Home -> Law Blog Directory -> International Law Blogs -> Misleading Advertising Law

International Law

: Misleading Advertising Law

Logic and Inference: How to avoid some Attractive but Bad Inferences

The majority of observations in this blog are:

a) deception, or the tort of misrepresentation, deceives smart people who are none the less completely aware of many of the warning signs of fraud, and that

b) public education aimed at giving more information to consumers to make their decisions is likely to fail or worse induce uncertainty at the wrong time which then pushes the decision maker to make the bad decision faster, just in order to preserve internal consistency.

None of these claims are novel in the world of social psychology, but they appear to be unknown among lawyers, regulators and judges.

This leads to a large concern about what lawyers should know and learn from other disciplines that is relevant to tort law.

One obvious area is the study of valid inferences. Over at the Torts Prof Blog, Peter Norberg writes:

"As it happens, lawyers have no monopoly on the study of valid forms of inference. The issue has been investigated by philosophers and logicians for millennia, and they have made especially valuable progress over the last hundred years or so.

Law students should be given technical training in how to spot a valid or invalid syllogism, how to identify (and avoid committing) the standard logical fallacies, and how to disambiguate imprecise propositions.

They should know their way around modus ponens and elementary principles of quantification, and they should be equipped to battle the law's repeated attempts to seduce their minds with spurious invocations of the Law of the Excluded Middle.

I

f there's time left over, we might give law students some bonus units on statistics, epistemology, and the sociology of knowledge.

Statistics, because a nodding acquaintance with statistical modes of inference is increasingly an indispensable component of modern professional literacy.

Epistemology, because lawyers should be professionally preoccupied with the question of what constitutes justified true belief.

Sociology of knowledge, because lawyers should also be interested in how social forces shape the structure of knowledge and information, and should learn not to confuse the study and analysis of that topic with a simplistic relativism."

While I am sympathetic with the results that Peter wishes to obtain, I can reliably report that despite decades of teaching by Philosophy Departments students the many forms of fallacies, the only result has been a small boom in the textbook department.

Few who survive a course on informal fallacies learn to think any better, they are able identify virtually every argument as both fallacious and attractive an inference form.

Part of the problem is that, until around 15 years ago, there was no systemic focus on particular types of bad inferences: fallacies which remain attractive, even when exposed as bad reasoning.

Here are some examples:

a) well, I know that the chances of A are low, but if it happens the reward will be very high, so I will take a chance on A, a secular version of Pascal's Wager;

b) expert B has testified that a rare event happened, so it seems reasonable to trust the report, an inference David Hume throughly discredited in the 17th century.

There are other bad, but hard to dislodge, inference patterns and if lawyers were going to taught something about inference, then they should learn how to identify and avoid variants of these bad but attractive inferences and not make a study of inference in general.

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on April 18, 2008 (boomark / email).