This sort of analogical reductio ad absurdum only succeeds in so far as whatever makes the parody arguments visibly bad applies to the original arguments too.
This is more or less true for your arguments when they are parodying “no such thing as intelligence” (though I don’t think the conclusion “there is no such thing as strength” is particularly absurd, if it’s understood in a way parallel to what people mean when they say there’s no such thing as intelligence).
But it’s clearly not true, e.g., for #4. If you divide the human species up into races and look at almost any characteristic we have actual cause to be interested in, then the within-group differences do come out larger than the between-group differences. Whereas, e.g., if you divide people up into those who can and those who can’t lift a 60kg weight above their heads, I bet the between-group differences for many measures of strength will be bigger than the within-group differences.
#5 is interesting because what Toni Morrison actually calls “a social construct” at the other end of the link is racism, not race. It’s true, though, that some people say race is a social construct. But so far as I can see the things they mean by this don’t have much in common with anything anyone would seriously claim about strength.
#6 takes a not-very-convincing argument from authority against belief in race and turns it into a completely absurd argument from authority against belief in strength, because in fact there are good scientists saying that race is an illusion or a social construct or something of the sort, and there aren’t good scientists saying the same thing about strength.
It seems to me that your parodies of arguments in class A are consistently less successful than those of arguments in class B—which is entirely unsurprising because intelligence and strength are similar things, whereas race and strength are much less so.
[EDITED to fix a weird formatting problem. I think start-of-line octothorpes must signify headings to Markdown.]
I would bet the opposite on #4, but that is beside the point. On #4 and #6, the point is that even if everything I wrote was completely correct—e.g., if the scientific journals were actually full of papers to the effect that there is no such thing as a universal test of strength because people from different cultures lift things differently—it would not imply there is no such thing as strength.
On #5, the statement that race is a social construct is implicit. Anyway, as I said in the comment above, there are a million similar statements that are being made in the media all the time, and I could have easily chosen to cite one that would have explicitly said race is a social construct. For example:
The writer is a law professor, writing in the NY times; she tells us that “race is a social construct” as “there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites” and explicitly draws the conclusion that race “is not real in a genetic sense.”
...which is a synthesis of arguments 1 & 3 & 5 in my post. I know I could read the author’s statement as true but trivial (she is, of course, right—race, strength, height, and all other concepts in our vocabulary are social constructs) but that does not seem to be the intended reading. I could also explicate her position beginning with the words “But what she really meant by that is...” but that also strikes me the wrong response to a fundamentally confused argument.
On #4 and #6, the point is that even if everything I wrote was completely correct [...] it would not imply there is no such thing as strength.
Certainly true, but the most conspicuous problem with the parody argument in this case isn’t that, it’s that the statements about scientific journals etc. are spectacularly false. (Much less so for intelligence.) So someone reading your parody sees the parody argument, correctly says “wow, that’s really stupid”—but what they’re probably noticing is stupid is something that doesn’t carry across to the original.
And (I’m repeating things that have been said already in this discussion) while indeed any quantity of scientific papers finding problems with universal strength test wouldn’t imply that there is no such thing as strength, they would give good reason to avoid treating strength as a single simple thing that can be easily compared across cultures—and that is the version of the “no universal test, so no such thing as intelligence” argument that’s actually worth engaging in, if you are interested in making intellectual progress rather than just mocking people who say silly oversimplified and overstated things.
I could have easily chosen to cite one that would have explicitly said race is a social construct.
Yes, I know; that’s why I said “It’s true, though, that some people say race is a social construct”.
I’m not sure I understand your criticism. I don’t mean this in a passive aggressive sense, I really do not understand it. It seems to me that “the stupid,” so to speak, perfectly carries over between the parody and the “original.”
A. Imagine I visit country X, where everyone seems to be very buff. Gyms are everywhere, the parks are full of people practicing weight-lifting, and I notice people carrying heavy objects with little visible effort. When I return home, I remark to a friend that people in X seem to be very strong.
My friend gives me a glare. “What is strength, anyway? How would you define it? By the way, don’t you know the concept has an ugly history? Also, have you seen this article about the impossibility of a culture-free measure of strength? Furthermore, don’t you know that there is more variation between strong and weak people than among them?”
I listen to this and think to myself that I need to find some new friends.
B. Imagine I visit country X, where almost everyone seems to be of race Y. Being somewhat uneducated, I was unaware of this. When I return home, I ask a friend whether he knew that people from X tend to be of race Y.
My friend gives me a glare. “How do you define race anyway? Don’t you know the concept has an ugly history? You know, it is a fact that there is more variation between races than among them.”
I listen to this and think to myself that I need to find some new friends.
C. Imagine I visit country X, where intellectual pursuits seem highly valued. People play chess on the sidewalks and the coffee shops seem full of people reading the classics. The front pages of news papers are full of announcements of the latest mathematical breakthroughs. Nobel/Abel prize announcements draw the same audience on the television as the Oscars in my own country. Everyone I converse with is extremely well-informed and offers interesting opinions that I had not thought of before.
When I return home, I remark to a friend that people in X seem to be very smart.
My friend gives me a glare. “How would you define intelligence anyway? Don’t you know the concept has an ugly history? Have you seen this article about the impossibility of a universal, culture-free intelligence test?”
I listen to this and...
It seems to me the three situations are exactly analogous. Am I wrong?
There are multiple things that could be wrong with your friend’s response.
It could draw a wrong inference given its premises.
It could have wrong premises.
It could, even if its conclusion is technically correct in some sense, be misleading.
It could, even if its conclusion is correct, be a just plain weird response.
As regards the first of these, the three situations are indeed very closely analogous. (Not exactly—you chose different arguments in the different cases. A: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure, within-versus-between. B: ill-defined, ugly-history, within-versus-between. C: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure.)
As regards the second, I think not so closely. For instance, so far as I know the notion of strength doesn’t have at all the sort of ugly history that the notion of race does, nor the (less ugly) sort that the notion of intelligence does. (Maybe it has a different sort of ugly history, something to do with metaphorical use of “strength” by warmongering politicians perhaps.) And I bet you can get something nearer to a usable culture-independent test of strength than to a usable culture-independent test of intelligence. And, as I said earlier, I greatly doubt that there’s more variation in anything anyone expects to be a matter of strength within strong/weak than between those groups. (Incidentally, you wrote “more variation between … than among” which is the wrong way around for that argument.)
I’m not sure how much we should care about the third and fourth of those points since I think we agree that the conclusion is dubious at best in each case. But for sure the context is different (e.g., one reason why people who think there’s no such thing as race or intelligence bother to say so is that there are other people saying: oh yes there are, and look, it turns out that this traditionally disadvantaged race to which I happen not to belong is less intelligent than this traditionally advantaged race to which I happen to belong; nothing like this is true for strength) and it seems like that makes a relevant difference. (E.g., your friend’s response to the comment about strength seems weirdly aggressive for no reason; in the case of a comment about race or intelligence, there’s at least an understandable reason why an otherwise reasonable person might be touchy about them.)
So no, I don’t think the situations are perfectly analogous, though they’re close. If we consider only the first kind of error, then the analogy is pretty good. And if you were making an explicit argument then that would be OK. But you aren’t; you’re presenting your parody arguments, and inviting readers to point and laugh and draw their own conclusions. And if one of the parody arguments is laughable for reasons that don’t correspond to defects in the arguments you’re parodying (e.g., because it depends on saying that there are lots of scientific articles out there saying that strength is purely a cultural construct) then you’re inviting readers to conclude that claims like “race isn’t real” and “intelligence isn’t real” for terrible reasons. It’s like dressing someone up in a clown costume, getting them to present an argument, and saying “wasn’t that silly?”. The argument may well be silly, but it will feel sillier than it is because of the clown suit.
I agree with 99.999% of what you say in this comment. In particular, you are right that the parody only works in the sense of the first of your bulleted points.
My only counterpoint is that I think this is how almost every reader will understand it. My whole post is an invitation to to consider a hypothetical in which people say about strength what they now say about intelligence and race.
Because that’s when something was said to which it was particularly relevant. (It’s not like anyone reading is likely to be unaware of that difference in context.)
Er, I realise that I am confused about #6. Its first paragraph seems like exactly the sort of thing someone might say about race, but then the second paragraph is pointing at a study concerned more with intelligence than with race (though it might have implications for inter-racial IQ comparisons).
Actually, it seems like an interesting study (though the press-release description at the other end of the link is a bit rubbish). What they did was to give (nonverbal) IQ tests to two culturally and racially different groups of people, along with lower-level and perhaps more objective tests of neurological functioning. Then they ran regressions to try to figure out what lower-level characteristics predict IQ scores in the two groups, and found that the results were quite different—suggesting that people in the two groups are attacking the IQ test problems in fundamentally different ways. I think this is the actual published study.
Of course, the state of psychology research being what it is, they did it with a total of 54 people, and if they did any actual statistical analysis of the difference in regression results between the Spanish and Moroccan subgroups beyond displaying some of the numbers and saying “look, they’re different!” then I haven’t found it. So I wouldn’t bet too heavily on it. But it’s suggestive, at least.
(I am not claiming that if it were correct it would demonstrate that either race or intelligence is unreal. It could be, e.g., that there are racial differences in how well people’s brains “choose” how to attack problems, and that this leads to systematic racial differences in cognitive ability. But prima facie it seems more likely that, as the researchers conjecture, these differences are a matter of culture and education more than of brain structure. If they’re real at all, of course.)
This sort of analogical reductio ad absurdum only succeeds in so far as whatever makes the parody arguments visibly bad applies to the original arguments too.
This is more or less true for your arguments when they are parodying “no such thing as intelligence” (though I don’t think the conclusion “there is no such thing as strength” is particularly absurd, if it’s understood in a way parallel to what people mean when they say there’s no such thing as intelligence).
But it’s clearly not true, e.g., for #4. If you divide the human species up into races and look at almost any characteristic we have actual cause to be interested in, then the within-group differences do come out larger than the between-group differences. Whereas, e.g., if you divide people up into those who can and those who can’t lift a 60kg weight above their heads, I bet the between-group differences for many measures of strength will be bigger than the within-group differences.
#5 is interesting because what Toni Morrison actually calls “a social construct” at the other end of the link is racism, not race. It’s true, though, that some people say race is a social construct. But so far as I can see the things they mean by this don’t have much in common with anything anyone would seriously claim about strength.
#6 takes a not-very-convincing argument from authority against belief in race and turns it into a completely absurd argument from authority against belief in strength, because in fact there are good scientists saying that race is an illusion or a social construct or something of the sort, and there aren’t good scientists saying the same thing about strength.
It seems to me that your parodies of arguments in class A are consistently less successful than those of arguments in class B—which is entirely unsurprising because intelligence and strength are similar things, whereas race and strength are much less so.
[EDITED to fix a weird formatting problem. I think start-of-line octothorpes must signify headings to Markdown.]
I would bet the opposite on #4, but that is beside the point. On #4 and #6, the point is that even if everything I wrote was completely correct—e.g., if the scientific journals were actually full of papers to the effect that there is no such thing as a universal test of strength because people from different cultures lift things differently—it would not imply there is no such thing as strength.
On #5, the statement that race is a social construct is implicit. Anyway, as I said in the comment above, there are a million similar statements that are being made in the media all the time, and I could have easily chosen to cite one that would have explicitly said race is a social construct. For example:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/how-fluid-is-racial-identity/race-and-racial-identity-are-social-constructs
The writer is a law professor, writing in the NY times; she tells us that “race is a social construct” as “there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks or all whites” and explicitly draws the conclusion that race “is not real in a genetic sense.”
...which is a synthesis of arguments 1 & 3 & 5 in my post. I know I could read the author’s statement as true but trivial (she is, of course, right—race, strength, height, and all other concepts in our vocabulary are social constructs) but that does not seem to be the intended reading. I could also explicate her position beginning with the words “But what she really meant by that is...” but that also strikes me the wrong response to a fundamentally confused argument.
Certainly true, but the most conspicuous problem with the parody argument in this case isn’t that, it’s that the statements about scientific journals etc. are spectacularly false. (Much less so for intelligence.) So someone reading your parody sees the parody argument, correctly says “wow, that’s really stupid”—but what they’re probably noticing is stupid is something that doesn’t carry across to the original.
And (I’m repeating things that have been said already in this discussion) while indeed any quantity of scientific papers finding problems with universal strength test wouldn’t imply that there is no such thing as strength, they would give good reason to avoid treating strength as a single simple thing that can be easily compared across cultures—and that is the version of the “no universal test, so no such thing as intelligence” argument that’s actually worth engaging in, if you are interested in making intellectual progress rather than just mocking people who say silly oversimplified and overstated things.
Yes, I know; that’s why I said “It’s true, though, that some people say race is a social construct”.
I’m not sure I understand your criticism. I don’t mean this in a passive aggressive sense, I really do not understand it. It seems to me that “the stupid,” so to speak, perfectly carries over between the parody and the “original.”
A. Imagine I visit country X, where everyone seems to be very buff. Gyms are everywhere, the parks are full of people practicing weight-lifting, and I notice people carrying heavy objects with little visible effort. When I return home, I remark to a friend that people in X seem to be very strong.
My friend gives me a glare. “What is strength, anyway? How would you define it? By the way, don’t you know the concept has an ugly history? Also, have you seen this article about the impossibility of a culture-free measure of strength? Furthermore, don’t you know that there is more variation between strong and weak people than among them?”
I listen to this and think to myself that I need to find some new friends.
B. Imagine I visit country X, where almost everyone seems to be of race Y. Being somewhat uneducated, I was unaware of this. When I return home, I ask a friend whether he knew that people from X tend to be of race Y.
My friend gives me a glare. “How do you define race anyway? Don’t you know the concept has an ugly history? You know, it is a fact that there is more variation between races than among them.”
I listen to this and think to myself that I need to find some new friends.
C. Imagine I visit country X, where intellectual pursuits seem highly valued. People play chess on the sidewalks and the coffee shops seem full of people reading the classics. The front pages of news papers are full of announcements of the latest mathematical breakthroughs. Nobel/Abel prize announcements draw the same audience on the television as the Oscars in my own country. Everyone I converse with is extremely well-informed and offers interesting opinions that I had not thought of before.
When I return home, I remark to a friend that people in X seem to be very smart.
My friend gives me a glare. “How would you define intelligence anyway? Don’t you know the concept has an ugly history? Have you seen this article about the impossibility of a universal, culture-free intelligence test?”
I listen to this and...
It seems to me the three situations are exactly analogous. Am I wrong?
There are multiple things that could be wrong with your friend’s response.
It could draw a wrong inference given its premises.
It could have wrong premises.
It could, even if its conclusion is technically correct in some sense, be misleading.
It could, even if its conclusion is correct, be a just plain weird response.
As regards the first of these, the three situations are indeed very closely analogous. (Not exactly—you chose different arguments in the different cases. A: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure, within-versus-between. B: ill-defined, ugly-history, within-versus-between. C: ill-defined, ugly-history, no-good-measure.)
As regards the second, I think not so closely. For instance, so far as I know the notion of strength doesn’t have at all the sort of ugly history that the notion of race does, nor the (less ugly) sort that the notion of intelligence does. (Maybe it has a different sort of ugly history, something to do with metaphorical use of “strength” by warmongering politicians perhaps.) And I bet you can get something nearer to a usable culture-independent test of strength than to a usable culture-independent test of intelligence. And, as I said earlier, I greatly doubt that there’s more variation in anything anyone expects to be a matter of strength within strong/weak than between those groups. (Incidentally, you wrote “more variation between … than among” which is the wrong way around for that argument.)
I’m not sure how much we should care about the third and fourth of those points since I think we agree that the conclusion is dubious at best in each case. But for sure the context is different (e.g., one reason why people who think there’s no such thing as race or intelligence bother to say so is that there are other people saying: oh yes there are, and look, it turns out that this traditionally disadvantaged race to which I happen not to belong is less intelligent than this traditionally advantaged race to which I happen to belong; nothing like this is true for strength) and it seems like that makes a relevant difference. (E.g., your friend’s response to the comment about strength seems weirdly aggressive for no reason; in the case of a comment about race or intelligence, there’s at least an understandable reason why an otherwise reasonable person might be touchy about them.)
So no, I don’t think the situations are perfectly analogous, though they’re close. If we consider only the first kind of error, then the analogy is pretty good. And if you were making an explicit argument then that would be OK. But you aren’t; you’re presenting your parody arguments, and inviting readers to point and laugh and draw their own conclusions. And if one of the parody arguments is laughable for reasons that don’t correspond to defects in the arguments you’re parodying (e.g., because it depends on saying that there are lots of scientific articles out there saying that strength is purely a cultural construct) then you’re inviting readers to conclude that claims like “race isn’t real” and “intelligence isn’t real” for terrible reasons. It’s like dressing someone up in a clown costume, getting them to present an argument, and saying “wasn’t that silly?”. The argument may well be silly, but it will feel sillier than it is because of the clown suit.
I agree with 99.999% of what you say in this comment. In particular, you are right that the parody only works in the sense of the first of your bulleted points.
My only counterpoint is that I think this is how almost every reader will understand it. My whole post is an invitation to to consider a hypothetical in which people say about strength what they now say about intelligence and race.
If the context is so important, why did you wait until four comments deep in the nesting to bring it up?
Because that’s when something was said to which it was particularly relevant. (It’s not like anyone reading is likely to be unaware of that difference in context.)
Er, I realise that I am confused about #6. Its first paragraph seems like exactly the sort of thing someone might say about race, but then the second paragraph is pointing at a study concerned more with intelligence than with race (though it might have implications for inter-racial IQ comparisons).
Actually, it seems like an interesting study (though the press-release description at the other end of the link is a bit rubbish). What they did was to give (nonverbal) IQ tests to two culturally and racially different groups of people, along with lower-level and perhaps more objective tests of neurological functioning. Then they ran regressions to try to figure out what lower-level characteristics predict IQ scores in the two groups, and found that the results were quite different—suggesting that people in the two groups are attacking the IQ test problems in fundamentally different ways. I think this is the actual published study.
Of course, the state of psychology research being what it is, they did it with a total of 54 people, and if they did any actual statistical analysis of the difference in regression results between the Spanish and Moroccan subgroups beyond displaying some of the numbers and saying “look, they’re different!” then I haven’t found it. So I wouldn’t bet too heavily on it. But it’s suggestive, at least.
(I am not claiming that if it were correct it would demonstrate that either race or intelligence is unreal. It could be, e.g., that there are racial differences in how well people’s brains “choose” how to attack problems, and that this leads to systematic racial differences in cognitive ability. But prima facie it seems more likely that, as the researchers conjecture, these differences are a matter of culture and education more than of brain structure. If they’re real at all, of course.)