Arguing from the Extremes

There is a very common type of fallacious reasoning that I have termed arguing from the

extremes. Once you see this, you’ll notice that it’s everywhere in our society and especially political discourse. Roughly speaking it’s the idea that one or an extremely small number of counter examples disproves a whole theory. This is simply not how to do good reasoning. If you see x follow y 1,000 times you will rightly conclude that there is some type of causal link between x and y. If on try 1,001, x does not follow y, that should give you pause, but it shouldn’t prompt you to conclude that your established theory (x follows y) needs to be completely thrown out.[1] That would be stupid. But a lot of people do reason like this.

So for example, it has been widely demonstrated in social science data that children with both a mother and a father present in the home do better in life. The fallacious example of arguing from the extremes would be to counter that this cannot be true because you know a person raised by both a mother and father who turned out to be a con-artist, and you also know a man raised by a single mother who founded and runs a multi-million-dollar company. This is a fallacious objection because it is treating the theory as if it were a deductive argument. One genuine counter example proves that something is wrong with a deductive argument. Conversely theories are much more akin to inductive arguments which simply say what is likely to be true, or what is true more often than not. As Nicholas Rescher says, “our acceptance policy is based on considerations of overall best-fit, where the fit at issue is one of consonance and coordination with our prevailing commitments.”[2]  

 So if I argue that far more often than not it is better for children to be raised by both a mother and a father, a few counter examples do not in any way undermine that argument. Or the existence of seemingly genuinely intersexed people does not undermine a theory of gender that says that human beings are male or female.[3] Estimates of the number of people who claim to be transgender vary, but seem to fall between a high of 0.7% and a low of 0.39%. Even assuming that all the reported instances of transgenderism are accurate (none of the people involved are confused, lying, suffering from mental problems, etc) which seems very unlikely, that still gives us a more than 99% correlation between biological sex and gender.[4] If the correlation was this high for anything else we would call people insane and stupid for challenging it. And yet this is only the people who make the trans-claim. The number of actually intersexed people is significantly smaller still. Reasonable people can disagree about how big a number would be a genuine challenge, but it certainly needs to be higher than 1%. Nonetheless many people make this fallacious appeal and claim that we need to throw out the traditional and historical understanding of human beings as male or female. An anomaly or error factor of less than 1% does not establish this. This is simply bad reasoning, as Timothy McGrew illustrates with an example from the philosophy of science, “This point tells against a naive form of falsificationism according to which even the slightest mismatch between theory and evidence suffices to overturn a theory. But it is a grave exaggeration to claim, as some social constructivists have done, that the existence of an interpretive dimension to scientific inference undermines the objectivity of science.”[5]

No reasonable and serious thinker would or should attempt to argue that because there are children born with birth defects such as missing limbs that we should then conclude that it is normal, fine, and even good for a person to have missing limbs. Likewise, just because there are some people who are born seemingly genuinely intersexed it does not follow that this is normal or good.

And this type of bad reasoning is everywhere in our society. Someone proposes a new law, system or idea that will help people or address a problem. Opponents do an analysis of it and find out that it will ignore or even hurt a small amount of people. They then claim that the whole thing is a terrible idea because it will hurt a small amount of people. But virtually everything that human societies do will ignore or hurt at least a small amount of people. For example, I use the VA health care system. Reworking the VA likely would cause problems for me and other veterans; however, it might also cause it to run better and more effectively. The balance of problems vs effectiveness is an empirical question that can be answered, but it’s quite likely that even if on balance reworking the VA is a good thing, it will still cause problems for me and other veterans. It doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t do it just because of those problems. Perhaps the good of the reworking outweighs those problems.

People do this all the time with abortion as well wherein they point to very rare and extreme examples to justify their positions. This is done because those examples are so extreme that they invoke emotional responses that cloud judgement and make it harder to see the error. Anti-war protesters often do the same thing. They find an emotionally heartbreaking example of a civilian (usually a child) who was killed in the fighting and start harping on about how the whole war is terrible. War is terrible, but depending on who is fighting and why, peace might be even worse. Further are the civilians being deliberately targeted? Did the military forces act negligently? Or is the civilian’s death a rare thing and reasonable steps were taken to avoid it? If it’s the latter, this is arguing from an extreme. It’s just naive and stupid reasoning to argue, “some civilians/children died, therefore the war must be abandoned.” Sometimes, but not always, young earth creationists will do this too. They will point to the rare instances wherein a dating method gave odd, contradictory, or clearly false results and then argue the whole method must be flawed. But this is the same style of bad reasoning as it ignores the numerous other times the method worked.

So here’s the point. You have a theory or idea that has met a fairly high standard. Say it seems to work 999 out of 1,000 times. Someone doesn’t like your idea and starts harping on and whining about the 1 out of a 1,000 saying, “See this proves it doesn’t work.” No, it doesn’t. Almost nothing humans do works 100% of the time. An error factor of 1 out of 1,000 is astonishingly good. That’s arguing from the extremes and it’s stupid reasoning that’s usually covered up by highly provocative and emotional examples. So watch out for people doing this and don’t do it yourself.[6]

[1] I know David Hume claimed that that one time over a thousand proved induction doesn’t work. But Hume was wrong and foolish as he contradicted himself regularly and rejecting induction is a standard that even Hume admitted he could not live up to.

[2] Nicholas Rescher, “Philosophy as Rational Systematization,” in “The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology,” eds. Søren Overgaard and Giuseppina D’Oro. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 37.

[3] Here I mean people who have something off with their genetics and/or body such that they display the standard traits of both male and female. It’s quite rare, but it does happen. This is distinct from transpeople who claim to be the other a gender other than what their body manifests.

[4] Ian T Nolan, Christopher J. Kuhner, and Gelani W. Dy. “Demographic and temporal trends in transgender identities and gender confirming surgery,” Translational Andrology and Urology 8, no. 3 (Jun 2019), 184-190. Since this source is from seven years ago it’s possible the number is higher now, but the point still stands.

[5]Timothy McGrew, “Evidence” in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, eds. Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard, 58-67, (New York: Routledge, 2011), 63.

[6] Some of this article was taken from essays I’ve presented at both the Evangelical Philosophical Society and the Society for Pentecostal Studies.