THE FALLACIES

THE FALLACIES 

A great part of humanity, including rich and poor, educated and uneducated, continue to be guided by millennia-old fallacies.  The rationale for eliminating these fallacies from our lives and our cultural frameworks is based on wide experiences across the sciences, broadly conceived.   I arrived at these fallacies through a lifetime of study across the physical, natural, and social sciences, and by standing on the shoulders of social networks across these disciplines.

The Transcendental Fallacy (also known as the theologian’s fallacy) is that there

is a world or that there are worlds beyond our own – transcendental worlds,

supernatural worlds, worlds of souls, spirits and ghosts, gods, devils, and angels,

heavens and hells. There are no such worlds. They are symbolic of social categories

and classifications in our earthly societies and cultures. There is nothing

beyond our material, organic, and social world. Death is final; there is no soul,

there is no life after death. It is also possible that the so-called “many worlds

interpretation” in quantum mechanics is contaminated by this fallacy as the

result of mathegrammatical illusions. Such illusions also power the idea that we

are a simulation. The world, the universe, may be more complex than we can

know or imagine, but that complexity does not include transcendental or supernatural

features. Stated positively, this is Durkheim’s Law.

The Subscendental Fallacy (also known as the logician’s fallacy or eponymously

as the Chomsky fallacy) is that there are “deep structures” or “immanent structures”

that are the locus of explanations for language, thought, and human behaviour in general. Such “structures” are just as ephemeral and ethereal as transcendental and supernatural worlds. They lead to conceptions of logic, mathematics, and language as “free standing,” “independent,” “history,” “culture,” and “value-free” sets of statements.  They also support misguided sociobiological, genetic, and brain-centred explanatory strategies. Restivo’s Law.

The Private Worlds Fallacy (also known as the philosopher’s fallacy) is that individual

human beings harbor intrinsically private experiences. The profoundly

social nature of humans, of symbols, and of language argues against intrinsically

private experiences, however, as Wittgenstein, Goffman, and others have amply demonstrated.  Goffman’s Law.

The Internal Life Fallacy. When we engage in discourses about surrogate counters,

imitation, and artificial creatures that mimic us, we need to remind ourselves

that we are working in an arena of symbolic and materialized analogies

and metaphors. Such efforts carry a high emotional charge because they take

place at the boundaries of our skins as interfaces. Analogy and generalization, if

they can be shown to have constructive scientific outcomes, need not obligate us

to embrace identity. Consider, for example, the case of building robots.

Robots (mechanical machines) will not have to have “gut feelings” in the identical

sense humans (organic machines) have gut feelings. Even this “fact” needs to

be scrutinized. What we “feel” is given to us by our language, our conversations,

our forms of talking, our cultures and social institutions. At the end of the day,

feelings are not straightforward matters of bio-electro-chemical processes that we

experience as “our own” feelings. Mechanical creatures will turn out to be just as

susceptible to internal life experiences as humans, once they have developed language,

conversation, and forms of talk. They will have electro-mechanical “gut

feelings.” This implies a social life and awareness. Roboticists may already have

made some moves in this direction, with the development of signal schemas and

subsumption-based hormonal control (Arkin, 1998: 434ff.). The development of

cyborgs and cybrids may make this point moot. What possibilities lie ahead of us

as we implant chips in humans and fit them with artificial mechanical limbs and

organs, while we also use organic materials in building our robots?  The Asimov Law.

The Psychologistic Fallacy (or neuroistic fallacy) is that the human being and/or

the human brain is/are free standing and independent, that they can be studied

on their own terms independently of social and cultural contexts, influences,

and forces. This is also known as the neuroistic error. It encompasses the idea

that mind and consciousness are brain phenomena. Human beings and human

brains are in fact constitutively social. This is the most radical formulation of the

response to this fallacy. A more charitable formulation would give disciplinary

credibility to neuroscience and cognitive approaches to brain studies and psychological

studies in general. These approaches might produce relevant results in

certain contexts. Then, there might be fruitful ways to pursue interdisciplinary

studies linking the social sciences and the neurosciences. It may indeed be possible

to construct a neurosocial model of the self. This would entail that socialization

operates on a brain-central nervous system-body (signifying an integrated

entity that eliminates conventional brain/mind-body and brain-mind divisions)

and not on a “person” per se. Moreover, the body here is conceived as a node in

a network of interaction ritual chains (Collins, 2004; Restivo, 2020). Brother’s

Law (after Brothers, 1997, 2001).

The Eternal Relevance Fallacy or Intellectual Fallacy is that ancient and more

recently departed philosophers should be important and even leading members

in our inquiring conversations about social life. An act of intellectual courage is

needed to rid us of Plato and Hegel. Once they are eliminated, an entire pantheon

of outmoded and outdated thinkers, from Aristotle to Kant, will disappear

from our radar. This move might also go a long way toward eliminating the

worshipful attitude that intellectuals often adopt to the more productive and visible

members of their contemporary discourse communities. The caveat is

that some ancient and some modern thinkers (departed ones, as well as some

who are still with us) who can be claimed for philosophy are still extremely

valuable for us. (Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein come immediately to mind.)

The issue here is that philosophy is overwhelmingly contaminated by the myth

of individualism; logicist, linguistic, and symbolic reductionism; and unbridled

speculation masquerading as rational thought. The idea that philosophers hold

the keys to the logical foundations of all disciplines is based on the idea that there

is one logic that fits all.  The limitations of that logic arise from the fact that it originates

in the world of physical phenomena. Most of the problems of philosophy are

now re-imagined as problems in sociology and anthropology, the pre-eminently

empirical social sciences.

Philosophers as philosophers (psychologists as psychologists, and theologians

as theologians) have nothing at all to tell us anymore about the social world. In

the wake of the work of sociologists from Emile Durkheim (1912/1995) to Mary

Douglas (1986), all the central human problems of traditional and contemporary

philosophy, psychology, and theology resolve into (not “reduce to”) problems in

sociology and anthropology.   Restivo’s 2nd Law.

The neque demonstra neque redargue fallacy; the “neither provable nor unprovable

fallacy” is that one can neither prove nor disprove some claim, proposition, or

statement. In some cases where this claim appears to be true, it is because a claim is

made in the context of the physical and/or natural sciences that properly falls

under the jurisdiction of the social sciences. Consider: One can neither prove

nor disprove the existence of God. This has not kept theologians, philosophers,

and mathematicians from Anselm to Gödel from proposing proofs for the existence

of God; and other scientists and philosophers from offering proofs that God

does not exist. While all proofs build conclusions into premises, God proofs are

universally and transparently contaminated by this strategy. The fallacy has not,

on the other hand, kept social thinkers and social critics from proposing proofs

for their theories about God as a delusion or a myth, but it has certainly tied their hands.

In fact, proofs are situated, contingent, contextualized, community matters, and

indeed, social constructions and social institutions. Therefore, within the world

of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms and what follows, a proof that God does not

exist is clearly possible.  Durkheim’s 2nd Law.

The NOMA Fallacy. This is the fallacy, defended by S.J. Gould (1997), that science

and religion are non-overlapping magisteria. Once we admit social science

into the science and religion dialogue, this fallacy is revealed.  Restivo’s 3rd Law.

The Tolstoy Fallacy. That experience and feelings are trustworthy modes of

interrogating and knowing reality. Consider that our immediate sensation is that

the earth is fixed in place; we do not experience the earth rotating, wobbling in

precession, or racing through the galaxy. In order to understand and explain the

earth in motion, we have to abandon our immediate experience of fixity, our

feeling that the earth is stable. If we assume fixity and stability, we will arrive

at absurd conclusions about the earth and ourselves. If, based on information

garnered by expanding the scale, scope, and depth of our experiences collectively,

we come to admit that the earth moves, then we can discover laws. In

the case of history, society, and culture, we do not experience, we do not feel,

we are not conscious of our dependence on the external world and on others.

This is not straightforward. We are, in fact, more aware of our dependence on

the material world than we are of our dependence on the social world. We do,

of course, recognize the social influences of peer pressure and the interpersonal

enforcement of rules of decorum and demeanour and so on. This is not the

same as consciousness of the way social relationships and interactions cause our

thoughts, behaviours, and emotions, however.

Differences in our levels of awareness across our material and social environments do not readily override our feeling that we are free-willing beings. In the prior instance, we had to discard a sense of an immobility that was not real and admit a motion we did not feel. In this instance, we are required to renounce our experience of free will and admit to a dependence, and especially a dependence on social causes and forces, that we do not feel.

It may be easier to admit to ourselves that we are subject to recalcitrant physical

laws, that we are thermodynamic systems subject to the laws of thermodynamics,

than to admit that we are social systems subject to sociological laws. But we are

just as subject to one set of laws as to the other set of laws. Here it is important

to keep in mind the distinction between open and closed systems, and the distinction

between lawful and determined, in order to avoid the fallacy that being 

subject to causes is the same as unmitigated determinism. On our experience of

the earth as fixed in space and the reality of its various motions, see Chapter 14.  

For the most compelling compendium of sociological laws in propositional form 

see Collins (1975).  Tolstoy’s Law.

The Napoleon Fallacy is that heroic, larger-than-life individuals make history.

How we think about and experience freedom and necessity depends (here I

follow Tolstoy’s analysis in War and Peace) on three things: (1) the relationship

between the person carrying out an action and the external world in which the

action is carried out; (2) the relationship between the actor and time; and (3) the

actor’s place in the causal nexus out of which the action arises. All things being

equal, there are fewer degrees of freedom for the drowning person than for the

person on dry land. If we focus on the persons standing apart, alone in their

room or within the woods, their actions seem to us and to them to be free.

If instead we focus on their relation to the things (material and symbolic) and

people around them now and in the past, we will begin to multiply the influences

on who and what they are as whole persons. As we multiply the influences,

we diminish the degrees of freedom of their actions and thoughts and see how

necessity weighs on them.

It is also the case that our own current actions and thoughts appear to be freer

by comparison with those of someone who lived a long time ago and whose

life is open to our scrutiny in a different way than our own. That person’s

life appears to have fewer degrees of freedom than does our own; but from a

future perspective, ours too will appear to have had fewer degrees of freedom

than we can now perceive. This is the fact of the matter for untutored introspection;

the trained observer can already see fewer degrees of freedom than the

untutored person observing their own life.

The more time passes, and the more my introspections and judgments sharpen,

the more I will find myself doubting that I have freedom of action and thought.

History makes events, actions, and thoughts seem less arbitrary and less subject

to free will. The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of

the crafty conduct of Bismarck. The Napoleonic wars still seem to us, though

already questionably, to be the outcome of their hero’s will. In the Crusades, however,

we already see an event occupying its definite place in history and without which

we cannot imagine the modern history of Europe, though to the chroniclers of

the Crusades that event appeared merely due to the wills of certain people.

Finally, attending to the unfolding of our understanding of the nexus of causal

chains leads us inevitably to seeing actions and thoughts as consequences of what

came before, contradicting the transparency of free will in action at the moment

that a particular idea occurs to us or we perform a particular act.

Understanding is the greatest enemy of the ideology of free will; ignorance its greatest nourishment. As for “responsibility,” that will appear to be greater or lesser dependingon how much we know about the circumstances of the person under our judge’s eye, how much time has passed since the judged act, and how well we understand the causes of the kind of act being judged. Sociology forces us to reconsider the nature and limits of individual responsibility. 

Let us consider the tale of the scorpion and the frog: The scorpion wants to cross a river, but he cannot swim. He asks a frog to carry him across the river. The frog is sceptical: “If I agree to carry you across the river you will sting and kill me.” The scorpion promises not to sting the frog: “I really need to get to the other side.” The frog agrees. The scorpion climbs on the frog’s back and off they go. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog. “What th…,” cries the frog, “you promised not to sting me.” The scorpion replies: “But it is in my nature to sting.” And so we should consider whether perhaps with humans, too, it is in our nature to behave as we have been socialized – or programmed. Or more generally, we behave the way we evolved to behave.  Are we any more responsible for our actions than the scorpion? It makes as much sense to condemn the scorpion for stinging the frog, as it would to condemn a human for a criminal act.  

This doesn’t mean, however, that society should not act to protect itself from further transgressions by the criminal, but it does mean we need to reconsider our ideas about responsibility and punishment.  The failure to understand “responsibility” in the context of evolution led to a period in European history when animals (mostly domestic, like pigs and cows but also insects and rats) were put on trial by Church and State, charged with everything from murder to criminal damage (Evans, 1906; Kadri, 2006).  Corpses and inanimate objects could also be charged for criminal behaviour.  This legacy survived into modern times when children and the mentally ill were charged and punished for criminal acts.  It is time to take the next step and consider whether our treatment of “mentally competent” criminals is any different from our treatment of the “mentally ill” and animals.  Tolstoy’s 2nd Law.                                                                                                                 CLASSIC FALLACIES FROM PHILOSOPHY

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness, described by philosopher Alfred North

Whitehead, involves thinking something is a “concrete” reality when in fact

it is an abstract belief, opinion or concept about the way things are. The fallacy

refers to Whitehead’s thoughts on the relationship of the spatial and temporal

location of objects. Whitehead rejects the notion that a real, concrete object

in the universe can be described simply in terms of spatial or temporal extension.

Rather, the object must be described as a field that has both a location in

space and a location in time. This is analogous to lessons learned from E.A.

Abbott’s Flatland (1884/1952): just as humans cannot perceive or even imagine a

line that has width but no breadth, humans also cannot perceive or imagine an

object that has spatial but no temporal position, or vice versa (Whitehead, 1925: 58; Whitehead, 1919):

… among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in                                                  our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which                                      possesses this character of simple location … [Instead], I hold that 

                by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions 

                which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions                                                         which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, 

                the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of                                                                 Misplaced Concreteness.

A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error by which

a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. For

example, the statement “the business of the book sleeps eternally” is syntactically

correct, but it is meaningless or nonsense or, at the very most, metaphorical,

because it incorrectly ascribes the property, “sleeps eternally,” to business, and

incorrectly ascribes the property, “business,” to the token, the book.

The term “category mistake” was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The

Concept of Mind (1949) to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the

nature of mind introduced by Cartesian metaphysics. It was alleged to be a mistake

to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance, because

predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and

capacities. The mind is just the body at work.