Girl crushed by tree during teacher strike
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8610392/13-year-old-girl-crushed-by-tree-during-teacher-strike.html, published 01 Jul 2011, last verified 7/16/2011

Girl crushed to death by a falling branch as she sat on park bench on the day her teachers went out on strike
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2010193/Teachers-strike-Sophie-Howard-13-killed-falling-branch-school-closed.html, published 2nd July 2011, last verified 7/16/2011

These headlines are from the UK national newspapers the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. Both highlight the fact that the death occurred during a teacher’s strike, which closed the girl’s school. The headlines and the articles themselves imply the claim that:

(1) The teacher’s strike caused the girl’s death.

Indeed, on the following day both articles were criticised in another national newspaper, the i on Saturday, (print edition, p. 20) precisely because they seemed to imply (1).
The informal reasoning behind (1) goes as follows: the strike caused the girl’s school to close; had the school been open, she would not have been in the park and she would not have died; therefore the strike caused the death. This assumes a counterfactual account of causation. A quote from the Daily Mail article nicely illustrates the counterfactual claim that is supposed to entail (1):

(2) “if the teachers were not on strike… [the girl] would have been at school, and this [the death] would not have happened.”

It seems probable that the closure of the school was a necessary condition for the girl being in the park, at the time when the branch fell. Or put another way, it seems probable that the girl’s death (by the falling branch) could only have occurred if the school was closed. Were it open, she would not have died. It is highly probable that this is true; however it is a fallacy to assume that, in general, all necessary conditions for events are causes. Consider the following example:

(3) John passed his driving test.
(4) If John were not human (if he were a dog, say), he would not have passed a driving test.

Certainly being human is a necessary condition for (3). Equally however the fact that John is a human is not considered a cause of him passing the test. There are more proximate factors to consider, such as the hours he spent taking driving lessons. Passing a driving test requires one to be human, but even given that, it requires much more besides. If we want to explain why (3) occurred, then there are the more relevant counterfactual scenarios to consider than (4).
Similarly in the case of the girl’s death there are other factors to consider. More proximate factors include the girl being in the park (as opposed to being elsewhere), and the branching falling at that moment (as opposed to some other). There are a range of counterfactual scenarios in which the school was in fact closed by the strike, but the girl would not have been killed by the branch.
The inference from (2) to (1) is fallacious because the counterfactual scenario in (2) in too remote. Much else could have happened besides to prevent the girl’s death, even though the strike closed the school. To infer (1) from (2) is to neglect these other, more immediately relevant, causal factors.

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I’m reading ‘In the Basement of the Ivory Tower’ by the pseudonymous ‘Professor X,’ who teaches English 101 and 102 as an adjunct at two unnamed colleges in the North East – one a small liberal arts college and the other a community college. Professor X’s point is that colleges are over admitting under prepared students, and relying on the temporary adjunct staff to do the dirty work of failing the unprepared out of the program.

This is not a particularly radical claim. But it is worth pointing out a bit of the reasoning:

The increased use of adjunct instructors is a direct result of the explosion in college enrollments, which have expanded dramatically since 1980.  In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in the United States.  Twenty years later the figure had doubled, to 2.9 million. In 1980, there were more than 12 million students enrolled in college, and by 2004, we were up to 17.5 million. Census projections for 2016 hover around 21 million. Everybody goes to college now, though not everybody graduates.

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

Why, however, does ‘Professor X’ give these numbers as quantities, rather than relative to the population of the US – which grew a great deal between 1940 and 2016.  Isn’t that just obvious?  Here’s the numbers in relation to the population:

And here’s the chart:

So it turns out that the big rises in college enrollments as a function of the population happened between 1940 and 1980 – this is no surprise, as the GI Bill famously revolutionized the state university during this period. The change between 1980 and 2016 is less than 1 percent of the population. I can think of no other industry that would be comfortable with this kind of growth relative to the growing population. Surely, then, the rise in number of students cannot be blamed for the rise in adjunct population, which Professor X dates to the 1980′s and 1990′s.

Professor X ends the paragraph by asserting that ‘Everyone goes to college now.’ That is clearly false, even without considering college population to the overall population.  It is so false that it even seems laughable. So what is it doing here?

I would contend that Professor X is inserting an exasperated exaggeration for rhetorical effect. He (and it is clear from the book that Professor X is male) doesn’t literally mean that everyone goes to college. But he’s lamenting that there are people going to college who don’t deserve it. The toss-away phrase becomes a shibboleth – a way for him to identify himself as a fellow elitist to like-minded readers. It thus becomes a kind of appeal to character.

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In The Interpretation of Dreams, Ch V (p. 210-211 of the Avon edition, Strachey translation, Freud argues:

And there is another objection that can be raised to Robert’s theory. If it were really the business of dreams to relieve our memory of the ‘dregs’ or daytime recollections by a special psychical activity, our sleep would be more tormented and harder worked than our mental life while we are awake. For the number of indifferent impressions from which our memory would need to be protected is clearly immensely large: the night would not be long enough to cope with such a mass. It is far more likely that the process of forgetting indifferent impressions goes forward without the active intervention of our psychical forces.

The argument has two parts: the first is a rejection of Robert’s theory that psychic forces are active in the process of forgetting the minutia of daily experiences while sleeping. The second posits that a more likely explanation for this phenomenon is that the psychic forces are not active.  The mechanism of forgetting posited by Freud is, of course, left to other sections of the work.

Thus, the argument that is the most interesting for our puposes here is the first.  The first sentence tells us Freud is objecting to Robert’s theory.

The second sentence in the quotation asserts a conditional:

(1) If it were really the business of dreams to relieve our memory of the ‘dregs’ or daytime recollections by a special psychical activity, our sleep would be more tormented and harder worked than our mental life while we are awake.

Let us formalize this argument by split this into its two parts and removing the qualifiers. The antecedent is (take from the subjunctive tense and put in the literary present):

(1a) it is the business of dreams to relieve our memory of the ‘dregs’ or daytime recollections by a special psychical activity

And the consequent is:

(1c) our sleep is more tormented and harder worked than our mental life while we are awake.

The use of the subjunctive tense here has already shown that Freud believes the antecedent false. We therefore know that this argument is intended as a form of modus tollens.

Thus, to complete the objection to Roberts, Freud needs to connect Robert’s theory with the antecedent, and demonstrate that the consequence is false.

Checking back over the text (Ch 1, section G or p. 110-111 in the same edition), we find that Freud characterizes Robert’s position as holding that “Dreams serve as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.” He quotes Robert as saying that ‘A man depraved of the capacity for dreaming would in course of time become mentally deranged, because a great mass of uncompleted, unworked-out thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain and would be bound by their bult to smother the thoughts which should be assimilated into his memory as completed wholes.’ Fair enough. “dregs of daytime recollections” is equivalent to the “great mass of uncompleted, unworked-out thoughts and superficial impressions” and “relieve” is the process of assimilating these “into his memory as completed wholes.”

All Freud needs to do then is provide the negation of the consequent and draw the conclusion.  The intended negation must then be contained in the third sentence:

For the number of indifferent impressions from which our memory would need to be protected is clearly immensely large: the night would not be long enough to cope with such a mass.

Again, we can split this into two parts.  The first must be seen as an extension of the antecedent: the ‘uncompleted, un-worked out thoughts and superficial impressions’ are compressed into ‘indifferent impressions,’ which are immensly large in number. The heart of the argument, then, is Freud’s assertion that the night would not be long enough to cope with this ‘immensely large’ mass. We can formalize these premises, tying them into the first, thus:

(2) The number of different ‘dregs’ of daytime recollections is immensely large.

(3) The night is not long enough to cope with an immensely large number of daytime recollections.

But that’s where the argument is an enthymeme: nowhere has Freud, or Roberts, made a claim about the computational speed of the mind.  To truly complete the argument, Freud needs the premise that:

(2) The number of different ‘dregs’ of daytime recollections is larger than the mind can process in a single night.

And that’s not exactly the same as what he asserts. The reformed (2) still doesn’t match the consequent in (1c), so we’ll have to allow that processing such a large mass would create tormenting, hard work for the mind–at least, more tormented and harder worked than daily life. On a charitable reading, then, we can recharacterize Freud’s argument thus:

IF (1a) it is the business of dreams to relieve our memory of the ‘dregs’ or daytime recollections by a special psychical activity THEN (1c) our sleep is more tormented and harder worked than our mental life while we are awake.

(2) The number of different ‘dregs’ of daytime recollections is larger than the mind can process in a single night.

(3) processing such a large number of ‘dregs’ in a night would make the mind more tormented and harder worked–at more than being awake.

(4) Sleep does not make the mind more tormented and harder worked than being awake.

(5) Therefore, it is not the business of dreams to relieve our memory of the ‘dregs’ or daytime recollections by a special psychical activity

 

Here’s a choice example of an old yarn: prominent atheists have had problematic relationships with their fathers, therefore atheism is adolescent rebellion against God. This conclusion, of course, entails absolutely nothing about the truth of the proposition ‘God exists,’ but arguments of this kind are less about convincing people not already convinced as they are about scoring points for ‘your team.’

This example adds a new twist to that tradition, with “America” playing the role of the benevolent yet strict father figure and President Obama as the alienated teenager:

Impeach Barack Before His Death Spiral Takes Us All Down

Are the Sins of the Fatherless the Root of Obama’s Tyranny?

Does Obama’s anti-democratic ideology result from his dysfunctional childhood? An intriguing book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, by Paul Vitz, argues this type background is a common precursor to the classic tyrant’s personality. This suggests Barack’s beef with America might result from his own deficient past.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/26329 reproduced here: http://standupamericaus.com.net-at-hand.com/are-the-sins-of-the-fatherless-the-root-of-obamas-tyranny:36373

It could be classified in a number of ways: as a fallacy of irrelevance, ad hominem, hasty generalization, appeal to authority, etc.

It begins by reciting the old yarn, this time via a ‘Christianized psychologist’ name Paul Vitz:

I Effects of Losing a Father

For death of a young child’s father, effects of a fatherless childhood can devastate character development. Vitz claims the genesis of atheism and socialism are often driven by personal childhood tragedies.

Vitz describes how loss of faith in one’s earthly father, by death, absence, or from mistreatment, frequently leads to a loss of faith in God. This “defective father hypothesis” gives a compelling explanation for “intense atheism” of famous intellectuals and politicians—the groups he writes about. Fathers can fail a child in many ways: By weak and cowardly behavior, abuse, or absence through death or abandonment.

Prof Vitz also describes childhoods of noted religious persons, linking belief to a warm father figure. He does not claim atheism is psychologically determined, but challenges the notion religious faith is irrational, whereas atheism is rigorous.

Vitz claims an especially difficult window exists between ages 3-5, when a father’s loss via death is viewed as abandonment. Also, he claims a physically abusive father can cause a boy to rage against all authority. So a lack of a positive male role model can translate into an inability to imagine God as a warm Father, as described in Judaism and Christianity.

The article even comes with a numbered list of alienated intellectuals (with no citations or references):

II The Famous Fatherless

Vitz focuses upon two groups: intellectuals and politicians, as the decisions of both are inordinately influenced by their religious views.

A. Intellectuals Who Lost Fathers

A brief list of atheist intellectuals greatly influencing the modern age includes:

1. David Hume, famed anti-Christian philosopher, whose father died when he was 2.

2. Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher skeptic, whose father committed suicide when Art was 16.

3. Ludwig Feuerbach’s father abandoned family for another woman when Ludwig was 13.

4. Sigmund Freud’s father was a coward, sexual pervert, and religious hypocrite.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche’s father, a pastor, died when he was 5.

6. Jean Paul Sartre’s dad died before the boy was 2.

7. Albert Camus,’ the existentialist writer, lost his father before he was born.

8. Thomas Hobbes, atheist philosopher, had a hypocrite pastor dad who abandoned family.

9. Votaire, famous French anti-religious author, hated his father, even changing his family name.

10. Philosopher Bertrand “Why I am Not a Christian” Russell, lost both parents before age 5.

In addition, America’s most famous atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair tried to kill her father with an 8-inch butcher knife.

And a case study of Nietzsche:

B. Special Study: Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche Infamous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche popularized the claim “God is Dead.” Hugely influential, especially on Hitler, he was extremely close to his father, a Lutheran pastor, dying when Friedrich was five. Writes Vitz, “Nietzsche often spoke positively of his father and of his death as a great loss which he never forgot. But he also saw him as weak and sickly.” Vitz says he views “Nietzsche’s rejection of God and Christianity as a rejection of the weakness of his father.”

Nietzsche claimed Christianity lacked a “life force.” In a strange reversal, the sickly boy grew to reject “weakling Christianity” for a return to macho paganism. His philosophy idealized “superman” but denigrated women (was he homosexual?). Ironically, sexist Nietzsche went mad, forcing sister and mother to care for him, whom he bitterly described as “machines built for hell.” Dr. Vitz writes, “It is not surprising that for Nietzsche Christian morality was something for women.”

After including

C. Political Leaders With Daddy Problems

Stalin, Hitler and Mao as instances of the fatherless, the author turns to constructing a psychological profile of Obama out of:

III Obama’s Childhood

abandoned and abused, acutely feeling the loss of his father, Obama developed pathological narcissism, which somehow connects to his identifying with his father’s putative political views (Marxism).

Which, of course, makes perfect sense because:

IV Policies & Strategies

For brevity’s sake, suffice it that Obama is not merely a leftist, but suspected of socialism by over 50% of Americans. Farther left as probably any president in history, debating the details of whether he’s socialist, Marxist, statist,fascist or corporatist is probably not meaningful. But Barack’s hidden motivations for failed policies, while pouring our assets down the commode, honoring dead atheists, is certainly rich fodder for discourse, as it could destroy America

Notice that the author has not shown that Obama is a socialists, but merely is suspected of being a socialist! Honestly, I can’t figure out what this paragraph is doing for the article. Maybe someone in the commentary can.

The author then offers, not as a conclusion but as further evidence:

V Possible Obama Mental Problems

One professional head-shrinker lists possible Obama problems: Mental illness; Narcissism; Asperger’s Syndrome; Drug-abuse affects; After-affects of child abuse, writing “Obama is flat when passion is needed; he’s aggressive when savvy is required. What’s most worrisome is that Obama doesn’t even realize that his behavior is inappropriate.” But this could explain Obama’s strange reactions, such as laughing at GM’s bankruptcy, or playing golf during the Gulf oil spill. Again, Dr. Vaknin wrote, “If we look into the childhood of all narcissists, we can see that invariably they were abused. Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence.” A list of Obama’s narcissistic behavior is found here. It’s not pretty.

There’s an implicit appeal to fear running through here as well. And of course, notice the unnamed ‘professional head-shrinker’ for an appeal to authority.

The article itself fails to make an actual argument. The final section, titled ‘What can be done? Impeachment” lays out what we might charitably call its “case”:

VI What Can Be Done? Impeachment!

Barack clearly fits the profile of young boys traumatized by loss of a father, turning to atheistic gods. It’s reported Obama no longer attends church. But don’t be shocked at old friends remembering his Marxist self-identity, and a two-decade attendance at a Marxist-fixated church under a racist crackpot “pastor” espousing socialist wealth-redistribution ideals. It fits the larger pattern.

All the elements of Barack Junior’s ideology mirror Obama Senior’s Marxist beliefs. Further, Vitz explains a fatherless son can reject all authority, even God, but still espouse his dead father’s leftist beliefs, perhaps in a vain attempt to please beyond the grave.

This publication has recently argued (here: article 1; article 2; article 3) the only logical escape from the Obama Death Spiral (ODS) is impeachment, and quick. Otherwise, America must watch captive as a leader, as unhinged as the deranged Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, lacking any method at all, continues to force suicidal decisions upon our once prosperous, virtuous and confident Republic.

Collected by Boing Boing, this fabulous undated bit of advertising hits all the right notes: appeal to fear and appeal to authority at the same time!

Notice ‘Ask your doctor.’ in the second paragraph, used in the same way we’d use ‘Do the math.’ today.

A clip from one of the first episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ in which President Barlett explains post hoc ergo propter hoc to his staff that “We didn’t lose Texas because of the hat comment…”

E.J. Dionne shows off:

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One of my favorite simple examples, arguing from analogy in opposition to restrictions on gay marriage:

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