I am always trying to improve my understanding of critical thinking. I believe I will always need to keep quizzing and challenging myself on these things. I find as I learn them and work hard to internalize identification of logical fallacies within my every day thought that they become very valuable tools. I wanted to share observations about false dichotomies, which are also sometimes called false dilemma, or false choice.

I typically focus on Generalizations, Appeals to Authority, Ad-hominem, Red Herring, and Bandwagon type logical fallacies and I believe they are all pretty well understood by me at this point. The one I've started paying attention to more recently is the false dichotomy.

A false dichotomy is basically distilling a situation to the you are EITHER THIS or YOU ARE THAT. It is framing an argument such that there are two choices. The fact of the matter is simply because a person states an argument framed as though there are only two choices that doesn't mean their statement is logical or a fact. In reality, such binary statements are far too simplistic and tend to leave out other choices.

"You are either with me, or you are against me." Which leaves out people that might be FOR some of the things you do, and AGAINST others. Which leaves out people that are neither for/against you because they don't know you, don't recognize you, don't care about you, etc.

Now this carries on heavily into the political, and popular culture realms today. It is also having a corrupting influence on scientific journalism.

A common false dichotomy which I saw today is that you either accept climate change, or you are a denier. This presumes a lot. This statement is always used by supporters of what the person is referring to as climate change. The so-called deniers in this dichotomy likely have false dichotomies as well that they will speak, but they would not be framed this way. Since this one is framed in the popular way of "Friend, or Enemy" or for sporting people "Home or Visitor".

We are raised on false dichotomies. We are practically conditioned to try to view the world as though there are two types of people. "Cowboys and Indians", "Cops and Robbers", "Axis and Allies", "Capitalist and Communist", "Left or Right", "Republican or Democrat", etc.

The truth of the matter is that in all of the cases above there are actually more choices than just the two that are being forced upon us.

Climate Change

Let's revisit the Climate Change Denier topic since it is what inspired my post this morning. I was reading this article Scientists slam Donald Trump's environment chief over climate denial: 'it's like disputing gravity' I freely admit by the loaded click bait (it worked, I clicked it) title that I wasn't expecting it to be anything other than an opinion/editorial piece. It did remind me of false dichotomies simply due to one thing they said.

This is a common false dichotomy. It is essentially you are a climate change supporter, or you are a denier. There are actually more choices than that. The climate has been changing throughout history. It is ignorant to assume it will stop changing due to the existence of man. So while there are at least half a dozen different stances on this issue I can come up with now, the truth of the matter is that there are people that believe the Climate Is Changing and simply do not believe that it is primarily due to Human Activity. There are those that believe it is due to human activity. There are those that do not believe the climate is changing, or that the way it is changing is actually different than what is being reported. There are those that don't know, and there are those that don't care. Those are 6 different perspectives that I thought of just now and they may not cover the complete list. It is not an EITHER/OR situation.

There are also people that believe the Climate is Changing and that it is primarily due to human activities, but they do not believe in the proposed solutions such as carbon taxes, and other methods. They see those as power grabs, and taxation that will not stop the worst offenders, and really would not address the problems at all. That is a 7th type of person.

Anti-Vaxxer

Another popular false dichotomy is that of Vaccine Supporter or Anti-Vaxxer. This too is a false dichotomy. There are also people who believe Vaccines are important, they just don't believe they are getting the testing and improvements that medication should. Vaccines are treated as a collateral damage type thing. Some people will have adverse effects, some people will die. The statistics are usually with the vaccines. Some people simply believe that these should be constantly be improved. Collateral damage should not be deemed as ACCEPTABLE. It should be accidental and all steps should be taken to try to eliminate or reduce such damage in the future. So people can believe in Vaccines and still disagree with the politics, lobbyists, and big pharmaceutical company approach to how they are handled. That is only a third type out of the FOR or AGAINST. There are many types as well, though it is framed popularly as a you are either WITH us or AGAINST us type situation when that is logically false and does not accurately describe the situation.

I am going to be keeping my eyes, and ears open for false dichotomies and try to get better identifying them so I do not fall for the emotionally loaded fallacy, and also so I can try to reduce my chance of using false dichotomies myself. I hope those of you that read this found this to be food for thought, and potentially useful.

Steem On!

EDIT: I just stumbled upon this video when I was talking about the Hegelian Dialectic and this indeed could be largely responsible for a lot of the false dichotomies.