to Resist a Bullshit Attack
Walter Carnielli
GTAL/CLE and Department of Philosophy–IFCH, State University of Campinas, [email protected]
Summary. This paper intends to open a discussion on how certain dangerous kinds of deceptive reasoning can be defined, in which way it is achieved in a discussion, and which would be the strategies for defense against such deceptive attacks on the light of some principles accepted as fundamental for rationality and logic.
1 How Can We Be so Easily Deceived?
Fallacies of weak induction are part of the arsenal of argumentative fallacies that we do commit sometimes, and that we agree we should not do: a logical analysisa posteriori, after having commit them, shows that we have fallen into a fallacy of weak induction when the premises are not strong enough to support the conclusion. A catalogue of weak induction fallacies includes the well-know cases of “appeal to hasty generalization”, “weak analogy”, “slippery slope ”
“appeal to unqualified authority” and “appeal to ignorance”, among other possibilities - it seems that a complete catalogue of fallacies is just unfeasible.
But how can we be deceived, if know so well the roots of deception? Likewise, we apparently know equally well what a proof in mathematics or in logic is, and we make much less flaws in logic or mathematics than in common reasoning - some errors of the former are famous, but in the latter are just too numerous to even be counted. Which kind of forces may push us into jumping into conclusions, by assuming incorrect assumptions when we are not in possession of the whole knowledge about something?
Traditional fallacies, so argue Gabbay and Woods in [13], although con- ceived as “mistakes that are attractive, universal and incorrigible”, may be subject to defensible strategies, and even be useful, as claimed in [11]. So some fallacies may have a higher degree of attractiveness (perhaps because of their pseudo-logical format), but the kind of deceptive reasoning we want to analyze here has a different status: it is almost logically inevitable (although not entirely fatidical).
We want to argue that falling into a specific deceptive reasoning which we call bullshit attack is not anything irrational from our side, but rather a rational response from an opponent maneuver, and that the entire episode can bee seen as a game, where logic and a certain principle of rational discussion play essential roles. Indeed, an opponent may act coercively into our reasoning process by using irrelevant facts or assertions, and by telling half truths in such a way that we feel forced to “complete” the story in a way that interest the opponent, perhaps contrary to our own interests.
Even to define what is “to deceive” is not easy. The act of deceiving would have to be intentional, and to involve causing a belief - but what about acting as to prevent a false belief to be revised by the other person? And to act as to make the other person to cease to have a true belief, or to prevent the person from acquiring a certain true belief? Of course one can deceive by gestures, by irony and also by just making questions. So there seems to be no universally accepted definition of “deceiving” yet; we assume currently a definition stated in [17]:
To deceiveDef= to intentionally cause another person to have or continue to have a false belief that is truly believed to be false by the person intentionally causing the false belief by bringing about evidence on the basis of which the other person has or continues to have that false belief.
Now, towards a concept of deceptive reasoning, we need some definitions.
The intuitive idea is that, starting from a certain belief set Γ, we may not want a certain consequenceα; so arriving at¬αwould be a safeguard against the unwanted α. Yet, if an opponent somehow “closes the door” to ¬α by subreptitiously imposing to us an extension∆to our belief set, we may then turn to be susceptible to α. Moreover, as I argue below, we are as prone to the unwanted consequenceαas much as we obey some principles accepted as fundamental for rationality and logic.
What I propose below is a model based on classical deduction⊢for under- standing such movements– this does not mean of course that logic explains fallacies, or that there is any “logic of bullshit”. The aims are rather to un- derstand the forces behind errors of human intellect in the way Francis Bacon describes them, cf. [1], XLVI:
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (ei- ther as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinc- tion sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.
Definition 1.1 A set ∆is said to be charged withαwith respect toΓ if:
(i) Γ 6⊢α, but (ii) Γ ∪∆0¬α.
Example 1.2 Consider Γ ={p→ ¬q, q∨r}. Clearly, Γ 0r, and any con- sistent set∆ containing either ¬q, orp, or q→pwill do the job of deriving rwhen adjoined to Γ that is,Γ∪∆⊢r (and consequentlyΓ∪∆0¬r, since Γ ∪∆ is consistent). Thus each such∆ is charged withr with respect toΓ.
But also any consistent set∆ containing either p∨ ¬q, p∨r,¬r→por q→rwill satisfy Γ∪∆0¬r, and thus will be charged withr with respect to Γ as well.
Γ ⊢∆αdenotes that the derivation ofαfrom Γ is charged with ∆.
Now we can say that a reasoning from a player Abelard based upon a non-empty collection∆ of premises from a playerEloiseisdeceptive when1: 1. Abelardaccepts a set of premises∆fromEloiseto be added to his beliefs
Γ;
2. Abelardis forced to perform an inferenceαcharged with∆; and 3. Abelarddoes not acceptα.
The intuitive idea is thatαis “paradoxical”, that is, it reveals to be prag- matically incoherent (contradictory or even undesirable) with respect to a knowledge basis Γ, though ∆ by itself is not so. As we shall see, it is our rational capacity of forming maximal consistent sets combined with our incli- nation to follow the Principle of Charity or Rational Accommodation, more than our tolerance to bullshit, which will make us victims of bullshit attack.
By defining a deceptive attack as a strategic maneuver by an opponent to elicit a deceptive reply from our side, it seems clear that understanding the mechanism of deceptive attack contributes decisively for an argumentative self-defense.
2 Charity, or Rational Accommodation, and Its Dangers
The Principle of Charity, also known, specially as focused by D. Davidson, as the Principle of Rational Accommodation, is a very basic principle in argu- mentation and in critical thinking which governs our interpretation to other people statements, and supposedly also other people interpretations to our discourse. The Principle of Rational Accommodation thus functions as a war- rant for the act of understanding a speaker’s statement (or discourse) by interpreting his or her statements to be in principle rational in its highest way and, in the case of any argument, by rendering the best, strongest possible interpretation of an argument. The principle forces us to find the most co- herent or rational interpretation for the statements involved in an argument
1Abelard andEloise are usual labels for game players.
- in another words, the principle constrains us to interpret the assertions so as to maximize the truth or rationality of the opponent, but under certain conditions: it demands us to accommodate all statements in the best possible consistent way, if there is such a way. The principle has strong connections, besides rhetoric, to some philosophical problems concerning meaning, truth and belief, and how these are all connected, which led Donald Davidson to turn his interests to the question of how are apparently irrational beliefs and actions even possible: quoting J. Malpas from [18]:
The basic problem that radical interpretation must address is that one cannot assign meanings to a speaker’s utterances without knowing what the speaker believes, while one cannot identify beliefs without knowing what the speaker’s utterances mean. It seems that we must provide both a theory of belief and a theory of meaning at one and the same time. Davidson claims that the way to achieve this is through the application of the so-called principle of charity (Davidson has also referred to it as the principle of rational accommodation) a version of which is also to be found in Quine. In Davidson’s work this principle, which admits of various formulations and cannot be rendered in any completely precise form, often appears in terms of the injunction to optimise agreement between ourselves and those we interpret, that is, it counsels us to interpret speakers as holding true beliefs (true by our lights at least) wherever it is plausible to do (see Radical Interpretation [1973]).
But Davidson has more to say about this, besides recognizing the origin of the principle and the influence of Quine (cf. [8], p. 35):
Quine and I, following Neil Wilson, have called in the past the principle of charity. This policy calls on us to fit our own propositions (or our own sentences) in the other person’s words and attitudes in such a way as to render their speech ad other behavior intelligible.
The reference is to the principle named by Neil L. Wilson in “Substances without substrata”.Review of Metaphysics 12(4), page 521–539, 1959.
The realist versus anti-realist controversy, and the direct implications for this principle for the theories of truth implicited in this discussion do not con- cern us here, nor are we interested (at least at this moment) in its implications as a defense against scepticism. We are more interested in a theory of untruth, which could explain how misconceptions and false beliefs are imposed upon us. The key to such analysis, at least in our case, can be synthesized in the entry by Simon Blackburn on the Principle of Charity in the The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (cf. [2], p. 62):
it [the Principle of Charity] constrains the interpreter to maximize the truth or rationality in the subject’s sayings.
Now, as I intend to show, the skilled the interpret is at fulfilling such constraint of maximizing the truth or rationality in the subject’s sayings, more successful the deceptive attack can be. H. Frankfurt in [12] qualifies bullshit as fundamentally distinct from falsehood, or from a lie. To utter a bullshit is to disregard truth or lack of truth at all; the bullshit statements just intend to produce an impression:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.
Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. (p. 20)
As Frankfurt clearly puts it (cf. [12]), the bullshitter is faking things:
The truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him;
what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor co conceal it. (p. 20)
and
He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. (p. 22) So, the bullshitter is more dangerous than a lier, and what he or she does more often (see e.g. [17]) is to use facts or assertions that he or she knows to be irrelevant (ambiguity and equivocation), or telling truths that he or she knows to be just half-truths (concealment and exaggeration). An indication that this kind of communication is something to be taken with caution is the notion of “implicatures” of P. Grice which tries to characterize what can be suggested in an utterance without being positively informed (cf. [14]).
3 Illusions of Reasoning: a Defense against Deceptive Attacks
Bullshit is a very powerful source to elicit deceptive reasoning: suppose that the bullshitter act as making us to “buy” a collection ∆ of statements (by
adding it to our beliefs Γ) which he or she intends to be charged with a conclusionαto her benefit.
Now, since∆ is charged toαwith respect to our beliefsΓ, we have:
1. Γ 0α, but
2. Γ∪∆0¬αas well.
However, by the Principle of Rational Accommodation, we are forced to maximize the truth or rationality in his or her sayings. In terms of logic, this implies that we have to extend the conjunction of our belief set Γ together with the bullshitter’s set ∆ to amaximal consistent set Γ∗. By the famous construction known as Lindenbaum Lemma concerning maximal consistent sets, we can always findΓ∗ such thatΓ∗ is maximal consistent andΓ∗0¬α.
However, this implies (by the maximality ofΓ∗) thatΓ∗⊢αas our opponent wanted!
As an illustrative example, suppose thatEloise, acting as a bullshitter, tells Abelard that a common friend, Carol, is going to have birthday, and proposes to pay her a dinner.
Abelard accepts from Eloise the following agreement ∆: “Let’s share a dinner in honor toCarol”, and adds this to his beliefsΓ. Of course,Abelard did not even think into acceptingα: to pay for the dinner without participating of it, that is, Γ 0α. However, Eloise’s maneuver makes it impossible for Abelardto totally avoidα(because he has agreed):Γ ∪∆0¬α.
Abelard, while following the Principle of Rational Accommodation, “max- imizes” Γ ∪∆ to a consistent Γ∗ (by expecting the best possible behavior fromEloise).
A few days later, however,EloisegivesAbelardthe bill: “The dinner was fantastic, please pay half of it...”. What went wrong withAbelard’s reasoning?
He implicitly agreed to share a dinner, not to dine together!
It should be clear then that not only any conclusion charged with the bull- shit set∆risks to be deceptive, but deceptive conclusions can be strategically imposed. Of course there are several ways to extendΓ ∪∆to a maximal con- sistent set. The more skillful we are into finding such extensions, the more conclusions (possibly of the interest of our opponent) we may derive. The op- ponent is by no means restricted to a single agent, but may be represented by a commercial company, or by an advertising campaign - lots of examples can be found in [15]. Our expertise plus our willingness to obey the Principle of Rational Accommodation as well as our tolerance to bullshit will maxi- mize the force of the deceptive attack. However, the same capacity we have in finding maximal consistent extensions may be at our side, and this is our defense.
The article [3] investigates reasons to some empirical evidence implying that human behavior often acts in contradiction to expected utility theory.
The authors proposes thepriority heuristicas a way to explain the discrepancy between empirical data and expected utility theory. The paper shows that
the priority heuristic, typically by consulting only one or a few reasons, really predicts choice behavior in several respects.
The aim of deriving a psychological process model able to predict choice behavior from empirical evidence of course does not exclude the logical side of it. The need for a deeper theory on why people simply abandon trade-off computation and embark into hasty conclusions (which seem to them to be correct) is explicitly recognized in [3] p. 429:
The heuristic provides an alternative to the assumption that cognitive processes always compute trade-offs in the sense of weighting and sum- ming of information. We do not claim that people never make trade- offs in choices, judgments of facts, values, and morals; that would be as mistaken as assuming that they always do. Rather, the task ahead is to understand when people make trade-offs and when they do not.
As a connected problem, a question treated in several places is the possi- bility of self-deception: how can we deceive ourselves?
As the French (Russian born) chess Grandmaster Xavier Tartacover sug- gested, in some sense self-deception involves bullshitting against ourselves:
A chess game is divided into three stages: the first, when you hope you have the advantage, the second when you believe you have an advantage, and the third... when you know you’re going to lose!
The relevance of self-deception and several examples can be found in [9]
and in [20]. There are also several aspects linking what I suggest here to abductive reasoning, but this is left for now. What is relevant for our purposes is to have it clear that the kind deceptive reasoning analyzed here is not merely fallacious, but somehow philosophically imposed: if we agree with Davidson ([7], p. xviii), and similarly defended by Scriven in [21], that
Charity is forced upon us; whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters
then being aware of this philosophical imposition and of its effects when com- bined with the logic mechanism: the risks of combining well-accepted prin- ciples and ending up with something we may repudiate are explained and exemplified in [4] and [5]. Awareness of this hazard is our only safeguard against falling into bullshit attack.
4 Assessment and Critique
In writingΓ ⊢∆αto denote that the derivation ofαfromΓ as charged with
∆, it should be clear that what I have in mind is the notion of classical deduction: I do not mean that there is any proof system that can express any distinctions between the notion of strong versus inductive arguments (as
in [10]) - it is simply that the notion of classical deduction ⊢ is sufficient to demonstrate that there is a kind of limiting capacity of the idea of rationality if we take seriously certain presuppositions as the requirement to obey the Principle of Rational Accommodation (or Principle of Charity), and its logical counterpart, the notion of maximal consistency. This does not contradict the analysis of fallacies as done e.g. in Chapters IV and V of [10] (cf. also the appendix on rationality in the same book). The analysis I am attempting here points to that fact that there may be limits for sound reasoning (if for a sound reason we understand that one which does not push us into deceiving) as much as there are limiting results in logic or in rational choice theory. But such limits may not be like the well-known formidable limitative results of Tarski, G¨odel, Turing, Church and Skolem, but perhaps like the more modest, but still burdensome, as the also well-known results on the impossibility of expressing irreflexitivy by a modal schema (see e.g. section 3.3 of [6]) or the fact that the transitive closure of a relation is not first-order definable (this and other weaknesses of first-order logic to treat some computational problems, as its lack of mechanisms for recursion and for counting, are discussed in [19]).
Kahneman and collaborators developed the notion of thefocusing illusion oraffective forecasting (see [16] and inside references to help explaining some mistakes people do when evaluating the effects of different scenarios on their future. This a typical illusion due to the fact that people tend to exaggerate the importance of a pretense positive factor, while overlooking other perhaps much more relevant negative factors. Another interesting and much studied problem is theconjunction fallacy, which happens when people assume that a number of specific events is more probable than a single general event (cf.
[22]). Starting from the understanding that what I am proposing here is not to use methods of formal or informal logic to analyze fallacies, but to pay due attention to principles that also affect logic, discerning the reasons why we succumb under a bullshit attack may help us to understand why we commit other illusions of reasoning.
Acknowledgements: This research was supported by FAPESP The- matic Project ConsRel 2004/ 14107-2, by the CNPq research grant PQ 300702/2005-1 and by the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg. The final version of this paper was prepared I am indebted to a research stay at IRIT- Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse where the final ver- sion of this paper was written, and to Richard L. Epstein for discussions and criticisms, even if he strongly disagrees to the ideas contained in this paper.
References
1. Bacon, F.: The New Organon or True Directions Concerning The Interpreta- tion of Nature (1620)http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm. Ren-
dition based on James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath in The Works (Vol. VIII), published by Taggard and Thompson, Boston (1863) 2. Blackburn, S.: “Charity, principle of”.The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press (1994)
3. Brandst¨atter, E., Gigerenzer, G., Hertwig, R.: The priority heuristic: making choices without trade-offs. Psychological Review 113(2) (2006) 409–432
4. Carnielli, W. A., Coniglio, M. E., Gabbay, D., Gouveia, P., Sernadas, C.:Analysis and Synthesis of Logics - How to Cut and Paste Reasoning Systems. Springer (2008)
5. Carnielli, W. A., Coniglio, M. E.: Bridge principles and combined reasoning.
In: T. Mller e A. Newen, eds, Logik, Begriffe, Prinzipien des Handelns (Logic, Concepts, Principles of Action) Mentis Verlag, Paderborn (2007) 32–48
6. Carnielli, W. A., Pizzi, C.:Modalities and Multimodalities. Springer (2009) 7. Davidson, D.:Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, New York (1984)
8. Davidson, D.:Problems of Rationality. Clarendon Press (2004)
9. da Fonseca, E. G.: Lies We Live by: The Art of Self-Deception. Bloomsbury (2000)
10. Epstein, R. L.: Five Ways of Saying “Therefore”: Arguments, Proofs, Condi- tionals, Cause and Effect, Explanations. Wadsworth Pub. (2001)
11. Floridi, L.: Logical fallacies as informational shortcuts.Synthese167(2) 2 (2009) 317–325
12. Frankfurt, H. G.:On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2005) 13. Gabbay, D. M., Woods, J.: Fallacies as cognitive virtues. In: O. Majer, A.- V. Pietarinen, and T. Tulenheimo, eds.,Games: Unifying Logic, Language, and Philosophy Series Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science 15, Springer (2009) 56–98
14. Grice, P.:Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press (1989) 15. Harford, T.:The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World.
Random House, New York (2008)
16. Kahneman, D., Krueger, A., Schkade, D., Schwarz, N., Stone, A.: Would you be happier if you were richer? A focusing illusion. Science 312(5782) (2006) 1908–
1910
17. Mahon, J. E.: The Definition of Lying and Deception First.Stanford Encyclope- dia of Philosophy, published Feb 21, 2008.http://www.science.uva.nl/seop/
entries/lying-definition/
18. Malpas, J.: Donald Davidson. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, pub- lished May 23, 2005. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/
DonaldDavidson
19. Otto, M.: Bounded Variable Logics and Counting. A Study in Finite Models.
Lecture Notes in Logic 9, Springer (1997)
20. Pears, D.: Self-deceptive belief-formation.Synthese 89 (1991) 393-405 21. Scriven, M.:Reasoning. McGraw-Hill, New York (1976)
22. Tversky, A., Kahneman, D.: Extension versus intuititve reasoning: The conjunc- tion fallacy in probability judgment.Psychological Review90 (1983) 293–315