Comments on: Is the Pundit's Fallacy a Fallacy?

By: Blar

Blar — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 23:25:00 +0000

Shorter WW: if you don’t care about truth then there are no fallacies.

(And if you want to use the hot new term of art, not caring about the truth is bullshitting, rather than lying.)

If you really want to turn this into a philosophy-of-language, satisfaction-condition game, I think that Matt can beat you on that turf, too. He isn’t wrong to point out instances of the pundit’s fallacy, because giving a speech act that label is an excellent way to counteract it by undermining the speaker’s credibility. The immediate purpose of calling someone on the pundit’s fallacy is to make everyone think “I can’t trust his claim that this’ll make our candidate more electable, because he’s just trying to rally everyone to his pet cause.” (The long-term purpose, generally, is to encourage people to figure out how to actually make your candidate more electable.)

By: washerdreyer

washerdreyer — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 23:21:00 +0000

thanks, my undergrad philosophy education, didn’t quite get into that. While it of course covered that commands were neither true nor false, it didn’t get into “satisfaction conditions.”

By: Gareth

Gareth — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 18:54:00 +0000

What are the satisfaction conditions of the phrase “There is no Social Security Trust Fund”?

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 18:26:00 +0000

Washerdreyer,

The general term for the success of a speech act is “satisfaction conditions” or sometimes “felicity conditions.” The satisfaction conditions of a speech act depend on the intention of the speaker. Truth is the satisfaction condition of a descriptive utterance. If I issue a straightforward directive, such as “Close the door,” the satisfaction conditions are met if whomever I was addressing closes the door. Similarly if I say, “It’s drafty in here” and it’s really not, but if the door gets closed, and that’s what I wanted, then the satisfaction conditions are met. If the intention behind my op-ed, say, is to rally more people to my position by stating something that is false, then falsehood of my statement is irrelevant to the satisfaction conditions. What matters is if my intention is met.

By: washerdreyer

washerdreyer — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:47:00 +0000

I asked a couple days ago about a method of evaluating these directive phrases. Is the answer that if the candidate or party takes your advice they’re true, and otherwise they’re false?

By: monkyboy

monkyboy — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:42:00 +0000

I think network TV news began its decline when reporters started interviewing each other on the air.

Blogs have already seemed to have reached this point. Two bloggers talking to each other via their blogs is…a sign their 15 minutes are almost up.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:06:00 +0000

I certainly see your overall point, but I don’t think the philosophy-of-language stuff is doing any real work here. If a pundit claims that there is a narwhal constituency when he knows there isn’t because he is “trying to get enough people to believe that there is a narwal constituency,” then what he’s doing is called “lying.” The fact that he does it in service of his own goals doesn’t change it from an “assertive” statement into a “directive” one. It’s still an assertion — one that he hopes people will believe, despite its falsity, leading them to support his favored cause.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 11:30:00 +0000

Thanks, Dave. I can always count on my fellow philosophy grad school drop outs!

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 10:52:00 +0000

I like the speech-act jargon — it helps make your point, whether or not we take it completely seriously as a proper analysis of the natural-language phenomenon you’re talking about.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 10:32:00 +0000

Robert,

Try this:
illocutionary force

Sorry for the philosophy of language lingo.