A colleague of mine just called my attention to a new case of a kind of error I've been noticing with increasing regularity of late. I'm looking for someone clever to name the error. It goes like this:
Some famous philosopher offers an account, A, of some phenomenon, P. A has certain features, of course, and among them is the second-order judgment that a proper account of P need not (or should not) include mention of some seemingly closely-related matter, M. That is, it is part of A that P should be discussed (explained, accounted for, what have you) independently of M. (Sometimes the claim is that M is in fact unrelated, other times the move is to go eliminativist with regard to M)
Then other philosophers propose criticisms-- C1, C2, C3....-- of A on the grounds that it leaves out M or fails to account for M or cannot accommodate considered judgments about M (or what have you). And the various instantiations of C often include reasons why M indeed must be discussed in an account of P.
Then someone comes to the defense of the original famous philosopher and simply declares that since A explicitly includes the (meta) judgment that P can be explained without reference to M, the criticisms C are dismissible or question-begging.
This is clearly some kind of error. Most often, it seems as if the philosopher coming to the defense of the famous philosopher is simply misunderstanding the target of the criticisms-- mistaking a criticism of A for a critical interpretation of the famous philosopher. Or something like that.
Any thoughts?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
18 comments:
Just so I'm clear: McX says "You don't need to account for M in accounting for P", the critic says "Yes, you do", and the philosopher-in-error says "This begs the question (etc.) against McX, who says you don't need to account for M when accounting for P."
If so, this is an instance of a more general error: McX says "P & Q", the critic says "Not P", and the philosopher-in-error says "This begs the question/misunderstands against McX, who explicitly says that P." As far as I can tell, it's rampant in philosophy. I've toyed with calling it a "question-beg foul", or perhaps "missing the bullet".
Reminds me of a remark David Lewis makes somewhere to the effect that it isn't very impressive to say "Your counterexample misunderstands the intention of behind my argument, because I didn't intend for my argument to have any counterexamples". He was talking about trying to refute someone to their face, whereas here the claim "You misunderstand the intentions behind A!" is made by the defender of the famous philosopher. Call it Evasion by Stipulation, Dodging the Bullet, the Stipulative Dodge, or something of that sort.
"... the intention /-of-/ behind my argument ... "
Dodging, or missing, the bullet sounds right to me.
begging the brown nose?
Parlor Elephant Error
Ass biting
word verification: ascis (no, I'm not making this up)
"Rebuttal by stipulation"; "evasion by stipulation"; "stipulative sidestep"; "stipulative dodge."
Word verification: "intho."
Anon 10:35 here again. I'm starting to quite like "stipulative sidestep."
Vote for 'missing the bullet".
It seems to me that this mistake accounts for a vast number of replies at "author meets critics" sections. Am I wrong?
That said, question-begging arguments are still rampant. For example, I recently read an article that tried to argue in the following fashion: "Generally, Accounts A and A' are both used to argue for conclusion C. However, if pitted against each other, A and A' lead to a paradox." However, in doing so, they misinterpret what someone defending C would say about the combination of accounts A and A', implicitly assuming ~C. When I pointed out that if you believed C there was no paradox in the combination of A and A' that the paper described, the person replied that the point of the paper was to show there was in fact a paradox, even though he changed the interpretation of the accounts!
A vote for 'rebuttal by stipulation'!
Is it really an error? I feel like that depends on what kind of thing ‘M’ is: is it ordinarily considered, pre-theoretically, part of the phenomenon P, like a datum, or is it an interpretation of P that rival accounts tend to include?
Consider: Someone proposes, explicitly, an economic account of tort law. A critic complains:” Gee, Dick, that totally leaves out the deontological considerations of Aristotelian corrective justice.” “Well, yes Jules (or whoever),” says the economist, “I said it was an ECONOMIC account, didn’t I. ”
I think the economist has a point: criticizing the account for – essentially -- being an economic account, and not one based on corrective justice, feels vacuous.
On the other hand, consider: Someone proposes an economic account of tort law that explicitly excludes cases of injuries done by accident.
Says the critic: accidental injuries are a crucial part of tort law. If your account leaves that out, the target is completely missed!
Says the economist: “But I *said* I was excluding accidents.” There, economist commits the error. But not in the first case, right?
Biting the question?
Appeal to authority, aka argument from authority
busking the question
Baiting the question.
‘Dodging a bullet’ won’t do because dodging a bullet is generally a sensible, commendable thing to do – but we need a terms which clearly conveys criticism.
Whilst I agree a witty phrase is desirable, it remains the case that if we are to actually use the term in practice – and it needs to be used – then it should be descriptive (sadly not everyone reads this blog – the jerks).
Perhaps what we need is a taxonomy of different ways of begging the question?
Thus the person defending the famous philosopher is ‘begging the question by appeal to authority.’ Whereas the famous philosopher himself is perhaps (if he offers no good grounds) ‘begging the question by stipulation’.
If the famous philosopher offers an argument Y in defence of not considering X, and Y begs the question, then perhaps he is ‘begging the question by begging the question’!
I guess you lot must be able to think of additional cases, right?
Post a Comment