Alternative facts and sloppy thinking. Either one can hijack our efforts to learn the truth and make quality decisions. Increasing political polarization, inequality and mistrust make it harder to reach consensus in politics, business, and society. This can slow human progress and result in catastrophic mistakes. A clear understanding of, and greater emphasis on, the nature of facts and the process of logical arguments are our best hope for improving our individual and collective decisions.
Sometimes Inconvenient, But Always Crucial: Facts
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Let’s start with facts. A fact is something that actually exists, whose existence is objective and can make statements true or false. It is not based on subjective opinion, preferences perspective. For example, it is a fact that global temperatures have been rising, however inconvenient.
An “alternative fact”, is really not a fact at all, it is a theory offered as a substitute to a more widely accepted theory or actual fact. For example, a Trump advisor, Kellyanne Conway, defended press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claim that the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was the “largest ever” as an “alternative fact,” apparently because the CNN interviewer called the falsehood “ridiculous.” Conway seems to have felt the adjective was inappropriate, disrespectful or unfair. She seems to suggest the alternative fact is a justified response to an overly aggressive reporter.
But we need to insist on actual facts. Without agreement about the existence of objective facts, it becomes nearly impossible to agree and work together for common benefit. We know something is a fact if it is true regardless of preferences, perspectives and interests. Attendance at the inauguration can be established empirically, by observation. In this case, pretending that attendance was, in fact, strong, implying lots of support, may have made it harder for the Trump administration to plan for and address persistently low approval ratings.
Also Needed: Rigorous Logic
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Clear thinking and reasoning put facts to good use, permitting us to learn something about the world and make good decisions. The first step in evaluating whether the reasoning is sound is to outlining how people string facts together (as premises) to reach a conclusion in an “argument”. There are two ways in which arguments can fail: formally as in non-sequiturs, which is analogous to making a math error, or informally, when the content is unsuitable, for example, by making personal, ad hominem attacks.
Here’s an example of a non-sequitur:
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- If humans are warming the planet, then global temperatures are rising.
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- Global temperatures are rising.
- Therefore, humans are warming the planet.
The premises (1 and 2) are true and the argument seems reasonable if you read it quickly (and if you’re already persuaded of the fact of human-caused climate change so that confirmation bias gets to work on you.) But look closely and you’ll see that the conclusion does not necessarily follow. Perhaps there is another cause of rising temperatures, for example, a friend of mine recently suggested sunspots as a cause. The argument is not “valid” because the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the truth of the premises. (That said, there’s little support for the sunspot hypothesis.)
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- If Alex Jones is censored, further censorship becomes likely.
- Eventually, freedom of speech, a cherished American value, will be lost.
- Therefore, Alex Jones should not be censored.
In this case, a slippery slope argument is used illegitimately to suggest that a single event could lead to a chain of other events, resulting in catastrophe. It’s illegitimate because the argument does not explain the causality that links the chain of events resulting in a loss of freedom of speech. Premise 2. may or may not be true. This argument really just fear-mongering: the conclusion does not necessarily follow.
Can Facts and Logic Save Us?
Here’s another argument:
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- Each of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals must compete for the world’s resources and attention based on their relative merits, costs and benefits.
- “Climate action” is one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
- Therefore, climate action should compete with other goals for resources and attention.
I believe this argument is both valid (if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true too) and sound (the premises are, in fact, true.) If you want to disagree, you can either attack the truth of the premises or the structure of the argument. One thing you cannot do, while maintaining your rationality and integrity, is disagree because it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable. Even worse is deliberately using fallacies like ad hominem (attacking me personally), red herring (making an irrelevant argument), or slippery slope to try to trick me into conceding.
Let us be thoughtful, skeptical and demanding consumers of media, politics and conversation. We can do this by insisting on facts and ensuring that the arguments we are presented with are valid and sound. And if we want to disagree, let that disagreement be based either on the facts or on the way we’ve structured our arguments, both of which can be validated objectively. Anything else is not going to get us closer to the truth, but farther from it, with grave consequences for us all.
This article was originally published as “Facts And Logic Can Save Us (But Only If We Let Them)” on August 17, 2018 at Forbes.com.
Unfortunately, one side representing 30%-40% of the population has long been committed to denial and falsehoods, and this commitment has increased exponentially in the past two years. I had long believed in trying to reconciling different perspectives and reasoning with them. Sadly, this strategy is clearly not indicated in the face of rigid fixed ideas fought for viciously and often unscupulously by racists and others filled with dangerous deplorable ideas with weak associations to facts. Not recognizing this can lead to insufficient countermeasures.