All posts by Robert M Ellis

About Robert M Ellis

Robert M Ellis is the founder of the Middle Way Society, and author of a number of books on Middle Way Philosophy, including the introductory 'Migglism' and the new Middle Way Philosophy series published by Equinox. A former teacher, he now runs a retreat centre in Wales, Tirylan House, and is in the process of creating a forest garden there.

Critical Thinking 16: Appeal to Ignorance

Critical Thinking, Objectivity training,

It’s over a year ago now since I let the ‘Critical Thinking’ series of blogs lapse (the last one being no. 15, the ‘Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy’). However, that wasn’t at all because I’d run out of interesting material to talk about. Inspired by work I’m doing at the moment on Critical Thinking issues and the David McRaney podcast, I thought it might be time to revive and continue this series. A full list of the previous instalments can be found here.

The Appeal to Ignorance is the claim that you can justify a belief as completely true or false just by pointing out a lack of information. It’s assumed that because we are ignorant about the evidence for or against a particular claim, it must therefore be true or false. An easy classic type of example would be the ‘Nessie Argument’:

Nobody has yet disproved the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. So the Loch Ness Monster must exist.Loch_Ness_Monster

This kind of example might be reasonably obvious to many people as fallacious. However, I am often astonished at how widespread and, indeed, institutionalised appeals to ignorance often are. The most common arguments for atheism, and for philosophical idealism, are usually based on an appeal to ignorance. Here’s an example of each:

The existence of God cannot be proved. All the supposed proofs of God’s existence, for example based on religious experience or design, are based on doubtful assumptions. So we must conclude that God does not exist.

The ultimate existence of material objects can never be proved, because all we have access to is our experience of those objects. Thus there can be no material objects out there, only minds and mental constructions.

These are also examples of what I have sometimes called ‘sceptical slippage’. People begin with a justifiable doubt about something, but then they turn that doubt into a negative claim, in many cases apparently not noticing that they have gone from one to the other. But the distinction between uncertainty and  negative claims is a large and important one with lots of practical implications. For example, those who go around stating that belief in God is ‘false’ cause a lot of unnecessary conflict that would probably not be created by those who merely point out that we don’t know whether or not God exists (especially when religions themselves often offer mystical perspectives that underline this point).

These sorts of examples show how important avoiding the appeal to ignorance is in Middle Way Philosophy. If we are to apply the Middle Way carefully and reflectively, we need to be willing to take a critical stance towards traditions that may be trying to avoid positive absolutes, but have failed to avoid negative absolutes after falling into an appeal to ignorance. That’s the thing that seems to divide Middle Way Philosophy from naturalism, which on most interpretations rejects the ‘supernatural’ as false because it is uncertain.

Like most such unjustified assumptions, the appeal to ignorance also potentially has an equally erroneous opposite: that is the assumption that due to ignorance we cannot make even provisional assertions. not only can we not justify absolute assertions based on ignorance (whether positive or negative), but we also cannot justify the avoidance of assertions. A degree of ignorance is our embodied state, but it’s only a degree of ignorance, not an absolute ignorance. We can always assert that based on our experience so far, subject to amendment from further experience, such-and-such is the case. For example, I can assert that the sun will rise tomorrow. I am not prepared for the rapidly plunging temperatures and planetary ruin that would occur if it didn’t, even though I can’t be absolutely certain. Practically speaking, I am justified in relying on that very high probability.

Exercise

Are these arguments guilty of an appeal to ignorance , or are they just taking our ignorance reasonably into account?

1. We don’t know when civilisation is going to fall apart, so we should all stockpile food and weapons to be ready for that eventuality.

2. We don’t know when the next outbreak of ebola will occur, and a worldwide pandemic has only been marginally headed off for now. Every child in the world should thus be given a vaccination against ebola.

3. You never know when a disabling virus is going to strike your computer. Back up all your files in at least two different places.

4. We don’t know for sure that the tooth fairy does not exist, so it’s quite OK to tell your children stories about the tooth fairy.

Appeals to Groups

Critical Thinking, Objectivity training, Psychology

Another video about groups! The timing of it coming out just after the previous one is just a coincidence. However, the approach in this one is a bit different, it being made as part of the ‘Mistakes we make in thinking’ series. The intended audience is wider, so it’s not framed in terms of Middle Way Philosophy but in terms of avoiding cognitive errors, drawing on psychology and critical thinking.

Breaking down the Walls of Fortress Europe

Current Affairs, Politics,

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should write something here about the refugee crisis that has been stirring up passions in the media and social media in Britain (and I suspect in Europe and the US too) in the last few weeks. I have been struck for some time by the dogmatic features of a lot of discussion about immigration (though not all), so what I really want to do here is just point out some of the dogmas that I think need to be avoided if we are trying to apply the Middle Way to the issue. Beyond a certain point, in such a complex issue, the Middle Way doesn’t give us specific answers to the dilemmas involved. Questions like exactly how many refugees to admit, how exactly they can be accommodated, or how to avoid encouraging criminal gangs from people-trafficking operations are all more detailed questions of policy on which I’m going to try to avoid being too prescriptive. Instead, I want to reflect on the effect of frontiers on our thinking

Syrian_refugees_in_lebanonNational frontiers are political absolutisations of differences in geography, history, language, culture, religion, ideology etc that would otherwise be incremental. If I travel overland from England to Mauritania, say, I will pass through only 3 other countries (France, Spain, and Morocco), and as I go the climate and culture will gradually but imperceptibly change. By the time I reach Mauritania I will be in a poverty-stricken, Islamic, desert land where slavery is still common: a starkly different place from England. However, since national boundaries in the Sahara are extremely difficult to police, and under the Schengen agreement France and Spain share an open zone, that whole difference has become concentrated at the Straits of Gibraltar (and to a lesser extent at Calais). There migrants and refugees try to scale the fences of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Mellila, just as they try to cross the sea between Libya and Italy or between Turkey and Greece. All European fear of the Other has become concentrated on those borders, with ‘home’ extended to one side of them and the Shadow lurking on the other side. The British tabloid newspapers have exacerbated this kind of reaction by using consistently negative or dehumanising language about the ‘swarms’ (a word used even by David Cameron) on the other side of it.

Whatever judgements we make need to avoid that absolutisation. Of course, when people of very different cultures are brought together (particularly when they have to share resources), difficulties of communication, adaptation and adjustment will follow. We can’t ignore that condition, but it is an incremental condition, a matter of degree. The ‘swarms’ on the other side of the wall not only share our basic humanity, but are like Europeans in lots of other ways too. Probably to list such ways would be patronising: anyone who has heard refugees interviewed on the media will have an impression of how much refugees are often not very different from us. Indeed, many people who have been refugees in the past are now settled citizens of Britain, the US, and other such countries.

It’s striking how the British tabloid Daily Mail, particularly, moved suddenly from dehumanising refugees to sympathising with their plight, after the shift in public mood that seems to have been triggered by pictures of drowned refugee children. But to blame them for that inconsistency (rather than for their previous negativity) is fallacious: we are all moved by such pictures, for we are embodied humans, not rational automata, and if those emotions help us to address conditions we were not previously addressing, that is helpful.

Frontiers also give us a sense of protective and egoistic ownership over ‘our’ land on this side of them, and this protectiveness can extend to worries about employment, the shortage of housing, and strain on welfare systems. But if we incrementalise such concerns, rather than absolutising them, we may be able to see them in better proportion: perhaps minor inconveniences or drops in service provision for us, and a major help to refugees. Perhaps if refugees did enter Britain in the kind of numbers they have been entering Turkey (where there are 1.9 million, according to UNHCR), we would see a noticeable increase in the strain on housing and welfare (employment is perhaps a different matter, as enterprising people can create their own jobs). But why should Turkey take that strain rather than Britain? How much difference would it really make to everyday life in Britain? Even if some British people would suffer to some extent in some ways, how would that suffering compare to the suffering of the refugees?

Yes, there are all sorts of practical difficulties that stand in the way of breaking down the walls of fortress Europe. I was in a local Green Party meeting the other day that brought some of those difficulties home to me: for example, currently a town in the UK that wants to host refugees will only be funded by central government for the first year to help the local authority meet their needs. Many councils are rejecting the prospect, because they fear that their overstretched budgets will be stretched still further by responsibilities for traumatised people that go on beyond that year. One can hardly blame local council officials, who have to make it all work, from being concerned about such points.

But we also need to keep in mind the big picture that such objectors neglect: that Europe cannot forever maintain a fortress policy. Exactly the same point applies to other developed countries, such as the US and Australia. How many refugees do there have to be, and how desperate do they have to be, before such policy becomes impossible to maintain? No border is absolute, not just in philosophical terms, but in terms of practical maintenance. If climate change produces a great many more refugees, as is often predicted, how will we deal with this? You cannot shut off a large portion of the world’s conditions behind a wall and pretend it is not your business – or if you do, you are engaging in repression, and that repression has a habit of springing back in the future with unexpected and often violent effects. Other social, economic and technological forces are also making the world more integrated, not less. It has been remarked that one of the drivers of the current wave of migration is the internet, where migrants can easily find out about their dreamed-of destinations.

How we precisely address these conditions is another matter. An open-door policy might actually produce a lot less conflict and suffering in the long-term. Of course we shouldn’t neglect the possibility of social conflict that might be created by such a policy. The details of where the right balance lies can only be worked out by those responsible, with all the practical information. But for those of us on the sidelines the general best policy seems clear: we need to work on the basis of the big picture, and that also means opening our hearts – not indulging our projected archetypal fears about the shadowy people on the other side of the border.

Picture: Syrian refugees in Lebanon (public domain)