Thomas Cathcart - Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington

To the memory of that fabulous poHtical quipster of yore Will Rogers, who nailed it when he said, "There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. "

Introduction

"That sounds like utter bullshit/^''

These words spring to our mindsand occasionally our lipsjust about every time we hear a politico or pundit deliver a speech or give a press conference or hold forth on some Sunday-morning talk show. But often, for the life of us, we can't figure out exactly what makes their pronouncements qualify as certifiable BS. We know in our guts they don't make sense, but we can't put our finger on why.

Certainly there are times when the politico's words fail to make sense simply because they convey a bald-faced lie. The speaker is a dissembler, a purveyor of disinformation, a fibber. As a scientist or epistemologist might delicately put it, the speaker's propositions do not correspond to the facts. But we aren't going to go there, in part because we were not permitted a sufficient number of pages to cover the most egregious political whoppers perpetrated in the last ten years (72,383, by our informal estimate). Furthermore, how many

lO ^ ARISTOTLE AND AN AARDVARK GO TO WASHINGTON ***************************************

times can you shout "Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!" without getting hoarse?

Nope, we are perplexed and intrigued by subtler stuff: words that have been cunningly fashioned to sound like they mean somethingsomething important and compelling but that on careful inspection can be revealed to be bullshit. Often, as the senator below discovered, it's just a small step into bullshit:

It was election time again, so a senatorial candidate decided to go to the local reservation to gather support from the Native Americans. They were all assembled in the council hall to hear his speech.

As the candidate worked up to his finale, the crowd was getting increasingly excited. "I promise better education opportunities for Native Americans!" he declared. And the crowd went wild, shouting "Hoya! Hoya!"

Encouraged by their enthusiasm, the candidate shouted,"! promise gambling reforms to allow a casino on the reservation!"

"Hoya! Hoya!" cried the crowd, stomping their feet.

"I promise more social reforms and job opportunities for Native Americans!"

The crowd reached a frenzied pitch, shouting, "Hoya! Hoya! Hoya!"

After the speech, the politician was touring the reservation and saw a herd of catde. Feigning interest in the livestock, he asked the chief if he could get a closer look at the herd.

"Sure," the chief said,"but be careful not to step in the hoya!'

'^Its a good speech -just a couple of points need obfuscation.

As philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the pioneer in bull-scatology, notes, bullshit is ultimately far more insidious than outright lying, precisely because it is harder to detect.

Like Frankfurt, we have been guided on our mission by the principal disciplines of philosophy: logic, epistemology, Aristotelian rhetoric here and there, plus a dash of that erstwhile philosophical province now known as psychology. It turns out those courses we took as schoolboys, which appeared at the time to have no use outside of dimly lit coffee shops, are just the trick for decrypting political doublespeak.

Linguistic Analysis

One of our favorite modern philosophers is the Oxford linguistic analyst and Comedy Central star Jon Stewart, who explained, "Yesterday, the president met with a group he calls the 'Coalition of the Willing.' Or, as the rest of the world calls them, Britain and Spain."

The field of logicmuch of it rooted in the writings of the early Greeksdemonstrates what rules need to be followed to go from true propositions to correct conclusions. Or to put it the other way around, it shows how we can be tricked by logical fallacies, what logicians call formal fallacies. Epistemology instructs us in what we can deem knowable and why, including how we can sensibly talk about what we are able

INTRODUCTION 'O 13

to know. That field has given rise to conceptual analysis, a rigorous technique for analyzing language and, well, digging out bullshit in all its varieties. As to rhetoric and psychology, they show how our minds and emotions can be manipulated by loaded language.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines fallacy as "a failure in reasoning that makes an argument invalid."

Fallacies come in two models^ formal and informal. A number of the fallacies in this book are formal fallacies: arguments that break one of the technical rules of how a valid argument must be formed. For example, there's the fallacy called denying the antecedent. Here's an illustration of how this one goes:

If someone is in Congress, then he or she is

a U.S. citizen. President Bush is not in Congress. Therefore, President Bush is not a U.S. citizen.

We won't be using President Bush's demonstrated noncitizenship to call for his impeachment, however, because the argument is obviously not validdespite the fact that the premises are both true. That's because the form of it is invalid. It's in the form called denying the antecedent, which is expressed in logical notation like this:

14 0> ARISTOTLE AND AN AARDVARK GO TO WASHINGTON

If p [the antecedent], then q [the consequent]. Not p.

Therefore, not q.

We can substitute anything at all for p and ^, and the argument will always be invalid.

Most of the fallacies in this book are informal fallacies^ failures in reasoning caused by something other than violations of logical form, say using a lousy analogy or appealing to emotions. Our favorite is the argumentum ad haculum^ or "argument from the stick," which goes something like this:

moe: The fairest tax code would be one that only taxes

bald people. LARRY! [smacks Moe in the chops] Nyuk, nyuk!

Many of these fallacies, formal and informal, were identified by Aristotle nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. Has that stopped politicians from using them.^ On the contrary, they've treated them as formal and informal strategiesl

But hold the phone! Lest anyone think this stuff is dry as a prairie patty, you should know that we are of the Philogag School of Philosophy, the school that maintains that any philosophical concept worth understanding has a great gag lurking inside it. As we shovel our way through the political patty field, we will uncover not only deceptions, butmore importandyjokes that point at them and say "Gotcha!"

INTRODUCTION <0- 15

Armenian Radio

During the Soviet era, many of us took smug pleasure in pointing an Orwellian finger at the preposterous disinformation emanating from the Kremlin. But alas, as the world turns, so has that finger.