One of the longstanding questions about plagiarism is one with which many First Things readers might be quite familiar, at least indirectly: plagiarism in homiletics. The advent of the printing press made sermon publication very easy and, at the same time, delivering a sermon written by someone else very easy. So if someone does this and does not attribute it to the original source, and if we take “plagiarism” to mean “morally problematic copying without attribution,” does this count as plagiarism? I’m inclined to think there is nothing problematic about it, because homilies are not an area of life in which originality is especially important, but you can easily find people on both sides of the issues today.

You could also find people on both sides of the issue in the eighteenth century, when large-scale publication of sermon series began to take off. One person who had to deal with the question directly was Laurence Sterne. Sterne often gave other people’s sermons, and his own published series of sermons includes a great many that are clearly other people’s sermons reworked to various degrees. He was criticized for it, and this is probably what led to what is arguably the most famous literary passage on plagiarism ever: Volume 5, Chapter 1 of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman attacks plagiarism in words that are themselves plagiarized from Richard Burton.

I’ve often thought myself that we would do better to stop thinking in terms of whether something counts as plagiarism and instead consider the underlying reasons why it’s problematic. There is no reason to think that what is problematic in one field will be problematic in another, and, indeed, reason to think that this will often not be the case. Copying becomes problematic when things like money and reputation are on the line; that is, it becomes troubling when it can endanger the incentive structure of the field in question. There are, however, many fields where copying does not do this. Nobody cares whether laws have original language or not; we so take for granted that politicians don’t write their own speeches that we are surprised when they do; and entire fields of folk art are based on swapping ideas in ways entirely inconsistent with any concern for plagiarism.

In any case, my view is a stronger view than most people usually accept; more people are likely to take the approach that Clark, following Richard Posner, takes. Whatever one’s view, it does seem that we need to think more critically about what we are actually criticizing when we talk about plagiarism, and why.

(1) Scouting as the Boy Scouts conceive it structurally involves at least a very minimal theism.

Policies like those governing rank requirements and eligibility for being a scoutmaster are easily changed, but the very conception of Scouting on which the organization is based is another matter entirely. The Boy Scouts of America have always seen themselves as the legitimate representatives in the United States of the pure Scouting movement, as originally concevied by Robert Baden-Powell.

Robert Baden-Powell, who was the son of the liberal theologian Baden Powell, explicitly developed Scouting to teach boys brotherhood under God. It was intended to be an educational movement suitable to a British Empire united not by blood or race but by ideals, among which were that of a moral order involving respect for God, whatever else one might think about God. The early founders of the Boy Scouts of America, who were mostly deists or liberal Protestants themselves, made this particular element of Baden-Powell’s vision even more central to their organization.

(2) Even the Girl Scouts handle this question in a relatively conservative way.

Contrary to popular belief, Girl Scouts of the United States of America is not the sister organization of Boy Scouts of America. It is the exact opposite: the only successful rival organization. The sister organization for Boy Scouts of America was Camp Fire Girls. The Boy Scouts spent much of their early history unsuccessfully trying to eliminate the Girl Scouts by legal attack and social pressure.

In other words, the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts have radically different organizations, with distinct visions of Scouting, and much less commonality than their names might imply. Most of what they do have in common are simply things they both independently took over from Baden-Powell. One of the consistent differences between the two is that the Boy Scouts have always been a much more conservative organization; even on moves that have widespread support, the Boy Scouts will often lag anywhere from ten to thirty years behind the Girl Scouts. Part of this is due to the fact that the Girl Scouts have always had a more unified and centralized structure, and part is due to the fact that the Boy Scouts are built on a much more conservative vision of what a Scouting movement should be. The Girl Scouts have always prided themselves on being ahead of the game on social issues; it is for them one of the things Scouting is about.

So what has the Girl Scout position been on this particular point? In 1993 the Girl Scouts voted to allow members to avoid using the word ‘God’ in the Girl Scout Promise. This was sometimes presented in news outlets as opening up the Girl Scouts to atheists. However, as often happens, quite a bit of nuance was dropped in these reports. The actual decision re-affirms that God is important for the organization’s vision of Scouting. The traditional Girl Scout promise is still the expected default, and Girl Scouts cannot simply drop the “To serve God” part of the Promise.

What the Girl Scouts decided was that if the girl in question believed in something that allowed for the same traditional Scouting function of religious education — religious and spiritual self-cultivation based on the principle of a moral order of which the Scout can be a part — she could substitute her preferred name for that instead of using the word “God.”

This is a very conservative change, entirely consistent with Baden-Powell’s original vision. The Boy Scouts still require one to use the word “God” in the Boy Scout Oath, but their substantive position has never been very far from this. You don’t have to understand the word “God” in any particular way for it to count. It is entirely possible, and has always been possible, to be an atheist as a Boy Scout, if you can accept the basic idea of a moral something-or-other to which we should hold ourselves accountable, as long as you are comfortable calling it God at least as a metaphor. It has long been established that you can be a polytheist, a pantheist, or a believer in God as an “ideal”; none of these stand in the way of membership.

At-least-metaphorical theism is a very weak commitment. All the Girl Scouts did was loosen up the requirement that you actually call it “God,” which was the smallest possible change they could make. If the Girl Scouts are still being that conservative, the Boy Scouts are not even close to a change.

(3) The World Organization of Scouting Movements stands in the way of any sudden change.

There’s a good explanation for why the Girl Scouts are so much more conservative on this point than they usually are, if you don’t accept the explanation that they really do take their original conception of Scouting seriously. The Girl Scouts have to remain part of the world Scouting movement, which for them means maintaining their position in the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. Membership requires maintaining the key elements of Baden-Powell’s original vision, as encapsulated in the Scout Promise and Scout Law. Making any more drastic change in their position than they did would have put them in clear danger of violating the requirements. For that matter, even the change they did make was very controversial for precisely this reason.

The counterpart of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts for the Boy Scouts is the World Organization of the Scout Movement. It also requires members to base themselves on the value system in the Scout Promise and the Scout Law. The Boy Scouts are even more unlikely than the Girl Scouts to put itself in danger of doing anything that could put into question its membership in its world Scouting organization.

To sum up: Until the World Organization of the Scout Movement drops its current requirements and the Girl Scouts stop insisting that they still think duty to God-or-something-just-like-God is essential to Scouting, I wouldn’t bet on the Boy Scouts making any significant changes here. It is a much more difficult change to make than just deciding who can be a scoutmaster.

The U.S. Constitution gives the president the power “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment,” and at least several of the Founding Fathers thought that such a power was important to the usual and normal order of government. Laws tend naturally to severity because they cannot take into account circumstances. A government deriving its authority from the people, however, needs to have a built-in recognition that circumstances do sometimes matter, even if the law does not account for them. In the words of James Wilson, “Citizens, even condemned citizens, may be unfortunate in a higher degree, than that, in which they are criminal.” Taking this into account is one of the ways in which a government can make clear that law exists for the good of the people rather than the reverse.

President Obama has to date issued twenty-two pardons and one commutation of sentence. This is extraordinarily stingy. There was not a single pardon or commutation for the 2012 year, unless you count the Thanksgiving turkeys. The president has only issued pardons on three occasions. His clemency grant rates are extraordinarily low.

Much of the problem lies in the system itself, which is clumsy, slow, and excessively tied to the vagaries of the Office of the Pardon Attorney. The current (Bush-appointed) U.S. Pardon Attorney, Ronald L. Rodgers, has been reviewed by the Office of the Inspector General, which had some sharp things to say about him. There are accusations of severe racial disparities in the clemency process, which the DOJ is gearing up to investigate.

We are well beyond this just being a case of hardened criminals denied their applications. Most people who apply for pardon have already served their sentence, and are only applying in order to have certain rights restored. In many cases these were for minor felony cases long ago. Robert Lee Foster, one of the successful applicants during the Obama administration, was a Vietnam veteran and outstanding citizen who had spent decades not even realizing that he had a felony conviction on his record. He had mutilated coins when he was eighteen in order to fool vending machines into dispensing cigarette packs for two or three pennies rather than two or three dimes. Because he and the others who were caught with him were heading off to war, the judge just gave them probation and a small fine, which is why the young Foster hadn’t been aware that it went down on his record as a felony. He only discovered it when he tried to get a gun permit and found he couldn’t. Despite these circumstances, it still took years for his application to go through.

Other applicants are often sick prisoners who are applying in the hope of spending their last days with their families. This past November, shortly before President Obama “pardoned” the turkeys for Thanksgiving, Drayton Curry, who was ninety-two years old and a model prisoner, died in prison, having waited almost two years for the Office of the Pardon Attorney even to respond to his application.

Yet other applicants are applying to get their sentences adjusted to match the law. Because sentencing laws change from time to time, it’s common for there to be people in the system who are serving sentences much harsher than would be required under current law. Some of the more recent examples have come about from the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which changed the sentencing requirements for crack cocaine; Mark Osler discussed this recently in the Washington Times.

There are things that clearly need to be done to reform the system. Rodgers almost certainly needs to be removed as Pardon Attorney, and the president needs to push for faster application review times. One possibility for reform is to follow the lead of many states and established a board or commission to increase the efficiency of the pardon process. Whatever is done, however, it is clear that the pardon process needs reform.

Those who are interested in learning more about this subject might consider reading Margaret Colgate Love’s paper, The Twilight of the Pardon Power (PDF), or perusing the posts at P. S. Ruckman, Jr.’s Pardon Power blog, which keeps track of clemency processes at both federal and state levels.

In my philosophical folklore post last week I asked about other tidbits of philosophical folklore, and commenter Ray Ingles gave one example:

The “is-ought fallacy” is another recurring ‘folk philosophy’ phrase – meaning “you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’”, after Hume.

This is a very interesting one, and it is undeniably common — even the exact phrase “you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” returns something like 48000 hits on Google, and when you start adding variations, the number explodes. The principle is sometimes called ‘Hume’s Guillotine’, a label that seems to go back to philosopher Max Black in the 1960s. Others call it ‘Hume’s Law’, the source of which I have not been able to trace, although it does seem to be both more recent and less useful, given that there are plenty of other things that have also been called ‘Hume’s Law’. As is often the case with things that reduce to a slogan, it seems to be used in very different ways. Here are some various formulations that often get thrown around when talking about the ‘Is-ought fallacy’ or ‘Hume’s Guillotine’:

You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
You can’t derive an imperative from an indicative.
You can’t derive value judgments from factual judgments.
You can’t derive normative claims from factual claims.
You can’t derive evaluative claims from non-evaluative claims.

But oughts, imperatives, and value judgments are all very different things. ‘Ought’ statements, for instance, are generally indicative statements.  What adds to the confusion is that all of these, even if they are often true, seem to have obvious counterexamples, yet they are all treated as absolute statements. There are many intriguing puzzles here, and the question is sometimes even raised as to whether the use of the principle is self-defeating. As a friend of mine, James Chastek, once joked, “We can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; therefore we ought not to try.”

Perhaps we should go back and look at the source of this slogan, David Hume (1711-1776).

It may help to give some very general background. There were in Hume’s day two major approaches to ethics, which we might call moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism. They’d overlap in many of their details, but they had very different conceptions of what moral judgments were. On the moral rationalist view, moral judgments were perceptions of relations between ideas. On this account, cultivating good moral judgment is like learning mathematics. As you learn mathematics, you develop the ability to ‘see’ necessary and eternal relations between ideas; these were sometimes called ‘relations of equality’. Moral rationalism holds that cultivating good moral judgment is very much like this: you develop the ability to ‘see’ necessary and eternal relations between ideas, which were sometimes called ‘relations of perfection’. Moral claims are either true or false, and they are necessarily so. This was a very popular view in the eighteenth century, but the most widely read proponents of it were Nicolas Malebranche and Samuel Clarke, both of whom we know Hume read very closely.

Moral sentimentalism, however, denied that moral judgment was in itself a matter of reason. Rather, it was a matter of orderly sentiment. Whereas the moral rationalist thinks that moral judgments are like mathematical judgments, the moral sentimentalist thinks that moral judgments are like judgments of good taste. It’s important to understand that this did not mean that they thought that moral judgments are mere expressions of taste or arbitrary opinion; they thought that they were like judgment of good taste, taste that was informed, sympathetic, based on wide experience, capable of making fine distinctions. The person of good taste was held to have a better understanding of whatever they were discussing, capable of backing up their judgments with good reasons. In short, moral sentiments see the person of good moral judgment as a moral connoisseur, able to distinguish good and bad action in the same way that a connoisseur of wine is able to distinguish good and bad wine.

Hume is a moral sentimentalist, and the passage from which the “Hume’s Guillotine” derives occurs at the end of his attack on moral rationalism (Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section I):

I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.

This is a passage that has been interpreted in many different ways by Hume scholars. My own approach to interpreting the passage is to argue that context is important. Hume is not arguing about ethics in general. In fact, he goes on in the very next section to present an account of obligation, or ‘ought’, based on moral sentiment. Rather, he is finishing up his attack on moral rationalism. Indeed, he as much as says so. What conclusion does he want us to draw? “That the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.” In other words: the claim only affects positions, like moral rationalism, that take moral judgments to concern relations perceived by reason. Hume’s own account of moral judgments is not affected by this because he is a moral sentimentalist, and thinks that obligations are neither relations nor perceived by reason, but are the objects of a kind of moral sentiment, something we feel. What is more, it is not put forward as a necessary or obvious truth, but as a challenge to the moral rationalist. It depends on the arguments that Hume has made in the rest of the chapter, in which he argued that nothing can have the features that moral rationalists like Clarke attribute to moral relations. Hume is here challenging the moral rationalist to prove him wrong. To be sure, it’s a challenge he doesn’t think the moral rationalist can meet, based on the arguments he’s already given — but it’s merely a challenge.

Regardless of whether this is the best way to interpret Hume, we can nonetheless see that there’s a great deal more complexity lurking beneath this apparently simple slogan. Ray Ingles, in the comment mentioned above, had noted some of that complexity:

And it’s sort of true. You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. But you can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ and a goal.

For example, given the ‘is’-es of the rules of chess, and the goal to win the game, it follows pretty quickly that you ought not sacrifice your queen early in the game.

I wouldn’t put it exactly the same way, in part because I think statements of goals clearly fall under the ‘is’ category, but I think Ray’s approach to the matter is essentially right. We use the word ‘ought’ when we’re talking about decisions, plans, strategies — practical matters. So it makes sense to see ‘ought’ statements as identifying solutions to potential problems. If the problem is to build a bridge that won’t collapse in the wind, it follows from the claims of material science and engineering that there are things you ought to do and things that you ought not to do. Faced with the problem of designing an experiment that will test a hypothesis, a good scientist can derive from available facts how the experiment ought to be designed. When you are faced with the problem of how to act rationally, there are facts about reason that undeniably force the reasonable person to draw conclusions about what he or she ought to do.

Now, of course, given that the slogan seems to be used in so many different ways, it’s entirely possible that it’s being used correctly in a particular context. But the next time someone brings it up, press them to explain what they actually mean.

Of all subjects in philosophy, I think informal logic tends to provide the richest veins of philosophical folklore. Reasoning and evaluating reasoning are things everyone has to do. Formal logic tends to get too technical to be widespread. Informal logic, on the other hand, is almost purely folkloric in nature. Unsystematic and messy, it consists chiefly of rules of thumb, folk classifications, proverbs, slogans, and the like. While there are academic philosophers who attempt to give order to this melange, these attempts at organization are always partial, so many strands of it always escape. Further, appeals to some element or other of informal logic are widespread, not confined to academia, and can have important effects on the kinds of reasoning that are accepted in the broader community. Taking a common slogan like, “You can’t prove a negative,” we are faced immediately with a number of questions. In most of the obvious senses such a claim is false, so how did it come to be part of common wisdom? Does it owe anything to some long-forgotten context? Has it changed its meaning over time, and why? How does its use impact the kinds of argument people accept (or refuse to accept)? We can trace down the history of it and find, for instance, that “You can’t prove a negative” originally had a specific legal context, which is true of a large amount of our folklore about reasoning, and that in breaking free of its original context it has come to be used in very different ways.

Within the already fruitful field of informal logic, one of the most fruitful for the philosophical folklorist is the theory of informal fallacies. Labels for alleged fallacies spring up and spread like weeds, are widely used, and interact in fascinating and sometimes puzzling ways. One interesting element of philosophical folklore that I’ve seen bouncing around recently has been something called a ‘reification fallacy’. The ins and outs of this bit of folklore are quite complex, but if you bear with me a bit through the long story, I think it shows how interesting it can be to try to study classifications of fallacies as bits of folklore. If you’re not that patient, you can probably skip down to the last few paragraphs.

According to Wikipedia, that marvellous collecting basin of folklore, and especially philosophical folklore, it “is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity.” There is good reason to think, however, that there is no such thing as a reification fallacy in this sense. A genuine fallacy has to be a single, specific, stable, structurally identifiable form of misreasoning. Merely making a mistake somewhere does not of itself make one’s reasoning fallacious, and this is true of merely making a mistake in how the abstract relates to the concrete, which is, it should be pointed out, very contentious philosophical territory, anyway, one in which mistakes cannot easily be summarized under simple labels.

And when we look at supposed examples of reification, we regularly find that there is no substance to the charge of fallacy. There is clearly no single type of error that is classified by the label: we see this already in Wikipedia’s fairly typical vagueness about whether we are talking about ‘abstraction’, ‘abstract belief’, or ‘hypothetical construct’, which are none of the three the same. We see this even more clearly when (as with the Wikipedia article) people classify the ‘pathetic fallacy’ as an example of the ‘reification fallacy’, because there is no single kind of misreasoning classified by the pathetic fallacy, either. The ‘pathetic fallacy’ wasn’t even originally intended as an error of reasoning; the phrase was coined by Ruskin to describe a misplacement of feeling in poetry, as when we call a storm cruel or a flower gold because to a generic feeling with inadequate vocabulary they feel cruel or come across as vaguely golden. It is a problem that occurs when poetry is over-sentimentalized and lacks access to a sufficiently precise vocabulary. To the extent that what Ruskin’s ‘pathetic fallacy’ indicates is even an error, it is purely an error in taste, in which the false is taken as true due to overwrought poetic sensitivities; calling it a ‘fallacy’ was at best a figure of speech. From there it became generalized to apply to any sort of anthropomorphizing or personification—with regard to which ‘fallacy’ is even less appropriate. But even if we set that aside, the ‘pathetic fallacy’ taken so generally covers many different things—because personification and anthropomorphization are labels covering reason not by the structure or character of the reasoning but by its effect, and thus indicates any kind of reasoning that leads to a particular kind of result.

Similarly, any list of examples of this alleged fallacy always looks like it was composed by idiots who don’t understand basic figures of speech. Also from the Wikipedia article:

Nature provides empathy that we may have insight into the mind of others.

What makes this an instance of the ‘reification fallacy’? It clearly cannot be a fallacy at all, since it’s merely a claim, and you can’t have a fallacy unless you actually have an inference or process of reasoning. Another example from the Wikipedia article:

The notion that ideas are literally “infectious,” “predatory,” and “selfish” is a fallacious reification of the idea-as-organism metaphor….

Except that this is obviously false. You can never identify a fallacy except to the extent that you can identify how someone is reasoning. Without knowing how one gets from the idea-as-organism metaphor to the notion that ideas are literally infectious, predatory, or selfish, we have no way of determining whether the reasoning itself was fallacious or whether the reasoning was nonfallacious reasoning from false assumptions (assuming, of course, that the assumptions are false, which is itself a substantive thesis requiring some kind of supporting reasons). Of course, almost no one actually thinks that ideas are themselves literally selfish; when people talk this way, they are talking figuratively, even if they are not always careful about that fact. But even if they are not careful, mistaking figurative usage for literal is a very different thing from mistaking the abstract for the concrete.

Examples could be multiplied, but I won’t do so here. The history of this alleged fallacy is interesting in its own right. The earliest example I have found of it, and certainly the most important early influence on its history, is found in John Bernhard Stallo’s interesting 1881 work, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, which was widely read as part of the International Scientific Series, where it brushes up with editions of writings by Walter Bagehot, Herbert Spencer, W. Stanley Jevons, T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin, and others. Stallo’s thesis was that much of physics consisted of taking abstract concepts like force, energy, matter, and space, and reifying them, treating them as real entities. It was his view that this treatment of the abstract as concrete was necessary for human cognition, but when, as physicists are wont to do, these useful fictions are taken as descriptions of reality, the resulting metaphysics or ontology was false and often absurd. With Stallo we have all three of the essential features of the alleged fallacy: he calls it reification, he calls it a fallacy, and he understands it as the mistaking of the abstract for the concrete. An unusual beginning for an alleged mistake in reasoning; if you just came across the fallacy in an essay, you would probably never suspect that it had its roots in an argument that almost all of physics committed the error.

Due to Stallo, the label gets used here and there over the next several decades, and gets new life breathed into it when people start identifying it with another fallacy-label that starts making the rounds, Alfred North Whitehead’s ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Most modern uses of the label, however, trace back to the American logical positivist and legal philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, who argued in Reason and Nature (first published in 1931 and revised in 1953) that many philosophical problems are due to “the disease of language” he calls the ‘fallacy of reification’, which consists of treating logical relations as if they were real entities capable of real actions. Cohen’s use almost certainly derives from Stallo. Stallo is only mentioned once in passing in Reason and Nature, but as a close reader of both Bertrand Russell and Ernst Mach, Cohen could hardly have been unfamiliar with the thesis of Stallo’s major work. Ernst Mach, in particular, was enthusiastic about Stallo, and regarded Stallo’s thesis as closely related to Mach’s own positivism.

The long association with positivism explains why the ‘reification fallacy’ label is often pinned on the philosophical position that is in some ways positivism’s opposite: Platonism. This is an example, I think, of how the uncritical acceptance of fallacy-labels can have a detrimental effect on serious thought. Platonists do not, in fact, treat Platonic entities (forms, or mathematical objects, or the like) as “concrete, real events or physical entities”; no Platonist of any kind treats Platonic entities as physical entities, and the only sense in which they are ‘concrete’ is that they have independent subsistence. But even if we set this aside, if Platonists are wrong it’s not because they are making some mis-step in inference; Platonic arguments that are not fallacious are not that difficult to construct. If Platonism goes wrong, it goes wrong because it makes mistaken assumptions; the wrongness of Platonism is a substantive wrongness that can only be identified by substantive arguments, not by simply slapping a label on it and claiming that there are structural faults in Platonic reasoning.

What’s particularly egregious about it is that the label purports to be an objective evaluation of reasoning, when it is actually an attempt to slide a substantive claim across the border without ever arguing for it. When applied to Platonism all the label is saying is that Platonism misdraws the relationship between the abstract and the concrete. This may be true, but this is just to say that Platonism is wrong for some reason, perhaps due to a mistaken assessment or assumption at some point; it is not to say that Platonists are necessarily engaging in any kind of misreasoning. Trying to refute Platonism by saying it commits the reification fallacy is the height of intellectual laziness: the label conveys no actual information about what is wrong with Platonism beyond the fact that it is Platonism and not some other philosophical position. Indeed, given the history of the label, it is implicitly an attack on Platonism for not being positivism, or, to be more exact, it is one particular positivist argument against Platonism wrapped up in a little package. Positivists should fight their own battles, however, and not try to make arguments for Platonism magically disappear by pinning a label to it. Reification can lead to serious philosophical mistakes, of course, but when it does, it needs to be shown to be so. Often it is simply a figure of speech. Often what is called ‘reification’ is actually a substantive thesis on the relation of the abstract to the concrete that needs to be addressed in its own right and not simply assumed to be an error.

One of the fundamental problems with much talk about fallacies is that people repeatedly show that they are unable to grasp the distinction between being mistaken in one’s position and being fallacious in one’s reasoning. One can use ‘fallacy’ to describe the former but this is a figure of speech. And if one fails to recognize its figurative status, one ends up labeling things as fallacious simply because one disagrees with them. This runs the whole point of calling things ‘fallacies’ into the ground; it becomes an impatient dismissal rather than a rational assessment. This is certainly the case with pseudo-fallacies like the ‘reification fallacy’, which seems to have arisen not from any special insight into reasoning, but from a mix of positivism and the fact that some people can’t understand basic English. Identifying such pseudo-fallacies is one of the useful things that can result from the study of philosophical folklore. Critical thinking consists largely of using ideas from informal logic; looking at the folklore that underlies the concepts we use when we try to think critically can make our thought better.

Of course, there is much more in philosophical folklore than just made-up fallacies. Common wisdom is not all bad, and the folk often know what they are doing. Looking into concepts like burden of proof, ad hominem, ‘all other things being equal’, and the like can uncover very important features of human reasoning. What’s more, it’s often quite fun. It’s just plain interesting to know that this ‘reification fallacy’ that often gets so facilely thrown at Platonism is a Trojan horse for positivism, or that it began with an attack on the worldview of physicists. I’ve often thought that there should be some sort of informal Philosophical Folklore Society to study this kind of thing. It’s open membership—no academic credentials necessary. What kinds of philosophical folklore have you discovered in the field, and what have you discovered about it?

An earlier version of this post was posted at Siris.