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

By: washerdreyer

washerdreyer — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Checking if I followed your argument:
If I (hypothetically a major pundit) were to say, “Kerry would have won the election if he had announced that he would perform mass homosexual marriages in the White House once a week.”
And you retort, “According to my very intensive polling, not a single person who voted for Bush would have changed their mind due to such an announcement, 10% of the people who did vote for Kerry would have defected, all non-major party voters would have either stayed with the candidate they voted for or voted for Bush, and exactly three people who didn’t vote at all would have voted for Kerry.”
I can truthfully reply, “Your retort is totally irrelevant to the truth conditions of my previous statement.”
Doesn’t this make pundits totally irrefutable for any statement they make about what a candidate or party should do. If not, what events or facts would refute them?

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=illocutionary

No entry found for illocutionary.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Robert,

Try this:
illocutionary force

Sorry for the philosophy of language lingo.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +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 — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

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

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +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: monkyboy

monkyboy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +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: washerdreyer

washerdreyer — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +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: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +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: Gareth

Gareth — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

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

By: washerdreyer

washerdreyer — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +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: Blar

Blar — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +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: The Great Whatsit

The Great Whatsit — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

The pudit’s fallacy and the creation of new realities

My old roommate Will Wilkinson has been having an exchange with Matt Yglesias about the so-called “Pundit’s Fallacy,” which is when a pundit offers her favorite policy proposal as a solution to a political problem. (Will’s example is a narwal-loving pu…

By: The Bellman

The Bellman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

Is the Pundit’s Fallacy a fallacy?

In a word, yes. But Will Wilkinson doesn’t think so.

“The pundit’s fallacy,” Will writes, “putatively occurs when a pundit sets forth his own preferences