Rhetorica:
The Arrest of the
Mad Hatter
By Gabriel Blanchard
Learning to think rationally can be counterintuitive; at times, one almost feels like Alice astray in Wonderland. Are there no limits to the strangeness of the world?
Lumen dē Lumine1
For a little more than a month, we have been discussing the three rhetorical appeals, the three varieties of comprehension and persuasion that rhetoric has at its disposal. We addressed the two varieties of ēthos (intellectual and moral) shortly before Easter. We analyzed pathos thereafter, both in general terms that distinguish the rhetorical appeal from the logical fallacy, and also in terms of the more specialized roles played by individual emotions, understood as lying along a spectrum from cold to hot.
What then of logos? We have our Brain Manual series, of course, prefaced (or supplemented) by our series on informal fallacies; those are indexed here. But that addresses only the subject of deductive logic. What is inductive logic, and more importantly, is it any good?
The answers are as follows. As for what induction is, it is a complement to deduction. Deduction reasons from first principles about what can possibly be true, and therefore leads to necessarily correct conclusions, provided it is furnished with correct premises and all its rules are rigorously followed; the trouble with it is, it’s hard to establish that premises are correct if they’re broad enough to deductively prove much. Induction, on the other hand, generalizes from particulars. If this claimed the same kind of validity as deduction, that would be a fallacy, but it doesn’t need to do that. However, at this point, we may find ourselves interrupted by
Shadow People3
To proceed with our discussion of induction, we must first deal with people who are not only ghastly nerds (scholars of the humanities), and not only the second-worst kind of such nerds (the sort who study philosophy,4 on purpose), but the very dregs of these people: epistemologists.
"Twopence a week, and jam every other day."
Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said "I don't want you to hire me—and I don't want jam. ... I don't want any to-day, at any rate."
"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day."
"It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day'," Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
Epistemology is the study of how we know things, from a philosophical point of view (as distinct from disciplines like neurology and psychiatry, which examine the physical systems our bodies use to “store” knowledge). Over classical antiquity and the medieval period, ontology, or the study of being itself, was viewed as the beating heart of philosophy; epistemology was not without its controversies, but it gradually coalesced around theories of knowledge based ultimately in the writings of Aristotle and Plato. With Descartes, however, the focus shifted. His philosophy of radical doubt, pursued in the name of establishing unassailable certainties, may have settled his own mind, but there have not been many pure Cartesians since; in any case, epistemology moved to the center, where it has remained since—great minds like Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Wittgenstein, Lyotard, and more have continued to put it there (though a noteworthy minority, including the late Mortimer Adler and possibly Alfred North Whitehead, would have preferred to restore the crown to ontology). But of all these, the villain of today’s piece is the eighteenth-century skeptical empiricist David Hume.
It’s grimly amusing, in a way, that Hume composed his philosophy when he did. The modern sciences were finally taking shape, and the notion of scientific proof through experiment—a rigorous application of a certain form of induction—was being settled (particularly in the fields of physics and chemistry, thanks to the work of Pascal, Boyle, Newton, and others). For he highlighted what is called the problem of induction in philosophy, especially the investigation of causes: Namely, the fact that something has happened in the past does not mean it will happen in the future. This is part of the broader fact that any two things which have one similarity need not be similar in other ways—they might have only one similarity. And when you come to think it, this is actually quite a disturbing thought. Is there any particular reason to suppose, just because the sun has come up every previous morning of your life, that it will come up tomorrow morning? Suppose, like the Mad Hatter, you somehow offended Time, and were trapped in a perpetual 4:00 p.m.? How do you know you haven’t?
Go To Jail
This line of thinking, if “produced” in the geometric sense, would eventually rob us of the capacity for object permanence. Any who wish to dismantle their own intellects as completely as that will doubtless find some way or other to do so; it is (in the present author’s opinion) a great pity that some of them wish to use the halls of Academe to bash their heads in, but, if they cannot be stopped, at any rate they need not be listened to. Hume’s basic point—that induction is not watertight—can most certainly be allowed. It ought at times even to be insisted upon, as the use induction in large quantities can produce an intoxicated state of excessive overconfidence. But the fact that “object permanence” is shorthand for a human ability, not a school of thought, seems sufficiently to show that human beings either live in a world where induction is both possible and necessary, or are creatures for whom it is both possible and necessary. Best get used to it.
1This phrase, which in Latin means “light2 of/from/out of light,” appears in the Nicene Creed as part of the definition of the Second Person of the Trinity. As an analogy for the relation between the Father and the Son, the image of “one lamp lit from another” (the idea being to show that this involves no diminution of the light) goes still further back in Christian writings, e.g. appearing in the second-century theologian St. Justin Martyr.
2Note that lumen appears here rather than lūx. Lūx means light as a “stuff”; lumen signifies a light, as in a light source, like a lamp. Both words could be used metaphorically, in which case the distinction becomes subtle and easily confused in some contexts; but sometimes the difference in wording can be very useful. The distinction in English between “people” and “persons” is usually negligible, but it can mean something—which is why it would sound funny to talk about “the right to self-determination of the Kurdish persons,” for example.
3Alternatively, you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, etc.
4The very worst, needless to say, are Classicists.
A graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, with a degree in Classics, Gabriel Blanchard serves as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
Congratulations to our Catholic readers on the selection of the new Pope, Leo XIV. If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like our series on “the Great Conversation,” which of necessity has long had lots of induction in. Thank you for reading the Journal.
Published on 8th May, 2025. Today’s page image and author thumbnail both come from John Tenniel’s illustrations for the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865); they depict the Mad Tea-Party and the Cheshire Cat, respectively.