Chapter 13 Introduction to Fallacies and Bias

13.1 Introduction to Fallacies

The introduction to this book gave an overview of the role of identifying fallacies for critical thinking, including defining the term “fallacy,” which we distinguished from a “falsity.” A proposition is either true or false, but arguments contain fallacies. The term “fallacy” is often used in everyday speech to just mean “error” or mistaken beliefs. We will not use it that way. We are identifying fallacies as mistakes in reasoning or inferences. We have already covered deductive fallacies (invalid argument patterns) such as denying the antecedent and affirming the consequent.

This part of the book covers informal reasoning, so we are now looking at more everyday forms of making arguments. Here we will look at the strengths and weaknesses of patterns and examine the ways they can be misused. So what makes something an informal fallacy? Fallacies are specific features of unsuccessful arguments. Fallacies appear in arguments—that is, they appear in the transition from a set of premises to a conclusion. There is often more than one way that an argument can go wrong at once. It is rarely so simply separated as many of the examples we show here. We are offering exemplars as diagnostic tools so that you can become a more careful reasoner—identifying both what is wrong and how to fix it.

Douglas N. Walton, in his A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacies (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995, p. 255), offers five conditions for identifying fallacies:

So far we have talked about conditions 1 and 2—that arguments have fallacies and fallacies are a problem. But the rest deserve more attention. Condition 3 reminds us that arguments are about trying to convince, thus they are part of an exchange where a conclusion is considered (ideally!). Arguments are public exchanges, governed by rules, intended to establish a truth. But since fallacies are not successful or undermine cogency in some way, we must pay attention to 4. Many fallacious arguments will feel familiar, and by that very fact, they might seem convincing. Sometimes fallacious arguments will say true things that are irrelevant to the dialogue at hand, thus distracting the conversation. Either way, the problem with a fallacy isn’t always immediately detectible, so we should be looking below our first impressions. Condition 5 tells us that sometimes a fallacious argument, more than even being bad reasoning, is just a roadblock that interrupts the very possibility of getting to the argument we want to make. To a certain extent, one or all these will apply to the fallacies we cover in part 3 of this book.

Remember that critical thinkers have a certain kind of attitude toward belief: They are both open-minded and sceptical. Fallacies usually have a deceptive appearance and pass for good arguments. In fact, we all likely use fallacious forms of argument many times every day. Thus we can all benefit from paying attention to our level of scepticism of what we hear and read. Often we perpetuate fallacies and it causes no damage because, if we were more careful, we could reformulate our arguments in better forms. However, about equally often, the very thinking behind our arguments is at fault (our inferences), and the fallaciousness of our arguments can only be removed by rethinking our opinions and correcting our tendencies for sloppy and irrelevant thinking. So the study of fallacies is valuable because it provides us with tools for thinking more coherently and increasing our ability to discover the truth.

While we will cover fallacies and identify them according to specific names, the important bit is to differentiate the kind of error in reasoning and what is wrong with it and why. Biases also lead us astray from the truth and need to be identified in order to improve our thinking. Often when evaluating the ways in which arguments go wrong, biases and fallacies are both identified. Arguments often have both! However, it is important to find out how fallacies relate to biases.

13.2 Bias and Relativism

The fallacies involving bias might well be called fallacies of irrelevance. In each, a different kind of irrelevancy involving bias is introduced in an attempt to obscure the real issue by stirring up our emotions. It is very common for critical thinking texts to focus on the importance of avoiding bias and the evils of stereotyping, vested interests, prejudice, and conflicts of interest. The danger of this sort of overemphasis is that these failures of reasoning can be overstated and exaggerated so that students come to believe that everyone’s opinion is equally valid because we are all woefully biased. Often students also jump to the conclusion that simply criticizing another’s position or argument is a kind of error (because “all opinions are valid”), or that our beliefs are all reducible to claims toward our self-interest (people “believe what they want to believe”), none of which are remotely true. So some preventative medicine is called for.

First, let’s deal with the claim that “everyone’s opinion is valid.” We hear this claim a lot, but if we are to understand it, we need significant context. Does this mean that everyone has a political right to free thought? It does seem like we have a right to form our opinions without direct interference from the government. But does this mean that all the opinions formed are “valid” in the sense that they all lay claim to truth?

If the truth is completely relative, then there is little point in a book on critical thinking that is trying to offer better methods of arriving at the truth. A lot depends on what we are investigating. If we mean complex linguistic and spiritual claims embedded in a total way of life, then it might need context for its truth to be understood. But if we mean most of our usual truth claims, such as “Smoking causes cancer,” or “Climate change is accelerating” and “The earth is round,” the truth of these claims do not vary by culture, language, or location. So this means that there are some truth claims that are not relative or context dependent. Critical thinking is about building a method for finding and justifying truth claims.

So if all truth isn’t relative, then we should work on trying to weed out inaccuracies. Let us start with concerns that opinions are biased. We can look directly at the word “bias.” It has a neutral origin but is now primarily used in a negative way. The word “bias” starts its life simply as referring to a diagonal line, as when cloth is cut “on the bias” (diagonally across the grid made by the threads) and has come to mean point of view or preference or attitude toward. The idea that bias is bad creeps into usage because our preferences or attitudes can lead us to deviate from, or outright conflict with, what reason requires. Let us look at an example:

So it is possible to both be “biased” (since parents care) and to give unfair preferential treatment. It isn’t the bias per se that’s the issue; it is the unfair preferential treatment. To treat your own children in an unfairly preferential way is not an acceptable consequence of parental love. It is wrong not because you are biased, but because it is a failure to universalize a simple moral rule: that we should be willing and able to put ourselves in the shoes of others. In other words, you’ve acted against reason. Any rule that a parent could apply to grant goods to their children could be used by any other parent to grant similar goods to their children; rules, whether intellectual or moral, apply universally or not at all. This is a fundamental starting point of critical thinking: don’t distort reasoning by using selective procedures (i.e., I will apply rules when it works for my interests, not in any consistent way).

But this is all to point out that the very fact that people have interests, care about particular things or people, or have wants and hopes does not imply that people will always reason badly, treat others shabbily, or be “biased” in a bad sense. Having interests or preferences is not by itself bad; what is usually called “bias” in the negative sense is really an intellectual failure to deal properly with one’s interests. We all have motives, desires, and preferences, but that doesn’t mean every claim we make is woefully biased. To be good critical thinkers, we have to be open to scrutinizing the way that biases can distort our thinking, and we need methods for correcting or accounting for bias. One way to do this is to learn about them and remind ourselves and others of them in relevant situations. This is very different than dismissing all opinions as biased.

The emotions and interests that human beings have provide us with motives for reasoning, and such motives are not by themselves sources of rationality or irrationality. And for the critical thinker, the incentives offered by emotion, interests, or hope will not be barriers to critical thinking but only guides for which problems to consider (we are motivated by truth, at least sometimes!). When we undertake a project of critical thinking, we have an aim. The aim is to pursue truth. For this, we need rules of clear thought and good cognitive practice. Selfishness and bigotry—like cheating, lying, and theft—are moral failures involving patterns of irrationality; they are not mere products of interest.

13.3 Stereotyping

Like biases, we are often told that to be a good critical thinker, we need to avoid stereotyping. However, when applied to reasoning, stereotyping is an important and powerful method of inference. The word “stereotype” also has a neutral origin and meaning that has become primarily negative. The root of the word lies in a process of manufacturing where one makes a model of something by means of a mould, and the objects produced by the mould share the shape of the original. This is a passive transmission of shape from one thing to another.

Stereotyping provides hypotheses for future evaluation and testing. Of course, the dominant use of the word “stereotype” has a negative use that emphasizes the passive and superficial sides of the root meaning. After all, things that have the same shape need not otherwise be similar; chocolate coins, for example, are not genuine currency. Stereotyping has come to refer primarily to a settled and prejudicial belief and attitude. But notice again that the problem with stereotyping in this sense is explicitly cognitive—it is an error in thinking. The bigot who “stereotypes” others engages in (among other things) shoddy reasoning and holds on to dubious and implausible beliefs in the face of counter-evidence by avoiding or discounting available facts—they are ignoring relevant differences and they are not being sensitive to context. These are failures that good critical thinkers should avoid because they tend to produce false beliefs through flawed reasoning. Thus, we should be wary of our tendency to stereotype and be on the lookout for dissimilarities when we are undertaking analogical reasoning.

In the long run, you are less likely to get what you want when reasoning badly. Correcting for bias, stereotyping, and emotional interference in your thinking will benefit you and others. Having said this much, let us end on a note of caution. None of this is to say that emotions are irrelevant and always lead us away from the truth. To begin, emotions give us information. They aim us at goals and highlight relevant features of a situation. Of course, emotions can make those features seem more important than they actually are and might hold your attention for too long, making you miss other important features of a situation. Add to this that bias can obscure important and relevant features, and it might seem like the goals of critical thinking are out of reach. But we should not despair.

The appropriate critical response to these difficulties is care; one steps back, thinks methodically about the whole issue, and attempts to take a more objective consideration of the facts. A useful approach is to shift perspectives. If other parties are affected by the issue, we can ask how the situation would be viewed by each other person involved. Others are similar enough to us such that we can learn from their experience. Indeed, their different interests will highlight different but equally relevant features of the situation in question—they will have a better view of some things, and you will have a better view of some things.

Notice how intellectual cooperation is not relativism; this is working together toward a careful consideration of perspectives. The traditional moral vices of pride, greed, and selfishness are barriers to critical thinking because they distort reasoning, and just because (and to the extent that) each person is vulnerable to these vices, good practices of critical thinking require vigilance against their effects. In short, bias is not intrinsically negative, but it does offer dangers, both in the first person and in others, which the critical thinker must solve in order to reason more clearly and well.

13.4 List of Fallacies Covered

Chapter 14. Fallacies of Ambiguity

Chapter 15. Fallacies of Emotional Bias

Chapter 16. Fallacies of Expertise

Chapter 17. Fallacies of Distorting the Facts

Chapter 18. Fallacies of Presumption

Chapter 19. Fallacies of Evading the Facts