THE MARGINALIZING OF EVIDENCE AND REASONING
It has become commonplace for prominent political voices, such as elected officials, party strategists and spokespersons, and media hosts/commenta-tors, to support their viewpoints with a single piece of evidence—often in the form of an extreme example fallaciously generalized to represent an entire population, regardless of its size. The neighbor’s 5-year old who somehow was mailed a job-training announcement becomes emblematic—proof positive—of everything that’s wrong with that training program. Or to show that tobacco use is not necessarily harmful, the proponent provides a “typical” supportive example: the 95-year old who has smoked four packs a day since they were 15 and now runs marathons and plays in tennis tournaments.
Cherry picking is the fallacy of selectively choosing evidence that supports your position all the while ignoring the majority of the evidence that challenges or contradicts your position. Instead, you cherry pick supporting evidence, however unrepresentative it might be. Should the evidence be challenged as unrepresentative or, worse, inaccurate, the now popular retort goes something like this: “It was meant to be illustrative, not necessarily factual.” But what does the evidence actually illustrate? A hypothetical of what could be true if it weren’t false?
Meanwhile, opposing positions, no matter how well evidenced, are dismissed as “just another point of view,” brushed aside as “simply your opinion, supported by your evidence, which is arbitrary and biased.” Prominent evidence that runs counter to your position no longer needs to be addressed or even discussed; you can simply retrieve “alternative facts.”
Facts, of course, by definition, must be true. Thus, “true facts” is a tautology, “false facts” is an oxymoron, and “alternative facts” is a non-sequitur. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
Treating facts as subjectively determined may well serve short-term agendas, but it does not ensure sound decision-making, and it, ultimately, weakens the underpinnings of a democratic society.
The marginalizing of evidence, and more broadly critical thinking, also plays out in many other venues, such as reality television, which rarely models decision-making based on quality evidence and sound reasoning. Instead, the need for drama mandates that conflict be heightened and exaggerated. Characters who think and act rationally, and thereby create fewer problems for themselves and others, are not nearly as interesting as dysfunctional troublemakers who can’t always say what they mean and don’t always mean what they say.
In some scripted programs, characters who are smart, educated, and relatively normal do command our attention, but elsewhere the allure of the contemporary defective character who is incapable of exercising even a miniscule of logical analysis too often takes center stage.
The public arena is replete with figures whose success is less a product of their allegiance to quality evidence and sound reasoning than a testament to their ability to speak in ways that resonate with targeted audiences, however deficient the discourse might be. But the public arena represents a small and specific segment of society. It does not demand of its practitioners the same standard of proof expected, for example, of employees in many high level positions, where the ability to articulate sound arguments enhances one’s credibility and increases the opportunity for upward mobility.