Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated after the G-7 meeting that Canadian soldiers had historically stood “shoulder to shoulder” with those of the U.S. and, therefore, President Donald Trump’s announcement of tariffs under a false claim of national security was insulting.

Having just returned from Normandy to visit the American cemetery above Omaha Beach, I especially felt the pain and sorrow of Trudeau’s words because the Canadian cemetery at Bény-sur-Mer is very close by. I am sure that, like the U.S. soldiers who fell, those Canadian troops died to build a better world.

My hope is that the memory of shared sacrifice triumphs over willful ignorance.

Kathleen Braden, Seattle

So funny to watch the Fake News, especially NBC and CNN. They are fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea. 500 days ago they would have “begged” for this deal-looked like war would break out. Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The Road to You (1993).

Character is who you are when no one is watching.

In this chapter we are concerned with certain recurrent mistakes in reasoning which, just because they are very common, have been singled out by logicians and labelled with more or less appropriate names. The world ‘fallacy’ has unfortunately often been used in different senses. It is used sometimes as a synonym for ‘error of fact’, as in the statement: ‘It is a fallacy to suppose that aeroplanes can be built by mass-production.’ This is, in my opinion, a plainly erroneous use of the word. The speaker meant that aeroplanes cannot, in fact, be produced by methods suitable to the production of, say, motor-cars. I shall assume without further discussion that the speaker, in using ‘fallacy’ in this sense, was simply showing his ignorance of the correct usage of the word. There remains to be noticed an ambiguity that is more important for our present purpose. If we say: ‘He is guilty of a fallacy’, we sometimes mean to imply that he is guilty of a deception. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives as a meaning of ‘fallacy’, now obsolete, ‘deception’, ‘trickery’. This obsolete meaning does, I think, influence our modern usage. It would certainly be an advantage if we recognized that to accuse a person of having committed a fallacy is not to accuse him of intent to deceive. A fallacy is a violation of a logical principle; ‘to fall into a fallacy’ is to slip into ‘an unsound form of argument’, that is, to make a mistake in reasoning, not in what is reasoned about. If we mistakenly suppose that we have premisses adequate to establish our conclusion, then we are reasoning illogically and thus committing a fallacy.

(L. Susan Stebbing, Thinking to Some Purpose [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1939], 156-7 [italics in original])

Note from KBJ: Susan Stebbing is a careful thinker and one of my favorite philosophers, but she is mistaken here. The New Oxford American Dictionary (3d ed., 2010) defines “fallacy” as “a mistaken belief, esp. one based on unsound argument.” The word “especially” indicates that the word is not limited to mistaken beliefs that are based on unsound arguments but extends to mistaken beliefs generally. Scholars in general, and philosophers in particular, are arrogant, by which I mean that they arrogate words to themselves. Philosophers don’t own the word “fallacy”; they merely use it in a particular (technical) way. If a philosopher, in a philosophical context, used the word “fallacy” to mean “mistaken belief,” then he or she would be rightly criticized; but Stebbing is criticizing non-philosophers for using the word in other than the technical philosophical way. This is disciplinary arrogance. We might call it philosophism (the analogue of scientism).

Here.

Here.

Regarding “Mellifluous Illegality vs. Crass Lawfulness” by Victor Davis Hanson (Forum, June 10):

So this is how it happens? By casting about citing examples of purported ethical and legal impropriety or even law breaking by President Barack Obama and his team, Mr. Hanson attempts to seize the moral high ground for President Donald Trump. He does this not on the merits of policy, purpose or ethical standards but in an exercise elevating Mr. Trump through whataboutism.

While Mr. Obama and his people are not above critical review, to focus on Mr. Obama absent an equally critical eye turned toward Mr. Trump, his penchant not just for boorishness but dishonesty and his early failings, especially with regard to the handling of Russian election meddling both past and future—with little being done to insure the ongoing integrity of U.S. elections—is whiny and rings hollow.

If laws have not and are not being outright broken (and that remains to be seen), some that go to the integrity of our Republic are clearly being ignored.

N. MICHAEL FAZZINI

O’Hara