The All Important “Or”
Studying formal logic turns out, it seems to me, to be of great use in understanding rhetoric. Take, for example, this from Jonah Goldberg (emphasis added):
Lots of folks on the right object to government intervention in the economy, even during a crisis. I had a mini-spat with Glenn Beck about this on his show earlier this week. I understand the objection, particularly given how often the left tries to create or exploit crises for the purpose of creating another New Deal.
As Professor Goldfarb taught me, “a or b” is true if and only if either “a” is true or else “b” is true. Thus, if it’s true that the left often tries to exploit crises, then it’s also true (a fortiori, as they say) that the left often tries to create or exploit crises. And since it is true that all political movements try to exploit crises to advance their policy agendas, it’s true that the left tries to do so. Thus it’s accurate, in extremely tendentious sense, to say that “often the left tries to create or exploit crises.” Thus, through a little bit of artful wordplay you can smuggle in the smear that American liberals often try to deliberately engineer crises and that, in particular, the current crisis — despite having unfolded entirely during an era of conservative governance — was deliberately engineered by liberals.
It’s all pretty clever.
54 Responses to “The All Important “Or””
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October 18th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
I partially agree with your point about “or” but the expression “how often” suggests that the left does something more often than predicted by a baseline. One could argue that it does not really say that (the semantics aren’t easy to analyze), but I cannot really picture Goldberg falling back on the defense that he just meant everyone does it often and the left is no different. Then he would be conceding that he wrote a vacuous and misleading sentence.
For that matter, if I said “Matt Yglesias has resorted to journalism or drug dealing to meet his financial goals.” then few people would find the “or” defense very plausible either. Natural language rarely maps neatly into symbolic logic. If you cannot defend your assertion based on what a reasonable listener would assume you were trying to say, then you cannot defend it at all. So if Goldberg is consciously playing this game, I don’t know what he would hope to accomplish by it.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I understand the objection, particularly given how often Jonah Goldberg salutes the flag or molests goats.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
“Clever” is not a word often applied to Jonah Goldberg.
And this wasn’t a particularly subtle trick. One could just as easily say that the GOP’s platform contains a plank for “executing babies or capital offenders”.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
conservatives are constantly trying to lower taxes or rape children.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Ah but it is also true that Cemocrats don’t not exploit the crisis and create it. And Republicans don’t not exploit the crisis and not create it. I prefer the engineering notation.
A=Democrats Exploit the Crisis
B=Democrats Create the crisis
A+B=true, A*B=False, also !(!(A)*!(B))=true.
This doesn’t alone allow us to build an AI model of the Republican mind but it is an essential part of the task. The Republican AI will come first because its simpler and more likely to destroy the world.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Wouldn’t they say the same thing to the democratic party?
October 18th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
What would be the equivalent of National Review on the left? (I’m talking in terms of history and influence, not in terms of publishing crazy conspiracy theories like Ayers wrote Obama’s memoirs etc). Is it The Nation? I don’t think it’s The New Republic. Washington Monthly seems to be more about policy than politics.
My point is, while The Nation can also be strident and too ideological at times, at least its writers still seem sane and rational. I think it says something about the ideological right that their flagship magazine produces writing that are probably equivalent to the most radical left-wing blogs.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
As much as you could say “tries to create or exploit crises” about the right.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
My take is it’s more a case of right wing stupid than of logical finesse. It is Jonah after all.
I can’t wait until the Republic party is so small it can be drowned it in a bathtub.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I’d be more worried about this sort of rhetoric if the Republican Party did not have such a proven record of creating crises.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Given that usually the left is trying solve the crises that unrestrained capitalism causes; I must amend my above comment to: I understand the objection, particularly given how often Jonah Goldberg exploits the flag or molests goats.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I think the Nation is sufficiently left wing to be equivalent to the National Review. I think it is pretty natural to put the center wherever on the political spectrum you are and then from that decide that people you disagree with are way out there. You could I suppose create a Ideological Histogram of the population and then define the center as the point where 50% are to the left of it and 50% are to the right. Doing this I think that the center of mass of those on the right of center may be a little further in that direction but thats mostly because Republicans politicians have been in power and have been able to say what they believe while Democrats like Clinton have been forced to stay in the center.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
It is completely evil for the Democrats to want to push good policies that will help the vast majority of Americans during times of crises.
If they were truly a moral party, in times of crisis they would obviously stick to pushing the Republican agenda that has so badly damaged this nation and the world over the past 30 years and in the past 7.5 brought us to the very edge of collapse.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Matt, as a matter of formal logic it can’t both be “very clever” and something practiced by Jonah Goldberg.
October 18th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I think the Nation is sufficiently left wing to be equivalent to the National Review.
Maybe, but I think there is a difference between standing up for an ideology and spreading despicable rumors about political opponents as if they are facts.
October 18th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
He meant OR inclusively to indicate that liberals both create and exploit such crises. Conservatives are simply powerless against the almighty liberal hegemony.
October 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
You’re figuring out now that rightwingers have worked carefully on their rhetoric? There are hundreds of examples of this kind of nonsense per day.
October 18th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
The Nation is possibly as far Left as the National Review is Right, but for the most part the Nation is more connected to reality. There are exceptions, most notably Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn – but those exceptions tend (like Cockburn) to hate Democrats (and, like Cockburn, to be disliked by other writers for the Nation, notably Alterman). I propose as an equivalent Cockburn’s Counterpunch, or Z magazine.
RE The actual post, I realize Matt is correct with respect to formal logic and with respect to English, so I’ll propose Goldberg was speaking in Boolean, where the correct term would have been not OR but XOR.
October 18th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
My question is this: what does Goldberg mean by “create” a crisis? I question whether even he is accusing liberals of deliberately engineering the circumstances of a crisis. Rather, to be fair, I suspect he’s accusing liberals of manufacturing a “crisis” by exaggerating or manipulating circumstances that already exist.
It’s sort of similar to the “shark attack” phenomenon: the only difference between an ordinary summer on the beach and a “shark attack crisis” is the amount of attention directed towards an ordinary, low-level problem. I suspect Goldberg is simply accusing liberals of disproportionate reaction to a problem, not deliberately causing the problem in the first place–in other words, creating the sense of crisis, not the underlying threat.
October 18th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
A lie is an attempt to deceive. A liar doesn’t get the benefit of linguistic tics since a lie is a moral act not a linguistic one. Sophistry, by definition, is lying.
October 18th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
“A or B” implies that one must be true. But the fact that A is true does not imply that B is true.
October 18th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Sometimes “or” is changed to “and.” And, truncation can be popular too.
So, this:
guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment
Is changed to this:
“guns and religion”
And, it’s fun to change the focus of this comment from:
some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest [which includes IL], the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
to:
all “rural voters”
Not that the original words were well chosen. My, point is that they were very foolish without editing, so why do folks need to embellish to make them even worse?
October 18th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Matt,
I’m pretty sure you would have been taught by Professor Goldfarb that “or” when used in logic (though not always in ordinary conversation) is inclusive. Thus, “a or b” is true when a is true or when b is true or when a and b is true.
That being said, I think the logical connector that Goldberg is searching for really is “and” since his objection to liberalism depends on them both creating and exploiting the crisis. Rule of charity and all.
October 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Really? I mean, saying “I often eat burgers, or shoot people” on Thursdays just doesn’t sound true to me.
October 18th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
If you often eat burgers on Thursdays, then the statement, “I often eat burgers or shoot people on Thursdays” is also true. The reason it doesn’t “sound true” to you is because the meaning of a statement is not only the truth or falsity of its logical implications (the semantics of the statement), but also its “pragmatic” character.
A famous example: The captain of a ship writes in his log, “The first mate was not drunk today.” Semantically, this statement is true if the first mate was not drunk that day. However, the implication of this statement is that the first mate is often drunk on other days. If, however, the first mate was a teetotaler, we would say that this pragmatic inference was false or misleading. But formal logic (of the kind described by Matt) is only concerned with semantic implication.
October 18th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
While you all parse the deeper meaning of something Jonah metaphorically picked out of his figurative nose, I’d like to call your attention to an even more jaw-dropping bit of bug-fuckery:
On so many levels, wrong. One scarcely knows where to begin.
October 18th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Oops. Forget to tie this back to your point. So, the statement, “I often eat burgers or shoot people on Thursdays,” has a pragmatic implication (what is known as an “implicature”) that you occasionally shoot people on Thursdays. This is because there are conversational rules that order–such as, for instance, we only bring up relevant information. If you didn’t ever shoot people on Thursdays, this wouldn’t be relevant, and so you would be breaking this rule. If you’re interested in more, here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia article on pragmatics
October 18th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
GRICE
October 18th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
This seems like a minor rhetorical device and it is only available to pundits trying to “smear”.
But the right wing talkers have another weapon that has been exposed over the last few weeks when the host continued to challenge a particular point.
This weapon is a careful series of fall-back positions. They advance the primary line of attack unless the attack is challenged. Without conceding the original attack is incorrect, they regroup at the next defensive position.
Using Matt’s example, the fall-back position is to point out the “or”. This keeps them from conceding defeat just long enough for them to change to another attack. “Surely there is some examples of someone on the left creating a crisis.” Or just give a vague example of when this happened. Once you get them cornered on “or”, we are off to the meaning of “often” and “left” and “crisis”. Don’t underestimate the extent of the smear, or how easy it might be revealed.
But there is an additional rhetorical framework that is used by pundits and politicians. They combine three types of lies: facts, deductions based upon the fake facts, and principles and/or theories supported by the facts and deductions.
The general tendency is to confuse these, so that “the left is bad” becomes a fact instead of an unsupported theory.
In a debate competition they would probably fail badly, but not as pundits or politicians.
October 18th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
I don’t think this is clever at all. He’s clearly saying that the left creates and exploits economic crises, but that in a given situation they may do one or the other. As was mentioned in the thread, that’s a standard way of using “or”.
And for it to be clever, I think the statement would have to imply that the left creates economic crises *and* allow Goldberg a convincing way to deny that he had made this claim. But I doubt he would ever deny that. He would readily clarify that yes, he believes the left has done and does do both.
October 18th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I’m not sure that Colatina is referring to my statements, but to be clear, “and” and “or” have different logical implications. There is no standard way of using “or” when you mean “and,” and anyone who does so is being misleading. What is correct is that whenever “a or b” is true, “a and b” is also true. However, it is possible for “a or b” to be true, but “a and b” false.
In other words, Matt’s original point is correct, he just infeliticiously described what he was taught by Professor Goldfarb. The point he wanted to make was that a disjunction is true when either of its disjuncts or both are true, but since the force of Goldberg’s criticism only holds when both disjuncts are true, Goldberg was being misleading.
October 18th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Typical leftist pap to be seen here. It’s undeniable that the liberals passed the Community Reinvestment Act in the 1970s with the aim of eventually creating a financial crisis that would bring down capitalism.
October 19th, 2008 at 12:24 am
As a teenager, Jonah Goldberg often kissed or fucked his mother.
October 19th, 2008 at 1:29 am
I expected Goldberg to make this argument, given how he tends to molest 6-year-old girls or write tendentious conservative columns.
October 19th, 2008 at 2:06 am
It is exactly as true as the fact that the right very often tries to elect politicians or kill and eat cute little kittens.
October 19th, 2008 at 2:18 am
Matt:
More stuff in this vein please (breaking down common argumentative ploys, discussing logical principles and fallacies and providing examples, whatever you want to call it). Doing this in a relatively non-pedantic fashion is a good deed . . . I learned something from this post.
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