Arianna Tries Her Hand at LogicWith predictably
bad results:
I just got back from a trip to the Happiest Place on Earth. Didn’t ride the teacups, though, because I wasn’t in Disneyland, but in Washington, D.C., where everyone is walking on air, swept away by the Beltway’s latest consensus: President Bush was right on Iraq.But then I thought back to my time at Cambridge, when I took a course in elementary logic, and studied the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle.
For those of you in need of a refresher on the concept, here’s an example: “All oaks are trees. All elms are trees. Therefore, all oaks are elms.’’
So: We invaded Iraq. Change is afoot in the Middle East. Therefore, the Middle East is changing because we invaded Iraq.Of course, Arianna is correct in describing the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle with regard to trees. However, the logical fallacy that she describes with Iraq is actually
post hoc ergo propter hoc. Literally, after this, therefore because of this.
Now of course,
post hoc is not always wrong. If somebody is walking by and I stick out my foot and they trip and fall, we may say that they fell after I stuck out my foot, therefore they fell because I stuck out my foot, and provided there is not another reason for their tripping, we can say that indeed they fell because I stuck out my foot. On the other hand if I had been, say, thinking about the NCAA basketball tournament just before the person tripped and kept my foot under my desk and the person tripped, it would be quite appropriate to point out my thinking about college hoops had nothing to do with them tripping, because it was completely unrelated and non-causative.
So the question becomes, did the invasion have anything to do with change in the Middle East. And the answer, obviously is that you can make an argument that it didn't but few people are, as even Arianna admits:
In the corridors of power, Republicans are high-fiving, and Democrats are nodding in agreement and patting themselves on the back for how graciously they’ve been able to accept the fact that they were wrong.
