You will complete the 4 exercises below over the next couple of weeks. You can do them in any order you choose. I will book as much computer time as I can, but you should make sure to have enough material to keep you busy during class time on those days we can’t get time in the computer room.
Due dates:
Exercise 1: Identify the fallacy that occurs in each passage.
Rubric: 100% for identifying at least 22 correctly. 90% for more than 18 correct, 80% for more than 14 correct, 70% for more than 10 correct, 60% for more than 6 correct.
Exercise 2: Choose one of the
longer passages below and identify as many of the logical fallacies as you can in it.
There is no good reason to suppose that solar energy will be capable of meeting all of our energy needs. And since solar energy is incapable of meeting our energy needs, it is clear that we must not decrease government support for nuclear energy.
For all their thinly disguised rhetoric, founded upon the cheapest misrepresentations of scientific fact, the environmentalists have not yet succeeded in laying to rest the uncomfortable visions that accompany the thought of a future without nuclear energy. One can imagine a human race thown into chaos by the spectre of starvation and cold. Already there have been instances of elderly persons on fixed incomes literally freezing to death because they could not afford heating fuel. As the top executives of every major oil corporation have pointed out, we can all expect to endure some energy shortages in the near future. The energy problems that face this nation, and the entire world, are nothing less than a crisis.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, many environmentalists propose that we should now abandon nuclear energy and rely entirely on passive solar energy. How are we to meet the energy needs of the world on an energy source as unreliable and costly as solar energy? You can take it from me that all of the various tricks that masquerade under the head of solar "technology" are pitifully inefficient. Using the greenhouse effect to heat water, for example, rarely succeeds in increasing the water temperature to slightly below tepid. From this we may infer that all of the other methods of solar heating are equally inefficient, and since this is true it should be obvious that solar technology as a whole cannot possibly collect enough energy to meet the needs of an ever-increasing world population.
We must, therefore, not abandon our efforts to improve nuclear technology. Although not all the bugs have been worked out of our present nuclear reactors, the environmentalists have no room for complaint. Solar energy is also far from perfect. More importantly, we must not reduce governmental support for nuclear power. The recent energy shortage followed directly on the heels of precisely such a reduction in governmental support. Had the government not relaxed its efforts on behalf of nuclear energy, the country would never have had to endure that devastating crunch.
Take it from me, the Earth is being invaded! Why, last year alone the National Inquirer reported no less than six landings of extra-terrestrial creatures. Yet, despite the evidence, mainstream scientists, who, on balance, are little more than a pack of bureaucrats whose incompetence is equaled only by their arrogance, have refused to recognize the threat. Hasn't their blind refusal to take the matter seriously caused enough delay? It is criminal not to be on our guard. Just consider the frightful destruction of our way of life if the invasion should be successful!
If we continue to ignore the threat of an extra-terrestrial invasion the habit of ignoring anything not accepted by modern science will become ingrained. We will become incapable of recognizing new species even here on earth, or of considering other challenges to scientific orthodoxy. As a fair-minded and forward thinking inquirer, you would naturally object to such a state of affairs.
But, in the end, such matters are unimportant. Once the aliens are in control little else will matter. Humans will be desperately unhappy under a government run by alien beings. Not being human, they cannot, as individuals, understand or appreciate human concerns. Hence any administration they impose on us will be without sympathy to our uniquely human perspective. Humans have never been ruled by alien beings. We ought not to allow it to happen now!
Rubric: You will receive one mark for each logical fallacy you correctly identify up to a maximum of 10.
Exercise 3:
Go to the tutorials on argument mapping and start by doing the introductory tutorial on the “Moon landing hoax.” Do as many of them as you can after that.
Rubric: You
will receive 1 mark for each exercise you complete correctly, up to a maximum
of 20.
Exercise 4: Choose something that you would like to apply the “Baloney
Detection Kit” to and do an analysis:
Steps
List of potential topics:
1. UFOs
2. Psychic phenomena
(mind-reading, future-telling, etc. One
or all of them.)
3. The Shroud of
Turin
4. The Moon Landing
Hoax
5. The Bermuda
Triangle
6. Aliens built the
Pyramids/Machu Picchu,/Nazsca lines, etc.
7. Astrology
8. Crying Virgins
9. Ghosts
10. Tarot cards/ Ouija boards
The following is Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit,”a system
for detecting faulty arguments. It is
based on the book The
Demon Haunted World which is in our library.
Additional issues are
Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric
Michael
Shermer’s Ten Questions for Baloney Detection
1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
Scientists
are usually reliable; pseudoscientists unreliable. As
Daniel Kevles showed so effective in his book The
Baltimore Affair, in investigating possible scientific fraud there is a
boundary problem in detecting a fraudulent signal within the background noise
of mistakes and sloppiness that is a normal part of the scientific process. The
investigation of a particular set of research notes in a laboratory affiliated
with Nobel laureate David Baltimore (and run by Imanishi
Kari) by an independent committee established by Congress to investigate
potential fraud, revealed a surprising number of mistakes. But science is
messier than most people realize. Errors and sloppiness in raw data happen. The
question is: can a distinction be made between intentional and unintentional
distortion of the data and interpretations? Baltimore and Kari were exonerated
when it became clear that there was no purposeful data manipulation.
2. Does this source often make similar claim?
Pseudoscientists
have a habit of going well beyond the facts, so when one individual makes
numerous such claims it is a sign that they are more than just iconoclasts.
Again, this is a matter of quantitative scaling, since some great thinkers
often go beyond the data in their creative speculations. Cornell scientist
Thomas Gold is notorious for his radical ideas, but he has been right often
enough that other scientists listen to what he has to say, and those same
scientists are also testing these ideas for their validity. Gold's book, The
Deep Hot Biosphere for example, proposes the heretical idea that oil is
not a fossil fuel at all, but the by-product of a massive subterranean colony
of bacteria living in rocks. Hardly any earth scientists I have spoken with
take this thesis seriously, yet they do not consider Gold a crank. Why? Because he plays by the rules of the game of science. What
we are looking for here is a pattern of fringe thinking that consistently
ignores or distorts data.
3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
Typically,
nonscientists and pseudoscientists
will make statements that are unverified, or verified
by a source within their own belief circle. We must ask who is checking the
claims, and even who is checking the checkers. The biggest problem with the
cold fusion debacle, for example, was not that Stanley Pons
and Martin Fleischman were wrong; it was that they announced their spectacular
discovery before it was verified by other laboratories (at a press conference,
no less), and, worse, when cold fusion was not verified anywhere they continued
to cling to their belief in the phenomenon despite the lack of evidence.
4. How does this fit with what we know about the world and how it
works?
An
extraordinary claim must be placed into a larger context to see how and where
it fits. When pseudoarchaeologists claim that the
sphinx was built over 10,000 years ago by an advanced race of humans (because
the sphinx shows signs of water weathering that could not have happened after
the end of the last ice age), they are not presenting any context for that
earlier civilization. Where are the rest of the artifacts
of those people? Where are their works of art, their weapons, their clothing,
their tools, and their trash? This is simply not how history or archaeology
works.
5. Has anyone gone out of their way to disprove the claim or has
only confirmatory evidence been sought?
This
is the confirmation bias, or the tendency to seek confirmatory evidence
and reject or ignore disconfirmatory evidence. The
confirmation bias is powerful and pervasive and is almost impossible for any of
us to avoid. It is why the methods of science that emphasize checking and
rechecking, verification and replication, and especially attempts to falsify a
claim, are so critical. There is so much evidence against cold fusion, for
example, that all but a handful of die-hard physicists, chemists, and
hopelessly optimistic futurists long ago gave up conducting further research.
Yet the purveyors of "infinite energy" (there is even a magazine of
this title) cling to the slimmest of experimental results and blithely sweep
the disconfirming evidence under the rug of conspiracy theories where, for
example, oil and electrical conglomerates are said to be preventing the
positive evidence from reaching the American public.
6. Does the preponderance of evidence converge to the claimant’s
conclusion, or a different one?
The
theory of evolution, for example, is proven through a convergence of evidence
from a number of independent lines of inquiry. No one fossil, no one piece of
biological or paleontological evidence has
"evolution" written on it; instead there is a convergence of evidence
from tens of thousands of evidentiary bits that adds up to a story of the
evolution of life. Creationists conveniently ignore this convergence, focusing
instead on trivial anomalies or currently unexplained phenomena in the history
of life.
7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools
of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of
others that lead to the desired conclusion?
UFOlogists suffer
this fallacy in their continued focus on a handful of unexplained atmospheric
anomalies and visual misperceptions by uninformed eyewitnesses, while
conveniently ignoring the fact that the vast majority (I estimate 90 to 95
percent) of UFO sightings are fully explicable with prosaic answers.
8. Has the claimant provided a different explanation of the
observed phenomena, or is it strictly a process of denying the existing
explanation?
This is a classic debate strategy—criticize your opponent and never affirm what you believe in order to avoid
criticism. But this stratagem is unacceptable in science. Proponents of the
pyramids as being built by pre-Egyptians offer no evidence of just who these
people are, and instead just pick at anomalies in the work of Egyptian
archaeologists. Critics of the Big Bang ignore the convergence of evidence of
this cosmological model, focus on the few flaws in the accepted model, and have
yet to offer a viable cosmological alternative that carriers a preponderance of
evidence in favor of it
9. If the claimant has proffered a new explanation, does it account for
as many phenomena as the old explanation?
The
HIV-AIDS skeptics argue that lifestyle (drug use or
promiscuity, coupled to a correlation with a naturally-weakened immune system),
not HIV, causes AIDS. To make this argument they must ignore the convergence of
evidence in support of HIV as the causal vector in AIDS, and simultaneously
ignore such blatant evidence as the significant correlation between the rise in AIDS in hemophiliacs just
after HIV was inadvertently introduced into the blood supply. On top of this,
their alternative theory does not explain nearly as much of the data as the HIV
theory.
10. Do the claimants' personal beliefs and biases drive the
conclusions, or vice versa?
All
scientists hold social, political, and ideological beliefs that could
potentially slant their interpretations of the data. The question is: how do
those biases and beliefs affect the research? It is true that even the most
well-intentioned scientists may find themselves searching for facts to fit
their preconceptions. But at some point, usually during the peer-review system,
such biases and beliefs are rooted out, or the paper or book is rejected for
publication. This is why one should not work in a vacuum. Intellect stumbles
and falters without critical feedback. If you don't catch your biases in your
research, someone else will.
Rubric: Out of 20 marks. 4 will be awarded for timely and effective work in and out of class.
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4 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
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Breadth of Kit application |
I applied almost all (all but two) of the relevant elements of the baloney detection kit. |
I applied many (more than two thirds) of the elements of the baloney detection kit. |
I applied about one third to two thirds of the relevant elements of the kit. |
I applied very few (less than a third) of the elements. |
|
Depth of Kit application |
I applied many (more than 4) of the kit elements in multiple ways. |
I applied some (2 or 3) of the elements in many ways. |
I applied one of the elements in multiple ways. |
I applied the kit elements in a shallow way. |
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Understanding |
I understood my topic well and was accurate in my use of the kit. |
I mostly understood my topic and was usually accurate. |
I understood some of my topic. |
I understood little of my topic. |
|
Presentation |
My presentation was clear and interesting. |
My presentation was usually clear and interesting. |
My presentation was occasionally clear and interesting. |
My presentation was confusing. |