Sorting Through Sophistries:
Dishonesty in Detail
By Gabriel Blanchard
Fortune-tellers claim to divine secrets from kings, jokers, and knaves; but what is the real source of their information? And for that matter, is it information?
Cold Reading
As we have touched on a few times in this series (such as in our two-parter on different sorts of appeals to ignorance or our post on the Dunning-Kruger effect), the power to recognize sophistries for what they are is not only a form of intellectual amusement or a benefit in debate club, but an important practical skill. The same is true here, albeit somewhat in reverse.
The following tricks of reasoning are common parts of the carnival fortune-teller’s show (the whole outfit being known as cold reading to mentalists, mediums, and other confidence artists); however, they appear in argument and philosophical discussion as well, and are none the better for it. The goal of cold reading techniques in general is to secure the cooperation of the target in being fooled—and, in the nastier sort of con,* exploited, usually for money. Speaking of which …
Morton’s Fork
Morton’s fork is named for English Cardinal John Morton, a chancellor of England under King Henry VII. On his death in the year 1500, a chronicler noted that, though brilliant, he was hated by the commoners; apparently, this was at least partly because they believed (correctly or not) that Morton was to blame for reviving the extremely unpopular tactic of benevolences.** This was an official “request” for contributions to the crown, typically with some rationale for the good of the realm, like planning a war. Allegedly, Cardinal Morton was the author of a famously effective rationale which came to be known as “Morton’s fork.”
It took the form of a false dilemma that made wealth and want into pretexts for donation. Mystery writer Josephine Tey summarized it thus: “You can’t be spending much so how about something for the King; you’re spending so much you must be very rich so how about something for the King”.† This distinguishes it a little from other types of false dilemma. They normally operate by feigning to limit the available options; instances of Morton’s fork instead find some route by which to direct every option toward the same result. C. S. Lewis, in the guise of a devil, suggests just such an argument as a way to muddle a human mind:
You can worry him with the haunting suspicion that the practice is absurd and can have no objective result. … If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and “therefore it would have happened anyway,” and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective. (The Screwtape Letters, XXVII)
The Magician’s Choice
Similar in style, though different in underlying mechanism, is the technique of the magician’s choice. This tactic’s name comes from sleight-of-hand tricks with playing cards, and conceals the extent to which the magician is controlling the elements of the illusion—in fact, it seems to transfer that control to a spectator.
PALLAS. You have money in corn. I have money in corn. Lots of people have money in corn. The more corn that can be landed in winter, the lower the price will be. That worries me.
NARCISSUS. That could be construed as a very selfish point of view.
PAL. Are you saying there is less selfishness in wanting the price of corn to be low rather than high?
NAR. There are more people who want it to be low!
PAL. Doesn't that add up to more selfishness rather than less?
It goes like this. In the course of a trick, the magician lays out, say, two face-down cards, and invites a spectator to choose one. The spectator points to the card on the right; the magician discards it, placing the other card on top of the deck and proceeding with the trick, which duly concludes with the amazement of the onlookers generally. However, while performing the same trick on a different occasion, when he invites a new spectator to choose one of the two cards, this spectator points to the card on the left—at which the magician puts that card on top of the deck and discards the un-chosen card, yet then proceeds to the same impressive conclusion.
The secret lies in the fact that the magician is not actually giving the spectator a choice in how the trick will proceed. All he has told the spectator to do is to “pick one”—not to decide what will be done with it, which is the only thing that affects how the sleight of hand operates. Obviously the form of a “magician’s choice” is practical; intellectually, it is closely allied with equivocation.
But enough about carnivals and magicians! Let’s talk now about something wholesome that’s just what it seems to be, like the circus shows of P. T. Barnum.‡
Barnum Statements
First studied scientifically in the 1940s, Barnum statements sound meaningful at first blush, and can give the impression of being highly personalized, but in truth apply to a large majority of people. In 1947, Ross Stagner, a professor at Michigan’s Wayne State University, asked a group of personnel managers to take a personality test and then rate the profile he gave them in response; a majority of them rated it as accurate. The twist? The “response” had no connection to their results at all: Stagner had simply assembled broad personality descriptions from sources like graphologists§ and newspaper horoscopes. Dr. Bertram Forer got similar results in an experiment with—or more exactly, on!—his students the next year. The supposedly individual profiles his students received (which were in truth identical) contained insights like the following:
- You have a great need for other people to admire and like you.
- While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
- At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
- You pride yourself as an independent thinker.
- At times you are extraverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
Profound. Of course, one reason Barnum statements tend to be so effective is that they appeal to—well, in fact, to our need to be admired and liked! Reread those bullets; do any of them say anything flatly negative? Even the second, which feigns to be about flaws, first gives them the gentler name “weaknesses” and then implies they don’t really do any harm. In other words, Barnum statements don’t just disguise the generic as personal; they flatter. Almost nothing motivates our cognition as well as wanting something to be true.
*Some readers may be puzzled by the implication that there is a less nasty sort of con. But it is possible to perform tricks of this type for mere entertainment, without professing abnormal abilities.
**Other, equally Orwellian names for a benevolence were “free gift” and “loving contribution.”
†This summation appears in Tey’s 1951 novel The Daughter of Time. Besides its interest for mystery fans, The Daughter of Time showcases unusually sound principles for conducting historical research.
‡This isn’t a fallacy—just good old-fashioned sarcasm. Whether or not P. T. Barnum really said “There’s a sucker born every minute,” his shows were notorious for exaggerated advertising and hoaxes.
§Graphology is the belief that the style of a person’s handwriting reveals aspects of their psychology; it is considered a pseudoscience. Alarmingly, graphology remains in the arsenal of some criminal profilers—a profession that itself, although widespread in law enforcement, relies on assumptions and techniques that professional psychologists have considered discredited for decades.
Gabriel Blanchard (or is he?)
Thank you for supporting CLT. If you’d like to read more from the Journal, take a look at our introductions to great authors like Hesiod, St. Augustine, Marie de France, Frederick Douglass, and G. K. Chesterton, or to great ideas like courage, language, punishment, and the world.
Published on 18th July, 2024. Page image by Willi Heidelbach, courtesy of Pixabay.