Flo: What’s that you’re staring at



Analysis # 7

Directions: The following dialogue contains at least one of each of the following errors:

xAd hominem

xStraw Man

xExceptional Refutation

xWeak Reason

xWeak Principle

xInnuendo

xEquivocation

xWeak Comparison

xWeak Distinction

xRed Herring

Contradiction

Identify 10 of them. Identify only one of each type of error. Read the entire dialogue carefully to insure that you find the best example of each type of error. Type your identification below the passage in which the error occurs. Type each identification in bold face type. Be sure to follow the identification procedure for each error as precisely as possible. Incomplete identifications will get no credit.

Flo: What’s that you’re staring at? It almost looks like a book!

Innuendo: Flo suggests, without stating or implying, that Sly can’t read. This is obviously intended as a joke, but fits the logical form of innuendo because it is obvious that Sly can read, so it would be silly to make this claim explicitly.

Sly: Shut up. It is a book. It’s called Everything Bad is Good for You, by a guy named Steven Johnson. It’s really good. He shows how people who think that video games and TV shows are making us stupider don’t know what they are talking about.

Flo: Well, I’m sure you’re a sucker for that argument, since all you ever do is watch TV and play video games. You must come out smelling like a rose, which is a lot better than you smell right now. Jeez, do you ever take a shower?

Ad hominem: Although Sly has yet to produce any reasoning in favor of the book’s thesis, Flo undermines any future reasoning by claiming that the thesis is attractive to Sly because of his personal circumstances, specifically the fact that he likes video entertainment.

Sly: Tell me about it. I’m not proud of it. But I do think he’s right. Did you know that Americans are actually quite a bit smarter than they used to be? I never read this before, but it turns out that average IQ has been rising since they first started doing the tests in the early 1900’s. It doesn’t show up in the test scores themselves because the tests are always recalibrated to keep the average IQ at 100. They keep making the tests harder.

Flo: Wow, that’s not fair. I knew those IQ tests were bogus. I don’t believe people are getting smarter, though. They seem stupider than ever to me. Anyway, even if we are smarter I seriously doubt it’s from watching TV and playing video games. It’s probably because of rising affluence and access to education.

Weak principle: Flo concludes that IQ tests are unfair on the basis of the fact that they are adjusted to achieve a particular mean score. The principle here would be something like: If test X designed to measure property Y is adjusted to achieve outcome Z, then X is unfair. This principle has some legitimate applications, but it has far more exceptions, since many outcomes, like fairness, are what tests should be adjusted to achieve. In this case the desired outcome seems legitimate, since ones IQ is relative to the population.

Sly: That’s true. Johnson thinks TV is a significant part of it, though. What he points out is that if you go back and watch some of the old shows and movies from the 60’s and 70’s, the ones that everybody thinks of as classics, what strikes you is how really lame they are. Even classics like Dallas and The Rockford Files just have such obvious story lines. But now if you look at shows of recent years, like Seinfeld or The Sopranos or The West Wing or 24, there’s like five or six stories all going on at once, and you really have to pay attention or you’re just going to be lost. And think about cartoons. Take a ‘toon like The Simpsons and compare it to, say, The Flintstones. They’re like night and day. Homer is just as stupid as Fred, but the Simpsons is just way funnier, and it has all sorts of really intelligent allusions to politics and social problems. The Flinstones just has Barney and Fred bumbling around getting into stupid trouble. So Johnson thinks it’s just obvious that the general intellectual level of TV has gone way up.

Weak Comparison: Sly compares the Flintstones to the Simpsons, and then goes on to claim that the Simpsons is better. But the Flintstones and the Simpsons are aimed at different audiences and the conclusion that one is better than the other is weakened by the fact that Sly misapplies adult standards of entertainment to the children’s environment.

Flo: Well, I don’t buy it. Not all TV programs are like that, you know. How about Meet Your New Mommy and Funniest Home Pet Videos? They’re as idiotic as anything that was on TV twenty years ago, and way more disgusting. Anyway, what does he think? Should kids just quit doing their homework and watch TV instead?

Exceptional Refutation: Sly has claimed that contemporary TV is of a higher quality than TV from the past. Flo attempts to refute this by pointing out that there are some still some bad TV programs. However, these exceptions do not refute the generalization. Sly has not claimed that all contemporary programs are better.

Sly: Well, no, Flo, not exactly. Actually, he does think kids do too much homework. There’s really very little evidence that lots of homework is worthwhile. He makes an interesting distinction between two types of learning: explicit learning and collateral learning. He says when we read text books or watch documentaries we’re doing explicit learning, just downloading and organizing new information. But collateral learning is more like developing critical thinking skills. That’s what he says good TV and video games do. Obviously you don’t learn a whole lot about the real world playing a video game, but what you do learn is a lot of complex problem-solving skills. School is mainly about explicit learning, so maybe for some people a little more TV and a little less homework isn’t such a bad idea.

Flo: Right, does he realize that the average American household watches TV for 7 hours a day as it is? Come on Sly if you weren’t such a committed couch potato yourself you’d see the idea that TV is actually good for us for what it is: a load of crap. I’m sorry. I know this is mean, but just look at you. You’re at least 50 lbs overweight. Why? Because you never get any exercise! And that’s because you’re always sitting in front of the tube. Does your Mr.Johnson think that’s good for you?

Red Herring: Flow appears to be objecting to the claim that some people could benefit from more TV when she point out that most people already watch a lot of TV. The issue whether or not some people could benefit from more TV is not relevant to the issue whether or not most people should watch less TV.

Equivocation: Flo equivocates on the term “good”. Sly and Johnson claim that TV is good for people in the sense of being good for their intellectual development. Flo claims this is not the case, but does so by using the term “good” in reference to overall well-being or physical health.

Sly: Well, no, my Mr. Johnson doesn’t think that.

Flo: Gross Sly. This guy claims that complicated fantasy TV shows help us to be better problem solvers, but how much good is that if all we end up wanting to solve is problems in a fantasy world? How about figuring out how to solve real problems, like keeping our kids off drugs or our armies from going off and brutalizing other countries for no good reason?

Sly: That’s a good rant, Flo. You haven’t lost your touch. Too much of anything is bad for you. It’s not like he’s saying TV will solve all the world’s problems.

Straw Man: Sly is actually criticizing Flo’s view as a straw man, but he does this by creating a straw man of Flo’s view as well. His comment suggests that Flo’s interpretation of Johnson’s view is that TV will solve all the world’s problems. She is just pointing out that there are some problems that it will not only solve, but perhaps make worse.

Flo: I admit it does get me worked up. And I guess I see some good points, there. I mean I have to admit I really don’t have any real experience with video games. I like traditional games, like poker and chess. But I actually do enjoy playing those on the computer. Chessmaster can give me any level of opponent and it can teach me all sorts of stuff that I might never learn if I were playing a human. But in the end its still chess, the same game they’ve been playing for a couple of thousand years. I mean, I see you in there playing that Grand Theft Auto for hours at a time, and it just looks so violent and retarded. Even the name is really offensive, I think. I could have sworn I saw you feeding some guy into a wood chipper last night.

Sly: Hehehehe. You saw that? You should try it sometime. GTA is actually one of Johnson’s favorite examples of a complex game. I like chess, too, but I like GTA better because it offers an entirely different dimension than chess or any other traditional board game. A lot of the adrenalin rush comes from the fantasy of being a criminal, and that is a cheap thrill, I admit. But the game is just way more complicated than chess. And what makes it harder is that there really aren’t any explicit rules. You can read book-length descriptions about the whole GTA environment, but as far as figuring out how to play, you’re pretty much on your own. When stuff happens, you have to develop hypotheses about why it happens. It’s totally realistic, scientific even. In old-fashioned board games like Battleship or Monopoly you just sit down before you play and read a short list of unambiguous rules. But in a game like GTA there isn’t really a rule book at all. You just have to start playing and you learn your lessons on the fly. Kind of like life. You really can learn a lot about life from playing a fantasy game.

Weak Distinction: Sly makes a legitimate distinction between GTA and Chess by claiming that Chess has a set of explicit rules and GTA does not. From this he concludes that GTA is harder than Chess. The presence or absence of an explicit set of rules does not seem relevant to establishing the difficulty of the game, though it may be relevant to establishing the difficulty of grasping how to play the game.

Flo: OK, I can see that, but still it’s just so gross to me. I mean being an actual criminal life is really complicated and challenging, too. But it’s wrong. And fantasizing about it is wrong, too. I mean does this guy know what the Columbine kids spent extra time doing? Jerking off and playing violent video games, that’s what. I know, people like you will say fantasy is one thing and reality is another and everyone knows the difference. But not everyone does know the difference. Those little shits sure didn’t. And I think the more time people spend playing these games the less they even care about the difference. What goes on in their fantasy games becomes more important to them, more ‘real’ in a way, than reality itself. I mean it’s perfectly plausible to me that people like that would feel worse about blowing away some fantasy character in a video game than they would a real person. Does Johnson think that’s all just to the greater good?

Weak Reason: Flo explains the behavior of the Columbine shooters by claiming that they didn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. This reason is weak insofar it is hard to understand how they could plot to kill real people based on their alleged hatred for these people if they didn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality.

Sly: Yeah, he thinks it’s just wonderful. You’re the one who is losing touch with reality now.

Flo: OK, maybe so. So, does he hate books, too? That would be an irony.

Sly: No, he doesn’t hate them. But he does say something interesting about them. Listen, I was just reading this:

Reading books chronically under stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of game playing—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. . . . But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . .This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.

Flo: What in the hell is he talking about?

Sly: He’s imagining what people would say about books if video games had been invented first. You always have traditionalists who think a new technology is the end of the world. In fact, there was a time when people did see the book that way. They thought books were just going to weaken people’s minds because they people would come to rely on them rather than their own memories. And they were right. But what they didn’t realize is that books would ultimately set our minds free to explore the world rather than just slavishly memorize a bunch of stories our ancestors made up about it.

Flo: I’m tired. What’s on TV?

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KEY

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