[lit-ideas] Re: Name this fallacy
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 02 Sep 2004 22:06:05 PDT
I've been puzzling over Teemu's problem off and on since it arrived in my
mailbox. He says he is in search of a name for 'having your cake and eating it
too...with a bit of a twist.' He suspects that it exemplifies some informal
fallacy.
I'm already in trouble, for I see nothing fallacious in what Teemu has presented
as needing identification until the advent of a mysterious premise (5), the lost
cousin of Frege's fifth law. Here's Teemu's example:
(E) Alice and Bob are neighbours. Alice wants Bob to cut down a tree that
shadows her yard, Bob disagrees. They agree to let Camille across the street
decide the matter. Camille decides that its Alice's choice to make. Bob argues
that while he agrees with Camille['s] judgement, Bob has to have a say in the
decision too.
If (E) exemplifies anything, it is Bob's refusal to abide by something he
already agreed to, viz., that Camille gets to decide 'the matter.' That he
should have a say in the decision is ruled out by his having agreed to let
Camille decide.
That Camille decides that Alice (who wants the tree cut down) should decide is
for simplicity's sake, just a way of deciding that the tree should be cut down.
The grounds on which Bob objects to this (if this is what he's doing) escape me.
Had Camille decided directly that the tree should go (the outcome in any case)
why should Bob _now_ believe 'he should...have a say in the decision too'? This
is not fallacious reasoning; it is, as far as I can see, an example of someone's
changing his mind. And when people change their minds, their present views are
surely different from their former views, by definition. There would be no
inconsistency between believing at one time that Smith was guilty and then
coming to believe that he wasn't; what would be inconsistent would be to believe
that he was ceteris paribus guilty and not guilty.
So, I'm perplexed. I'm further perplexed when, in spelling out the situation,
step (5) is introduced as if it were a consequence of anything that has gone
before, instead of what it is, an apparently unmotivated interpolation.
Teemu sets up the situation this way [I've changed his symbols but not the form
of what's presented--A = Alice decides; C = the tree is cut; B = Bob decides;
and ~C = the tree is not cut]:
(1) A-->C
(2) B-->~C
(3) A
--
(4) C [or, therefore, C]
This is as far as the original story takes us, so I'm surprised to find that it
continues with (5)--A & B--for (5) requires for bouyancy the assertion (or the
fact that) Bob gets to decide, and this is not part of the story merely a part
of Bob's fantasy life. And if Bob does get to decide, this no more licenses
'both Alice and Bob get to decide' than it does 'Alice doesn't get to decide'
('Alice gets to decide' is false), for B is compatible with either A & B or with
B --> ~A, and it's the latter entailment that I thought was implicit in the
account as given. (After all, if they both got to decide, somehow, they wouldn't
be leaving the decision up to Camille du Solomon.)
What the initial conditions state is that Camille gets to decide and what
Camille decides is that A & ~B. Period. Had Camille found herself in a logical
fugue and decided that both Alice and Bob got to decide, there might have been
grounds for maintaining that a contradiction somehow emerges from all this. But
that is not what she did.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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