The New York Sophist

I ran across this post the other day which I thought was really interesting. I find logical fallacies quite interesting, and this post seemed to promise that it would investigate not only the fallacy, but the origin of the phrase that we use for it.

The fallacy discussed is the Begging the Question fallacy, the only one that I’ve experienced, next to Argument from Ignorance, that students don’t really ever understand. It’s simply when you make your argument in a manner that assumes the more controversial and less agreed upon assumption within your claim has already been answered in your favor. Therefore, the opponents might “beg your pardon” on the way you dealt with that question.

I have no idea if this is historically accurate or what, but it’s just how I rationalized it in my head when teaching it. At least I’m better off than the New Yorker, who thinks it means “to raise a question.” So what do they do to solve their problem? They turn to a Computer and Information Science Professor to answer it.

This is my greatest pet peeve – how the media ignores rhetoricians, and how hard scientists are consulted to explain everything. Rhetoricians are notoriously bad about attracting the attention of the media as well, so the fault is on both sides. But if you are a rhetorician and you haven’t talked to your media relations department at your University about what you study and what you can comment upon, shame on you.

So they ask the computer scientist (who has this blog, which is amusing until you realize that the sediment of working with computer languages informs his perspective on what “good” natural human language should look like) what he thinks and he responds by first claiming that begging the question is the same as the circular argument (Sorry professor, easy trap to fall in to but more studying on your part would spot the difference). Then he responds this way, which I simply must quote at length because it’s too jaw-droopingly annoying to avoid:

In my opinion, those are both bad choices. If you use the phrase to mean “raise the question”, some pedants will silently dismiss you as a dunce, while others will complain loudly, thus distracting everyone else from whatever you wanted to say. If you complain about others’ “misuse”, you come across as an annoying pedant. And if you use the phrase to mean “assume the conclusion”, almost no one will understand you.

My recommendation: Never use the phrase yourself — use “assume the conclusion” or “raise the question”, depending on what you mean — and cultivate an attitude of serene detachment in the face of its use by others.

As we can plainly see, this is why a rhetorician should be called in to answer such a question. For the Computer Scientist, the audience is unteachable, unchangeable, static, and with unproblematic and impossible to break ties to their understanding of the term. His solution is to “zen out” somehow about the words when they are misused. A quick check of the rest of his blog indicates just how easy that is to do – most every entry is about an annoying practice of language that is either worth our scorn or our laughter. This representative anecdote, in Burkean terms, shows us the limits of using any science – be it computer science, psychology, or any other go-to science for explaining “correct” use of language. The rhetorical moment of being able to trump your opponent, or broaden the audience’s understanding is lost because “nobody will understand you.”

That might work for computer languages, but identifying question begging, explaining it succinctly, and then using it as an argument itself as to why the opposition shouldn’t be accepted is a powerful rhetorical move that just might work in a situation or two. Cultivating the ability to explain difficult, old, and complex ideas related to how we use language can boost one’s ethos and improve the audience’s appetite for looking a bit deeper into fallacies.

Of course, I agree with our noble computer scientist that adaptation to audience is vital. But at what point does it become pandering? At what point is the ethical duty to try to push that audience to richer understanding lost? I suppose for a computer scientist it makes sense to “re-code” the language to get rid of the annoying, meaningless “memory call” command (wow I really don’t know enough about programming to write that last sentence). But for humans, language writes us. We didn’t invent language, we were born with it. We came into “being,” as humans, because of language. And that understanding is why scientific explanations of proper use of language will always be lacking.

We mold ourselves and each other with our words. This is what we lose when we crumble to the idea that “they just won’t get it.” It is good advice for getting a computer to do something though.

1) Last night my friend who works at the University described in great detail how she reads books for free by going to the Barnes & Noble, special ordering what she wants, and then when it comes in deciding she doesn’t want it. The book stays in the store and she goes there to read it until she is done. She found this quite clever, until I pointed out the library (a 3 minute walk instead of 20) will ILL anything for free and you can keep it for 2-4 weeks. She said, “I forgot about the library.”

2) My wife worked part time at a pet store for a while. People would “drop off” or abandon their unwanted pets at the pet store, or persuade the staff to take unwanted animals for cash. The free shelter is less than 2 miles away from the pet store.

Unrelated stories? Not likely. They are evidence of the transformation of options brought about by the ideology and rhetoric of consumer capitalism. These two examples indicate the decline of the potential to imagine any alternative to a consumer capitalist model, and force the imagination to work hard to develop tactics within consumer capitalist strategies. The space, if there ever was one, of imagining an alternative to this ideology is nearly gone (if it ever existed) at the point where someone walks thoughtlessly by the library on their way to “scam” the bookstore. The better “scam” is to use the facility dedicated to an anti-consumerist model of books – no longer “commodity,” they can be re-imagined as “resource.”

The lack of imagining an alternative to a shop of animals is even more disturbing. The farthest people can reach is to trade “sideways” within the same grammatical case to rhetorically “solve” their problem – a “shop of animals” becomes a “shop for animals” with a rhetorical “squint.” The effort is to change the vision, not to “turn away.” There is no other place to go that can be thought of, well no place outside of the model of the consumer oriented business. If the staff refused to take the animals, the rhetoric of “customer rights” is invoked or blackmail – “I’m just going to kill it if you don’t take it.”

de Certeau discusses rhetorical options within dominating rhetorical systems in his book The Practice of Everyday Life. A “tactic” is distinct from a “strategy” because a “strategy” depends on “the proper” in order to operate. Words like “competitors” and “customers” are part of the vocabulary of strategy because they are force-relationships which do not require (as I interpret it) a lot of thought or effort on the part of the consumer or competitor (in business) to occupy them. “Tactics” depend not on the “proper” but on the “timely.” De Certeau argues that propriety as a value is a “triumph of place over time.” So a tactic can be read as “seizing the moment.” The example that de Certeau gives is the woman at the market planning a dinner party where the force-relationships (guest, size of fridge, ingredients at home) are taken advantage of by her shrewd purchase of sale items and ingredients that might be cheaper but not within the “proper” items for such a meal. (all of this is on page xix in the introduction of the book). Tactics are timely and are created, strategies eliminate time from the decision and are placed upon.

So what’s the payoff here? What we see is the “tactical” being limited in its application under the crushing force of consumerism. Perhaps de Certeau does not believe that it can operate outside of strategy (although it is a question what it’s oppositional stance is because it is the “Other” – in the French sense then, it would require strategy to exist in order to be, so it would never be Archimedian). He links it to the Greek sense of metis – “ways of operating” or perhaps “getting by in the world” or something like that.

I would say that our “tactical” moves are especially restricted in the dominance of the role of the consumer and the increasing unintelligibility of rights outside of a customer service sensibility. This can perhaps go toward explaining the intense anger and crazy outbursts of people at health care town meetings. They cannot imagine an alternative outside of a consumer-capitalist sensibility, where health is a product, and even more threateningly, the tactics they have discovered within the health care strategies that work for them would be wiped away if there were an alternative system. This is the motive for the behavior, and suggests a response where instead of telling people that they will not be turned away for insurance, explain that they will still be considered the customer, which diffuses the fury at the loss of such moments of triumph that people have discovered within the current health care system.

At once both disturbing for the lack of imagination left in our relationships, but a good discovery I think since it suggests a new way of “lining up the ducks” when ordered to “get your ducks in a row” within the dominant consumer-capitalist ideology.