Dialectic and Sophistical Refutations: Fallacies of Language

Orientation #

He opens with “a few more words about dialectic”, recalling that “we talked last time about the four tools of the dialectician” (prev. lecture). He says he will not go through all thirteen fallacies today, only the most important, and that he emphasized on “the little thing I gave you” the first from language and the first two outside language. The previous class treated demonstration and the four questions of the Posterior Analytics; the next takes up the fallacies outside language (accident, simply vs. in a certain respect).

The class, in order #

1. What dialectic is useful for (“useful to exercise your mind”) #

Point: Aristotle in the first book of the Topics (a book “about places”) gives three uses of dialectic, and the whole art can be stated formally as one question.

• Three uses: (1) to exercise the mind by looking at both sides of a question; (2) to meet somebody on his own grounds, reasoning from his opinions with him; (3) for philosophy, in two ways: reasoning on both sides helps you judge better (a jury judges better having heard both sides), and dialectic “has a road” (hodos) to the beginnings of all knowledge. Plato touches on this in the Republic.
• Formally, dialectic is about whether this is said of that; Aristotle divides that: whether said as essential (genus or difference), whether said convertibly, and whether as property or as definition. The later books of the Topics give places to look for each.

2. Three kinds of argument, from the Phaedo (“those you can trust completely”) #

Point: Socrates’ division of people (and arguments) into those you trust completely, not at all, and up to a point maps onto Aristotle’s logic.

• Demonstration: trust completely. Dialectical or rhetorical argument: trust up to a point, dialectic more than rhetoric. The Sophistical Refutations is about arguments you can’t trust at all, “simply a bad argument”.

3. What a refutation is: the slave boy and the album (“it’s dangerous to admit three things to Socrates”) #

Point: to refute is to show somebody he is contradicting himself, not always directly but by what his statements lead to.

• Real refutation, simplest example: Socrates and the slave boy who thinks doubling the side doubles the square. A 2-by-2 square has area 4; the 4-by-4 square has area 16; “even the slave boy can see” 16 is not double 4 but four times it. What he said (side twice as long, square twice as big) doesn’t fit together.
• His own example: Berquist says the album is length 10, width 3, area 40. 3 by 10 is 30, not 40; 40 divided by 10 is 4, not 3. “These three cannot all be true.” Hence the dialogues: three admissions rarely contradict as such, but from two of them Socrates deduces something contradicting the third.
• Such a refutation is real: the thoughts don’t “harmonize” (a Greek word meaning fit together); they are incoherent.

4. The sophist and his motive (“all his glory’s going to come over to me”) #

Point: refuting someone overcomes him, and the sophist wants the glory of being superior, so he enters conversation to win, not to find the truth.

• Prince Hal on Hotspur: everyone admires Hotspur; on the battlefield his glory will come over to the one who overcomes him. So the sophist takes even famous people and makes them at least appear to contradict themselves.
• Conversation as a form of war: “all fair in love and war”; the sophist will use bad arguments if the other can’t see through them.
• Aside: sometimes we ourselves use a bad argument just to see if someone can see the defect.

5. The thirteen ways of deceiving (“six of them come from words”) #

Point: Aristotle distinguishes thirteen ways the sophist deceives, learned both to avoid being deceived and to avoid the errors ourselves.

• Two groups: six from words or language, seven from things (outside language). Thomas touches on this in his commentaries on the Epistles of St Paul, since Paul alludes to the two ways of being deceived.
• He emphasized on the handout the first from language and the first two outside language, because they are the most common and because they correspond to three kinds of distinction made “again and again and again” in philosophy: the mind is deceived because it doesn’t see a particular kind of distinction, so the fallacies are also a way of learning the distinctions.

6. Equivocation: mixing up the senses of a word (“Roger Maris hit sixty-one home runs”) #

Point: the first fallacy of language, commonly “equivocation”, he spells out as the mistake from mixing up (not seeing the distinction of) the senses of a word or name.

• Easy cases nobody is deceived by, because both senses are sensible and known: Roger Maris hit 61 home runs off the bat; the bat is a flying rodent; therefore off the flying rodent. Chianti is a dry wine; what is dry is not wet; therefore Chianti is not wet. The old rule: look at the opposite. Dry opposed to sweet in the first premise, dry opposed to wet in the second.
• Aside: in the first reading of natural philosophy he gives students a sophistic argument, announcing “I’m going to refute Aristotle now”, and they think he has.
• The serious case, Feuerbach (the “vicious little mind” between Hegel and Marx, The Essence of Christianity: the incarnation is a symbolic way of saying man is God):
  1. Theologians say the unlimited or infinite is God.
  2. Man’s mind is unlimited: you can always learn more, always invent more; knowing a universal like odd number you know an infinity of things, and “no odd number is even” is a statement about an infinity.
  3. Therefore man’s mind is God. “Unlimited” is not like “bat”, whose two senses everybody knows; many could not say there are two meanings, so if you see no distinction you are deceived, as Marx and Engels were (perhaps wanting to be). Marx’s doctoral thesis rejects anyone who does not accept the human mind as the supreme divinity.
• Question to class, what differs? Student: in the second it is a kind of imperfection, one is always getting better. Answer: man’s mind is unlimited in that there is always something more to inquire; God is unlimited as an actual infinity. “Right away there is a difference in meaning”, though the average person has a hard time expressing it.
• De Koninck: every respectable word in philosophy is equivocal, has many meanings. What Aristotle has done is take all the key words of philosophy and distinguish their senses in order; Thomas does it following him; the moderns don’t, though Locke notices confusion in conversation from words without understanding it.
• This is the second tool of dialectic (distinguishing senses), for clarity but also to avoid this mistake, which can be very serious. Aristotle says this is the most common kind of mistake in thinking.
• Anecdote: teaching Marxism at St Mary’s College, California, he needed permission to use passages of an Index book; the registrar sent the request to the bishop, who granted it but said “you’re responsible for anybody who loses their faith”.

7. Amphiboly: one speech with two meanings (“the Word of God is about the Word of God”) #

Point: the second fallacy is like the first except that a phrase or speech, not a name, has two meanings.

• The Bible is the Word of God (Vatican II’s document on Revelation is titled De Verbo); St John’s Gospel says the Word of God is the Son of God; therefore the Bible is the Son of God. “Word of God” has two meanings.
• But the meanings are connected, which Vatican II develops: as the Word became man and took on flesh, the Word of God in the other sense takes on human language and expresses itself in a human way. And the Word of God (Bible) is chiefly about the Word of God (Son), which is why the Gospels are the greatest books and the others refer back to him.
• Parallels: Shakespeare’s “wisdom of nature” for the philosophy of nature, which is about the wisdom nature shows in its operations, a reflection of divine wisdom (nature as something of a divine art in things). The proemium to wisdom: wisdom is knowledge of God in two senses, knowledge about God and the knowledge God most of all has; and God’s knowledge is chiefly knowledge of himself, knowing other things only in knowing himself.
• Amphiboly means “thrown two ways”. Amphiboly vs. equivocation: one speech with two meanings vs. one name with two meanings; equivocation is much more important and more common.
• Student: “knowledge of reason”? Two senses: knowledge about reason, knowledge that reason has. So “some knowledge of reason is not a knowledge of reason” is not a contradiction: geometry is knowledge reason has but is knowledge of triangles and cubes, not of reason.

8. Composition and division: potentially two meanings (“can I stand when I’m sitting”) #

Point: the next fallacies of language have not actually but potentially two meanings; composition and division is given first “but it’s more important”.

• Can I stand when I’m sitting? In the divided sense yes (at the time I’m sitting I could be standing); in the composed sense no (not sitting and standing at the same time).
• God’s foreknowledge: an if-then is true only if the then follows necessarily; if God knows you will sin tomorrow, then you will sin. Must you sin, are you not free? Taken separately, no, you can sin or not; taken together, “if God knows you’re going to sin, then you will sin” is necessarily true, because God cannot be deceived. True in the composed sense, not the divided. “That’s kind of a subtle thing.”
• Student: is it a different sense of “must”? Answer: “no, no, no”, it is a different type of fallacy, true in the composed sense and false in the divided, or vice versa.

9. Accent, and the ending of a word (“seeing and being seen”) #

Point: the remaining fallacies of language are less important.

• Accent: the same word pronounced one way means one thing, another way another; it deceives in the written word. Students do something like it in papers, and so does he.
• The last, a “fantastic or imaginary multiplicity” from the ending of a word: seeing / being seen are grammatically active and passive like kicking / being kicked; but whereas the kicker acts on the kicked, in seeing the thing seen acts on my eye, though grammar makes me look active.
• Mill’s mistake: burnable means able to be burned (put it in the fire, it burns), so lovable means able to be loved, desirable able to be desired. But desirable means what should be desired, not what someone could desire; the same ending as burnable makes you think otherwise.

10. Confused, natural, simple: more senses of words (“forewarned is forearmed”) #

Point: returning to the one he emphasizes, equivocation “is done all the time”, shown in words he will meet in the first reading of the philosophy of nature and in Shakespeare.

• Aristotle: the confused is more known to us and more certain than the distinct. How, if confused means mistaken? “Confused” here means indistinct, not mistaken. Descartes maybe said the opposite because he was “a little bit confused with the words”.
• The Tempest: the English call an odd person “a natural”; Caliban is called a natural, but he is a monster, i.e. something unnatural, so a “natural monster”. Shakespeare (he places it in The Tempest) complains of “simple truth miscalled simplicity”: simple can mean foolish (simpleton), yet God is the most simple thing there is.
• Cardinal Journet, at the Angelicum, writing to a friend, amazed that Thomas could write so simply yet be so profound. By contrast a letter of Hegel: he writes obscurely on purpose, since if understood nobody will admire him; and Descartes in public lectures would insert a sentence meaningless even to himself, and people would come up afterwards to praise that very sentence.
• Closing: seeing this mistake made makes you attentive to the senses of a word; and vice versa, understanding the distinction of senses helps you understand the mistake. “You don’t realize how common it is at first.”

His words #

• Topics: “about places”; the later books give “places to look”.
• hodos: dialectic “has a road” to the beginnings of all knowledge.
• refutation: to show somebody he is contradicting himself, that what he says is not consistent.
• harmonize: Greek word meaning fit together; the opposite is incoherent.
• sophist: enters conversation to win, not to find the truth, as a form of war.
• mistake from mixing up the senses of a word / not seeing the distinction of the senses of a word [ed.: equivocation], his spelling-out of the first fallacy.
• the old rule: “look at the opposite” (dry vs. wet, dry vs. sweet).
• unlimited: of man’s mind, always something more to inquire; of God, an actual infinity.
• second tool of dialectic: distinguishing the senses of words, for clarity and to avoid this mistake.
• amphiboly: “thrown two ways”; one speech with two meanings, against one name.
• composed sense / divided sense: true in one, false in the other.
• accent: same word, different meaning by pronunciation; deceives in writing.
• fantastic or imaginary multiplicity: fallacy from the ending of a word [ed.: figure of speech].
• confused: in Aristotle’s first reading, indistinct, not mistaken.
• wisdom of nature: Shakespeare’s words, used by him for the philosophy of nature.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Topics, book I: the uses of dialectic; the division of “whether this is said of that”.
• Plato, Phaedo: the three kinds of people/arguments one can trust.
• Plato, slave boy on doubling the square (Meno, inferred).
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations: thirteen ways, six from language, seven from things; equivocation, amphiboly, composition and division, accent, ending of a word.
• Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity: the syllogism “the unlimited is God; man’s mind is unlimited”.
• Aristotle, first reading of natural philosophy (Physics I, inferred): the confused more known to us than the distinct. Mentioned
• Plato, Republic (on dialectic).
• Thomas, commentaries on the Epistles of St Paul (two ways of being deceived).
• Vatican II, De Verbo [ed.: Dei Verbum]: Word of God takes on human language; the Gospels chief.
• St John’s Gospel: the Word of God is the Son of God.
• Marx, doctoral thesis (Moscow edition): the human mind as supreme divinity.
• Locke, on confusion in conversation from words.
• Mill, on burnable / lovable / desirable.
• Shakespeare: Prince Hal on Hotspur; The Tempest (Caliban a natural monster; “simple truth miscalled simplicity”).
• Descartes; Hegel (letter on obscurity); Cardinal Journet (letter from the Angelicum); De Koninck; proemium on wisdom.

His questions #

• Why did Aristotle title his book “sophistical refutations”? A refutation shows someone contradicting himself; the sophist wants the glory of appearing to do so, by bad arguments if need be.
• Is the square whose side is twice as long twice as big? No: 2-by-2 is 4, 4-by-4 is 16, four times as big.
• Is the Roger Maris argument one you can trust completely, up to a point, or not at all? Bad; nobody is deceived because both senses of “bat” are seen.
• What is the difference between “unlimited” said of God and of man’s mind? Man’s mind: always something more to inquire; God: an actual infinity.
• Anything wrong with “the Bible is the Word of God, the Word of God is the Son of God, therefore the Bible is the Son of God”? “Word of God” has two connected meanings; one is about the other.
• Does “knowledge of reason” have more than one sense? Yes: knowledge about reason, knowledge that reason has (geometry is the second, not the first).
• Can I stand when I’m sitting? In the divided sense yes, in the composed sense no.
• If God knows you’re going to sin, must you sin? Not in the divided sense; the whole conditional is necessary in the composed sense, since God cannot be deceived.
• Is that a different sense of “must”? No; it is a different type of fallacy, composition and division.
• How can Aristotle say the confused is more known to us and more certain? “Confused” means indistinct, not mistaken.