What It Is

In one of the Psychology Today blogs, Satoshi Kanazawa discusses two kinds of fallacies that many people often commit and the kinds of people who commit them:

[P]olitical conservatives are more likely to commit the naturalistic fallacy (“Nature designed men to be competitive and women to be nurturing, so women ought to stay home to take care of the children and leave politics to men”), while political liberals are equally likely to commit the moralistic fallacy (“The Western liberal democratic principles hold that men and women ought to be treated equally under the law, and therefore men and women are biologically identical and any study that demonstrates otherwise is a priori false”).

. . . It is actually very easy to avoid both fallacies – both leaps of logic – by simply never talking about what ought to be at all and only talking about what is. It is not possible to make either the naturalistic or the moralistic fallacy if scientists never talk about ought. Scientists – real scientists – do not draw moral conclusions and implications from the empirical observations they make, and they are not guided in their observations by moral and political principles. Real scientists only care about what is, and do not at all care about what ought to be.

Of course this remedy works only if all people simultaneously behave this way, otherwise, as soon as someone starts talking about how whatever is ought to be, someone else is going to say the exact opposite. Thankfully for me and this blog, people will never just talk about what IS (and even if they did, they'd never agree on what IS really is.). Which, um, is my way of saying that whatever I say IS is, it's right! And, anyway, talking about what ought to be is the only way to hop, skip, and jump from a bad IS to a new IS.

But that does not mean that we shouldn't be as rigorous as possible in our thinking of the world around us. Let's face it - we do commit fallacies, both the left and the right. And more often than not, it gets in the way of making any real headway.(Remember when Rachel Maddow said, "It's a fuzzy line between changing people's minds and changing the world.")

I think Kanazawa might agree with me. He says, "We can never devise a correct solution to a problem if we don’t know what its ultimate causes are." Which might just be another way of saying, "Sometimes what is is just not enough.