One student in my Constitution class wrote something to the effect that there are two groups of people: those who support us and those who are against us. I wrote a big NO in the margin and gave a logic lesson. The only way to validly split something into two (and only two) groups is A and not-A. Teenagers and not teenagers. Americans and not Americans. Living and not living. But very rarely is this done. Instead, people will say there are two groups, A and B. such as either you are with us or against us. NO. That is not valid. The valid statement is Either you are “with us” or “not with us”. “Not with us” is very different from “against us”. The group of “not with us” will include “against us” but it will also include the three day old baby, the kid in Iceland who has no opinion, the spouse of the terminally ill cancer patient who is preoccupied, the person who says a plague on both your houses, a person who maintains they are fundamentally with you but not in the way you want them to be, the person who thinks the whole controversy is a bit silly. Another way of saying it is if you divide the universe into two groups,A and B, there will be a very important, often unnamed, third set: “neither A or B”.
A week later I came upon an editorial written by a guy named O’Reilly defending Fox News that he works for. In the editorial, he wrote that Fox News is accused of being biased but this can not be because a recent poll shows that the great majority of the viewers are distributed across the political spectrum. What? If one of my students had written this editorial, I would have written a NO next to this and had him rewrite it. His rebuttal to the accusation has nothing to do with the accusation. Who is watching the show is irrelevant to whether the show has bias. The gap in logic is appalling and yet an editor lets it pass. Worse, the logic is so awful that I can’t help but assume O’Reilly knew he was being a sophist. Like I’ve mentioned before, I feel like we live thick within the fumes of organizations trying to generate a trance of non-critical acceptance.
Leave a Reply