Faulty Causality

Okay – I promised a blog entry some weeks back on rhetorical devices that are meant deceive, particularly the commonly used device know as “faulty causality.” I would have gotten to this earlier, but I’ve been so depressed over the terrible referring during the SuperBowl that I’ve been avoiding all responsible behavior for several days since.

However, with the Winter Olympics just around the bend, promising lots of theater and beautiful visual images, I’m starting to be able to get my mind around the things that really matter again. I slept well last night, ate well today, and managed to say a few words to my wife, so recovery is sight.

So I will try to focus what few brain cells survived and recovered from last Sunday night’s debacle on the issue at hand, which is how cause and effect arguments can easily be deceptive misleading, and worse. I would particularly like to point to an article by James K. Glassman of the American Enterprise Institute that ran recently in the Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette under the headline, “Tinker with Bush policy at our own risk.” Aside from the fact that the AEP can be counted on to publish self-serving interviews with its own people purporting to show plenty of “progress” in Iraq, the article is a fun read because it argues very simply that President Bush is obviously on the right tract because there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11. Glassman even goes on to claim that efforts by Congress to change the way we interrogate prisoners, not to mention the way we eavesdrop on American citizens without court ordered warrants, should not be tampered with nor even questioned, since these tactics are clearly working so well.

That’s a nifty argument, but it is also a dishonest argument because it is based on a faulty premise – that the cause claimed in the argument indeed is the one that created the effect.

To illustrate, let’s try this: snap your fingers. What happened? I claim, and you can not really disagree, that when you snapped your fingers, no elephants appeared. Now snap your fingers again. What happened? Again, no elephants appeared.

So if I claim snapping your fingers keeps the elephants away, who is to argue?

I rest my case.