I discovered something important the day a Vietcong sniper came within a skin’s thickness of hitting and possibly killing me. I realized that I should never stop learning. Later, I learned that it doesn’t matter how many years we spend in school or how many degrees we earn—we will never know everything, and that it is okay to be ignorant and learn from our mistakes.
My latest lesson in life started in November 2011 when I agreed to debate another author on this Blog. He wrote a scathing book condemning Chinese culture, and I disagreed with his biased opinions. In this series of posts, I am sharing the lesson I learned from that debate and the mistakes I made.
Instead of using my opponent’s name, I’m going to call him Sid. If you are interested in reading the actual debate, there will be embedded links in this series of posts that will lead you to it [as there is in this sentence]. When Sid and I started arguing about China, I didn’t know there was a philosophical school of thought that has studied logical fallacies for decades. I didn’t know there were books on the subject and university courses.
Since the debate, I’ve learned about the different types of logical fallacies, and Professor Keven deLaplante says there are more than 100.
One Good Move.org says, “The idea of logic is truth preservation. What that means is that if you start with true beliefs, your reasoning will not lead you to false conclusions… most people have non-logical reasons for believing the things they do… So use reason with caution, and if you really want to persuade someone of something, remember that compassion, honesty and tact are as important as logic.”
Introduction to Fallacies – Hosted by Kevin deLaplante, the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University. Source: The Critical Thinking Academy
Before this series concludes, you will discover that Sid knew about logical fallacies and took advantage of my ignorance. I will also cover some of the most common logical fallacies that lead to intellectual dishonesty, and I will be using examples from the debate I had with Sid and comments he left or attempted to leave on this site since the debate.
I have never taken a debate class. I have never read a book on logical fallacies, and this is nothing to be ashamed of.
However, when I was earning a BA in journalism (1973), I learned how to write an honest and proper Op-Ed piece. Due to that, I was aware of a few logical fallacies to avoid such as cheery picking, ad hominem, and red herring — but not in depth. No one formally taught me how to recognize these logical fallacies [or what to do when I did], but I knew it was intellectually dishonest to use them in an Op-Ed piece to influence people, and I recognized their use by sales persons, politicians or political talk-radio hosts.
Then in December 2011, Sid and I launched a twelve-part debate on this Blog about China, which was the beginning of my education about intellectual dishonesty and the use of logical fallacies—an alleged con artist was my teacher, and I was his victim. As you will see, Sid eventually came to hold me in contempt.
Continued on January 27, 2012 in Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 2
Meet the real Sid and learn about him from his own words and the opinions of others
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Note from Blog host — Mr. Parfitt left a 346-word comment for this post [more like an emotional rant] that does not appear here in its entirety because it is just more of what he usually spews… more logical fallacies, which is my personal opinion.
In fact, in this comment, if you read this Blog [even once?], Mr. Parfitt has labeled all of us in a mass ad hominem. He says, “You’re a crank and so are your readers.”
If we take what Mr. Parfitt says literally, it means if you are one of the 220 sites linked in to iLook China, or one of the 214 followers of this Blog, or one of the 169,158 viewers [at 12:05 PM on January 27, 2012], according to Mr. Parfitt, you are all a “crank” along with me.
To discover who else is a “crank” according to Mr. Parfitt, I checked Alexa’s Advanced Demographics for ilookchina.net, which says “68.2% (on January 27, 2012) of visitors to the site were from the United States [all “cranks” according to Mr. Parfitt] and that relative to the general internet population, people who went to graduate school and are age 65 or over are greatly over-represented at ilookchina.net,” and are now anointed with the title of “crank” from a world expert [according to Mr. Parfitt] on China.
In addition, in the original comment, Mr. Parfitt asked one valid question and here it is with an answer.
Mr. Parfitt asked, “An alleged con artist? Who’s alleging I’m a con-artist?”
Alessandro wrote in a comment, “Troy, I know you have to defend your ill gotten and self invented fame as “china expert”, cause the sales of your book (and your personal fortunes) depend on that… but Sun’s 民权, one of his “3 principles” still DOES NOT mean democracy, and keep on repeating that (based on not accurate and somewhat superficially twisted transpositions in English language) will not make it become any more real…”
The source is one of the comments to this post: http://ilookchina.net/2012/01/09/the-ignorance-factor-of-bias-part-55/
Mr. Parfitt also, true to form, attempted to drag other topics into the fray and divert the topic of the post. One attempt was to bring up the topic of China as a republic, which was the topic of the last series of posts. It doesn’t fit here.
http://ilookchina.net/2012/01/22/is-china-a-republic-part-14/
Then he mentioned Mao, which has been discussed at length in a series of other posts and has nothing to do with this topic. [I’m beginning to suspect he has attention deficit disorder].
http://ilookchina.net/2011/12/15/on-the-trail-of-dr-li-zhisuis-shaky-memories-part-14/
http://ilookchina.net/2010/01/28/maos-alleged-guilt-in-the-land-of-famines-viewed-as-single-page/
http://ilookchina.net/2011/08/06/maos-great-leap-forward-and-the-cultural-revolution-viewed-as-single-page/
http://ilookchina.net/2011/08/07/mao-and-complex-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-part-12/
Mr. Parfitt then says, “And we ought to use reason with caution? What does that mean? Reason is all we have. A dim statement should invalidate that website you quote, and why not quote a book?”
Besides being a Red Herring and Loaded Questions, this comment was also an example of what Professor Patrick J. Hurley calls in his book Suppressed Evidence [page 150] and from “The Structure of Argument” by Annette T. Rottenberg [page 303], the fallacy known as Faulty Use of Authority.
Hurley says, “The requirement of a true premises includes the proviso that the premises not ignore some important piece of evidence that outweighs the presented evidence and entails a very different conclusion. If an inductive argument does indeed ignore such evidence, then the argument commits the fallacy of suppressed evidence.”
Rottenberg says, “The attempt to bolster claims by citing the opinions of experts… Both writers and readers need to be especially wary of the testimony of authorities who may disagree with those cited. In the circumstances where experts disagree, you are encouraged to undertake a careful evaluation and comparison of credentials.”
Since Mr. Parfitt has cast doubt on Professor deLaplante’s Website, it might be a good idea to follow Rottenberg’s advice and compare the credentials of Troy Parfitt with Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Department Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University with Mr. Parfitt’s credentials.
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kdelapla/
We know that Mr. Parfitt was an ESL teacher in South Korea for two years and then taught ESL in Taiwan for more than ten. He also read about 80 books on China and visited 17 of China’s provinces as more than a tourist for a period of some weeks.
http://www.troyparfitt.com/biography
Mr. Parfitt already dismissed the comparison of credentials with Frank Neville, which appeared in
http://ilookchina.net/2012/01/24/is-china-a-republic-part-34/
Mr. Parfitt said, “Thunderbird video fellow knows about as much about Chinese culture as you do, Lloyd, which is to say: not very much” and then later said after the comparison of credentials, “I don’t care who that guy is. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about… Sinophiles, like that twit in the video, often assure neophytes that China will become a democracy, because they know it’s what westerners want to hear… ”
In fact, I recognized this as a Red Herring right away when Mr. Parfitt criticized the Thunderbird School of Global Management video. The topic of that post was, “Is China a Republic?” not about what Frank Neville said about China and democracy. However, I cleared Mr. Parfitt’s comments about Frank Neville to reveal more about Mr. Parfitt character.
I don’t approve or reply to Mr. Parfitt’s comments or portions of his comments for his sake. I do it for anyone that reads this Blog so they can decide for themselves instead of being led about like cattle by someone such as Mr. Parfitt, who reminds me of Rush Limbaugh whom calls his fans “ditto heads” and says not to worry because “he [Rush Limbaugh] will do their thinking for them”.
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Definition of con artist [which answer/s fit?]: a person adept at
A. lying
B. cajolery
C. glib self-serving talk
D. a person who deceives other people by making them believe something false
E. all of the above
F. none of the above
Synonyms for con artist: barricuda, bilker, bunco, cheater, clip artist, con man, crook, deceiver, fleecer, flimflammer, fraud, hoser, hustler, mountebank, scam artist, scammer, shark, sharpie, smoothie, swindler
Note from Blog’s host: Each “crank” reader of this Blog may want to select his or her own answer/s from the choices provided for the definition of a “con artist” that may fit what Alessandro was saying in his comment of Mr. Parfitt.
Here are my choices of what I felt Alessandro was saying —
• glibb self-serving talk
• cajolery
• a person who deceives other people by making them believe something false
• deceiver
• flimflammer
• fraud
• smoothie
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Then there is this from Mr. Parfitt comment where he said, “It baffles me how someone could be your age and have been an educator for so many years (not to mention a journalist) and not be familiar with the basics of logic.”
Let’s deconstruct Mr. Parfitt’s flawed reasoning and his attempt to focus on me as a person instead of the topic in these posts. First, we are not talking about logic in these posts; we are talking about logical fallacies, which as a field of study is between 40 and 50 years old.
Of course, while in college, I took one course in philosophy that mentioned logic in one chapter. That was in 1968 after I started college on the GI Bill. By 1970, I was immersed in my major, journalism, which offered no classes in any type of logic but focused on the media and the different types of media writing such as news, feature, sports, opinion, etc. I took courses in photography and the use of a dark room and learned how to design magazine and newspaper pages, etc.
In the early 1970s, logic wasn’t mentioned in any of the media textbooks I used and as far as I know, they still aren’t.
Troy Parfitt was born in 1972 when I was twenty-seven. When I graduated from college in 1973 with a BA in journalism, he was one-year old. By the time, he was in high school and then entered college, logical fallacies were probably appearing in the new textbooks since most schools of any kind do not adopt new textbooks annually but often use the same textbook for a number of years.
Therefore, back in 1968, I took one course that was required that I recall vaguely focused on Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. Forty-three years is a long time to remember one, one semester class that was not part of my major but was a requirement of graduation.
In addition, forty-three years ago, the study of logical fallacies was in its infancy and probably didn’t appear as a topic in any of the textbooks in use at the time.
When I was teaching English and journalism in the public schools for thirty years, the state curriculum for English did not include a section on logic and/or logical fallacies and the journalism textbook didn’t mention the subject. I know because I wrote the final exams from all the textbooks I taught from and never once saw the subject mentioned.
For some reason, the State of California did not feel it was important for an English teacher to teach logical fallacies to high school kids with lower than average literacy skills. I taught in a barrio high school surrounded by violent Latino street gangs where I witnessed drive by shootings from the doorway to my classroom. It wasn’t exactly an intellectual atmosphere where the students were motivated and driven to discuss the use of red herrings, ad hominem, etc.
In fact, even in Hurley’s book, “A Concise Introduction to Logic,” with 646 pages and nine chapters, only one chapter of 74 pages, which includes about 20 pages in exercises, focuses on Logical Fallacies such as Fallacies of Relevance: Appeal to Force, Appeal to Pity, Appeal to the People [which Mr. Parfitt has used more than once], Argument Against the Person [which Mr. Parfitt is using here], the Fallacy of Accident, Straw Man, Missing the Point, Red Herring.
In the next section in the chapter, Hurley focused on the Fallacies of Weak Induction: Appeal to Unqualified Authority [which applies to Mr. Parfitt himself], Appeal to Ignorance [which Mr. Parfitt does all the time], Hasty Generalization, False Cause [an example of this is the claim that Mao murdered 40 million of his people during the famine that took place during the Great Leap Forward], Slippery Slope, and Weak Analogy.
Then Hurley talks about Fallacies of Presumption, Ambiguity and Grammatical Analogy: Begging the Question, Complex Question [which Mr. Parfitt often uses], False Dichotomy, Suppressed Evidence, Equivocation, Amphiboly [which Mr. Parfitt has used], composition, and Division.
At least you could call me Wally or Chuck.
Sid?
It is an acronym.
Interesting – looking forward to the rest of the series to see how this pans out now.