Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor. Straw man, steel man, beggar man, thief.
The Internet has done something remarkable for the study of logic. It has taught millions of people the names of half a dozen logical fallacies.
Whether this has improved logical reasoning is another question.
Once upon a time, accusing someone of an ad hominem attack required knowing what ad hominem meant. Today it requires a keyboard. A straw man can be spotted from three comments away, correlation never implies causation, anecdotes are not data, and an appeal to authority can apparently be defeated by announcing that it is an appeal to authority.
We have acquired the vocabulary of logic without always acquiring its discipline.
That matters because the names we give logical errors were never intended as magic words for making inconvenient arguments disappear. A fallacy describes a defect in reasoning. Identifying one requires understanding the argument, determining what role the questionable reasoning actually plays, and—most inconveniently—considering whether the conclusion might still be true.
On the Internet, we often skip those steps.
We have turned the tools for examining arguments into weapons for ending them.
Enter the Influencer
Every age produces its own public intellectuals. Ours has produced the influencer.
The species is not difficult to recognize. He—or she—has a microphone, a camera, a practiced vocabulary, and very little tolerance for dead air. Complicated questions arrive and remarkably uncomplicated answers depart.
The particularly successful specimen has learned that logic itself can be part of the performance.
Words such as fallacy, premise, evidence, correlation, causation, straw man, and ad hominem lend an argument a pleasing intellectual finish. Sprinkle in a study, a historical quotation, perhaps a statistic delivered to one decimal place, and an ordinary opinion begins to resemble a proof.
Sometimes the reasoning is excellent.
Sometimes it isn't.
The difficulty is that the presentation looks much the same either way.
A skilled influencer can make a weak argument appear formidable simply by controlling the conditions under which we encounter it. He chooses the question, the evidence, the opposing quotation, the length of the clip, and usually the final word. If an opponent appears at all, it may be an anonymous post selected from millions of possible examples or an unfortunate person attempting to formulate an answer while a camera is pointed at his face.
This creates one of the Internet's favorite creatures: the straw opponent.
The traditional straw man substitutes a weaker argument for the one actually being made. The straw opponent accomplishes something similar with people. Instead of addressing the strongest serious case for a position, the influencer finds someone making the weakest version of it and allows that person to stand in for everyone who holds it.
No misquotation is required.
If ten thousand people disagree with you, someone among them has almost certainly explained the disagreement terribly.
Find that person, and content practically makes itself.
The Straw Man
The ordinary straw man remains wonderfully useful.
Suppose someone argues that a particular government program costs too much. His opponent replies that apparently he doesn't care whether poor people starve.
Nothing about the original proposition required indifference to starvation. A question about the cost or design of a program has been replaced by a much easier proposition to condemn.
But accusations of straw-manning have themselves become a shortcut.
Reducing an argument to its essential proposition is not necessarily constructing a straw man. Neither is drawing an implication from someone's position that the person would rather not discuss.
The question is whether the restatement materially weakens or changes the argument.
That requires more work than typing straw man.
The Man of Steel
The steel man was supposed to be the antidote.
Before criticizing an argument, state the strongest reasonable version of it. Better still, state it well enough that someone who holds the position says, “Yes. That's what I mean.”
It is an admirable habit.
It can also become absurd.
We are not obligated to construct an ingenious argument on behalf of someone who has made a bad one. If a person says something foolish, accurately describing what he said is not unfair merely because a cleverer person could have said something better.
Charity in argument means trying to understand what someone reasonably intended.
It does not mean becoming his unpaid defense attorney.
Ad Hominem, Therefore I Win
Few Latin phrases have enjoyed a better Internet retirement than ad hominem.
“You're an idiot” is an insult.
“You're an idiot, therefore your calculation of the Earth's circumference is wrong” is an argument—and a bad one.
But the distinction matters. An insult does not magically become a logical fallacy merely because it occurs during an argument. It may be rude, childish, or unhelpful without having anything to do with the logical structure of the argument.
Nor is information about a person always irrelevant.
If someone has repeatedly fabricated evidence, that fact may reasonably affect how much confidence we place in evidence for which that person is our only source. If someone stands to profit from a claim, the financial interest does not prove the claim false, but it can be relevant when deciding how independently to verify it.
Context is not a fallacy.
The Appeal to Authority
Then someone cites an expert.
“Appeal to authority!” comes the reply.
Well, yes.
Civilization would become rather inconvenient if appeals to expertise were inherently irrational.
Most of us have not personally performed the experiments necessary to establish atomic theory. We have not inspected every bridge we cross, independently audited every economic statistic we use, or conducted clinical trials before taking medicine.
We rely on other people's expertise constantly.
The logical problem arises when authority substitutes for relevant evidence where the supposed authority has no appropriate expertise, when experts are represented as more unanimous than they really are, or when a famous person is treated as authoritative merely because he is famous.
“I believe this because qualified people who study it have produced substantial evidence” and “a celebrity said it on a podcast” are both appeals to other people.
They are not logically equivalent.
Correlation Isn't Causation
This may be the Internet's favorite sentence that is both true and frequently useless.
Correlation does not establish causation.
But correlation can be evidence of causation.
If everyone attending a particular banquet becomes violently ill and everyone who skipped the oysters remains healthy, we have not established causation merely by observing a correlation.
We might nevertheless suggest leaving the remaining oysters alone.
The proper question is not whether correlation is causation. It isn't.
The question is what evidence the correlation provides when combined with everything else we know.
“Correlation isn't causation” should begin an inquiry.
Online, it frequently ends one.
The Fallacy Fallacy
And eventually we arrive at the most entertaining mistake of all.
Someone makes a poor argument for a proposition.
Someone else identifies the flaw.
The proposition is declared false.
But destroying an argument does not necessarily destroy its conclusion.
A man may believe the Earth is round because his dog told him so. His reasoning is spectacularly defective.
The Earth remains inconveniently round.
This distinction is fundamental. Logic evaluates whether a conclusion follows from its premises. Demonstrating that someone's reasoning fails tells us something important about the argument.
It does not automatically tell us the opposite conclusion is true.
Yet much Internet debate proceeds as though arguments were contestants in an elimination tournament. Knock out the opposing argument and your own position advances automatically to the next round.
Reality has no obligation to organize itself that conveniently.
Logic as Costume
This may be the larger problem.
Logic has become part of the costume of persuasion.
A microphone, a bookshelf, a few Latin expressions and a confident identification of the other fellow's fallacies can create the impression that something more rigorous than persuasion is taking place.
Sometimes it is.
The useful test is not how many logical terms a speaker knows. It is whether the same standards survive when they become inconvenient.
Does the influencer demand evidence from opponents while accepting anecdotes from allies? Does correlation suddenly become compelling when it supports the preferred conclusion? Is an expert an “authority” when helpful and merely an “appeal to authority” when not? Are weak representatives of the opposing position treated as representative while embarrassing members of one's own side are dismissed as exceptions?
Those aren't failures of vocabulary.
They are failures of method.
And method is where logic actually lives.
Beggar Man, Thief
Perhaps that leaves us with the last two members of our little rhyme.
The beggar asks an argument to give him more than it contains.
The thief takes a conclusion he has not earned.
Between them stand the straw man and the steel man, one weaker than the argument he replaces and the other sometimes stronger than the argument anyone actually made.
None of this means we should stop talking about logical fallacies. Quite the opposite. They are useful tools precisely because reasoning is difficult and human beings are remarkably talented at convincing ourselves of things we already want to believe.
But a tool for examining our reasoning becomes something else when it is used only to examine theirs.
The most interesting logical fallacy on the Internet may therefore be the one we recognize instantly when somebody else commits it—and somehow never notice when we do.
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