Regardless of the implement being compared to guns, this is a fallacy. Yes, all of these things are made of metal. Yes, they can all be used to kill people. But the overall purpose of each of these other things is not the same as a gun, which is specifically designed to destroy something by putting a hole in it and, if it’s a living thing, to kill it. The main purposes of hammers and scissors are not generally to make something useless or to kill it, but to create things. Even knives, which one might argue are often used to destroy something, have other equally important purposes in our lives. But guns have a singular purpose—to destroy. And that makes this argument weak and fallacious.

How do you avoid weak analogies? By making sure the things you’re comparing are similar not just in some tangential way, but in the relevant way, the way that would make the argument stronger. 

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Let’s move on to the final fallacy we’re talking about, the mistaken appeal to authority. This is a little tricky, because we often use the words and ideas of some authority figure to give credibility to our arguments. This fallacy occurs when someone uses the words and ideas of another person they claim is an authority on the topic who really isn’t; either they are just someone the person trusts to tell them the truth, or they might actually be an expert on some topic, just not the one being argued. For instance, you might cite your mom as a source about some topic because she just knows everything and always tells it to you the way it is, and you would consider her an authority on many topics; when in reality she has no actual expertise at all on the topic of discussion, just very strong opinions about it. Or, it could be somebody that is a familiar public figure; if you’re a person of a certain age, you might remember the 1980’s-era Vicks 44 commercial with Peter Bergman, a famous soap opera star. In the commercial, he says “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV” and then goes on to extol the virtues of Vicks 44 cough syrup, with the obvious implication that you should listen to him and buy this brand when you “play doctor.” He might have had some authority on the topic of acting like a doctor, but his authority on medical topics was sadly lacking. People loved that advertisement anyway, and I’m sure many bought Vicks 44 simply because their favorite handsome tv doctor told them to.

So mistaken appeal to authority is present when the person being cited isn’t really an actual authority on that topic. However, it’s also present when the words of someone who truly might be an authority on a topic are used as the only evidence to support a claim. For instance, if the only reason you think evolution is real is because evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says it is, you’re guilty of a fallacy. While he certainly is knowledgeable on the topic and it’s relevant to his field of study, it’s erroneous to consider that his is the only expertise that should matter. Now, the vast majority of scientists in his field agree with him (in fact, 98% of all scientists think that life has evolved over time), and THAT is something that you also need to take into consideration. The problem with relying on just one expert (or a small percentage of experts) to make a determination about the truth of something becomes more obvious when you look at topics like climate change or vaccine safety. Are there scientific and medical professionals who disagree with the consensus on these topics? Yes. But as I said in episode 20 about trusting in experts, when most experts in a particular field come to a consensus about something, it’s not done frivolously; it’s the result of a very large amount of research and data. Of course it’s always open to more review and possible revision; however, it’s far more likely that their consensus reflects reality than do the conclusions of the few who disagree with it. In the case of climate scientists, published reports says that around 98% percent of them agree that climate change is largely caused by humans, although there is some debate over whether the actual percentage is quite that high, and it’s possibly somewhere around 80%, which is still a large majority. I’ll link to a discussion of that controversy in the show notes. And as far as vaccine safety, the American Medical Association says that 96% of all its doctors report being fully vaccinated, and if they didn’t think it was safe they would very likely not do it. Now, you might be one of those people who would rather believe that “one guy” who refuses to go along with the majority and I understand that, but a good critical thinker also understands that while it’s possible this authority might actually be on to something, it’s highly unlikely, given the large number of other experts who disagree with them. So to avoid this fallacy, make sure the people who are being touted as authorities on a topic are actually experts, on the topic being discussed, and that their conclusions fall in line with the majority consensus. 

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Well, I’m exhausted! That was a lot of thinking we just did! But I hope it opened your eyes to these common fallacies that sneak their way into our brains and impact our ability to think critically. Now that you’re aware of hasty generalizations, weak analogies, and the mistaken appeal to authority, you’ll be better able to think it through.