The invincible dogma is based of a fallacy | Eastern North Carolina Now

    In another life I taught School Law. Most of the students were educators, preparing themselves to be education administrators. After teaching the course a couple of times it became very clear to me that most of my students had never been taught how to reason. So I revised the course. The first chapter became "Legal Research," which was what it sounds like...how to find the law. The second chapter was "Legal Reasoning," which was a focus on how to apply logic to analyzing the law once it had been found.

    One of the topics in Legal Reasoning was "Fallacies." I introduced it by defining a fallacy as a conclusion that while often supported by competent evidence/facts was nonetheless either untrue or contrary to the evidence/facts. I introduced this by suggesting that "just because something appears to be true does not necessarily mean that it is true." The typical technique I used in teaching these concepts was to present a set of facts and then apply the Socratic Method of posing questions that ideally would ultimately lead the student to draw a true conclusion on their own via sound reasoning.

    Final exam results showed that consistently students did more poorly on this topic than any other. They typically did better on Legal Research (something that could be memorized and required very little reasoning.) The worst performance (theirs or mine) was turned in on Fallacies. I have often pondered why that was true and have never reached a satisfactory conclusion that I think sufficiently explains why so many really bright people (these students statistically ranked in the top 5% of the population) simply could not grasp the concept of fallacies.

    For example, because they were educators I used this illustration of a fallacy (remember, they are being told upfront it is a fallacy). Here's the proposition: "white students are brighter than black students as witnessed by their academic performance." The evidence presented was a myriad of statistics that showed that high student performance on generally accepted indicators of educational achievement was positively correlated with race. That is, numerous statistical studies have shown that the average reading and math scores of nearly any randomly selected group of students was higher for white students than for black students. Similarly, the average score of entire schools tended to be higher the lower the percentage of black students compared to schools that were predominately black. The same was true of dropout rates. Studies of average SAT scores...ditto.

    It was interesting to watch the facial expression and body language as we waded through such statistics. But then came the test, and the point. The question was then asked: "Is the proposition a fallacy or is it a true conclusion?"

    Then came the difficult part. Whichever answer you chose (true or false) defend it by refuting the statistical evidence or proving it to be true.

    Over the years it was interesting to see how the students responded. An overwhelming number responded with a right-brained conclusion. That is, they came to a conclusion (true or false) based on emotional reasoning rather than logic. That was almost always true of the minority students over many classes.

    If you're interested, I still recall the best answer I felt I ever got. It was: "The conclusion (that whites are smarter than blacks) is false because of the fallacy of The Average. On average most people, black or white, are not average." Exactly. The real fallacy was the premise that statistics accurately revealed the true differences. Thus, the conclusion based on false statistical analysis is inherently false.

    Let me illustrate. While there is a correlation between educational performance and race, there is a much higher correlation between educational performance and father's income, regardless of race. Ditto the educational attainment of either or both parents. And here's another interesting statistic: Students of Asian ethnicity do even better than whites, on average. (If you're interested in what I think that shows, it is the effect of parental and peer expectations).

    But all this reasoning was typically lost on the students who employed emotional reasoning to reach their conclusion. I was often accused of being a racist because of this exercise. Consider the irony of that. What I was teaching was an intellectual method of refuting racism but the propensity to blame racism for an uncomfortable, yet false, perception prevented many students from coming to a truthful conclusion.

    Think about how wasteful such reasoning is in our society. Far too many of us can't see the truth for our biases.

    We have seen just this affliction in the Trayvon Martin case. Trayvon Martin's death is a terrible tragedy. But many more black young men are killed by other black young men than by whites. But far too many don't see the tragedy of black on black crime because of an emotional bias.

    And while it must await another day, the exact same argument can be made, correctly I believe, about the malady of "political correctness" that is so pervasive in our society today.

    Dr. Thomas Sowell, in his April 3, 2012 column in Town Hall.com makes the same point about the fallacies inherent in using statistics to assess racial discrimination. Click here to read Dr. Sowell's superb reasoning .

    And if you want yet another example of a fallacy do a search of our archives on this site for: "Racial Justice Act." Fallacious reasoning is now state policy.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.