Putting It All Together

In this final section, we’ll take a look at several claims, and I’ll run them through the eleven rules. As a reminder, the goal is not to determine the probability of the claim being true; it is to evaluate the strength of the claim, or if making the claim, ensure that it is strong. We do this by revising the claim throughout the process, building a stronger claim as we go. This works best as a cooperative process where all parties involved participate in the process to strengthen the claim.

A Bumper Sticker Claim

We’ll start with a common claim/meme shared on the Internet:

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.

✓ Acknowledge the Limits of Your Knowledge Regarding the Claim. I never made or shared this claim, so I am not sure what people who do make this claim mean exactly. This admission prevents me from making a strawman out of the argument and prompts me to seek more information.

✓ Explore Your Biases Related to the Claim. I have no strong position on guns. I like shooting them, but I don’t own one. I am left-leaning politically, but the gun debate is one of the least interesting to me of all political issues.

✓ Isolate the Actual Claim. There is an obvious implicit claim within this explicit claim. I can make assumptions if necessary, but the first choice is to ask for clarification from the person who made the claim. What do they mean, exactly? Do they mean restricting gun access won’t make a difference in murders? Do they mean stricter gun laws won’t make a difference in murders? Do they agree that restrictions will make a difference in murders, but that would infringe on their rights? We need clarification.

At this stage, we would ideally get a revised claim by the person who made the claim. Otherwise, we can continue by applying the following rules to all of the possible claims we propose. Let’s assume the claim was revised to

Stricter gun laws violate our Constitutional rights.

✓ Clearly and Precisely Define Each Relevant Term. What are “Constitutional rights” specifically?

Stricter gun laws violate the Second Amendment, which is the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

✓ Use Terms That Reflect the Scope of the Claim Accurately. By defining “Constitutional rights,” we narrowed the scope from what initially sounded much more problematic to a specific amendment.

✓ Operationalize Terms When Possible. There is no need to make any terms measurable in our latest version of the claim.

✓ Make the Claim Falsifiable When Possible. This is ultimately a legal claim that rests on a legal opinion. Falsification would include a court of law ruling that this is not the case. With such a politically-charged topic, it is unlikely that everyone would accept any court’s legal opinion on this issue, so making it objectively falsifiable might be an impossibility.

✓ Express an Accurate and Meaningful Level of Confidence. I would argue that this is a case where a threshold is relevant. Even if our rights are “violated a little” or “kinda violated,” it makes more sense to keep a violation of rights as a binary distinction so that we either take action or don’t. The extent of the violation can be on a continuum, but the decision to take action or not is the binary distinction.

✓ Convert Causes to Contributing Factors When Appropriate. We can say that stricter gun laws cause the violation, which makes sense if the claim is true. The gun laws don’t “contribute to” the violation in the claim; they are the only reason for it, according to the claim.

✓ Make Strong Analogies and Call Out Weak Ones. The claim does not use any analogies.

✓ Filter All Relevant Assumptions Through These Same Rules. One assumption here might be the meaning of “the right to bear Arms.” Does “Arms” apply to semi-automatic weapons? If yes, how about fully-automatic weapons? Nuclear and chemical weapons? If we don’t allow certain kinds of guns, why do we allow knives and even sticks? What is the rule here for where we draw the line?

At the very least, we moved from what is a very weak claim due mostly to its ambiguity:

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.

to a much stronger claim (as indicated by its clarity and precision) that lays the framework for a productive debate.

Stricter gun laws violate the Second Amendment, which is the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Going through the rules might have also prepared us to argue more objectively and fairly while reconsidering our relevant assumptions .

An Analogy

Analogies are claims in that they are claiming that one thing is like another thing in some way. Evaluating the strength of an analogy is evaluating the strength of the claim.

Here is a meme that has been widely circulated during the COVID-19 pandemic when new cases, hospitalizations, and death have started to slow, and many people were pushing to lift the restrictions put in place to slow the spread of the virus.

The curve is flattening; we can lift restrictions = The parachute has slowed our fall enough; we can take it off now.

✓ Acknowledge the Limits of Your Knowledge Regarding the Claim. I am not an epidemiologist, although I don’t know how much that matters yet for this analogy. I do think we need to know the primary reason the restrictions were put into place, which I currently don’t know.

✓ Explore Your Biases Related to the Claim. I am an optimist and have a strong, negative emotional reaction to pessimistic posts, headlines, and claims about COVID-19 that highlight worse-case scenarios and play on the fears of the public in order to affect behavior. I tend to unreasonably dismiss the doom and gloom associated with the virus and accept the positive news.

✓ Isolate the Actual Claim. If possible, we should ask those who share this analogy what exactly they mean by this. I don’t have this luxury here, so I need to do my best to accurately isolate the claim being made without creating a strawman. The claim appears to be clear:

We should not lift the restrictions just because the curve is flattening.

This revised claim introduces decision making or evaluating suggested courses of action. This is beyond the scope of this book, so we will stick to the original analogy, especially if our goal is to simply determine the strength of the analogy rather than engage in an argument or debate.

✓ Clearly and Precisely Define Each Relevant Term. Does “The curve is flattening” refer to the fact that the number of daily new cases are being kept at a manageable level that is not overloading local healthcare systems, or does it mean it is approaching that point? Or does it mean something else? What is included, specifically, in “restrictions?”

✓ Use Terms That Reflect the Scope of the Claim Accurately. The phrase “lift restrictions” is missing the scope. Can we lift all restrictions? Some? Many? Most? This matters because the claim is that it is analogous to taking off a parachute (the extreme). By this, it would seem that “all” restrictions is what is meant.

✓ Operationalize Terms When Possible. The claim doesn’t dispute the flattening of the curve, which is a term that we would generally want to operationalize. But in this case, it is not necessary—it is irrelevant to the claim/analogy.

✓ Make the Claim Falsifiable When Possible. Falsification doesn’t apply to analogies, and if looking at the modified claim, it doesn’t apply because the claim is an opinion.

✓ Express an Accurate and Meaningful Level of Confidence. This doesn’t apply.

✓ Convert Causes to Contributing Factors When Appropriate. This doesn’t apply.

✓ Make Strong Analogies and Call Out Weak Ones. Here is where we will do most of the work, given that this claim is an analogy. Recall the different meanings for “the curve is flattening.” What is meant by this will determine how strong this analogy is. The parachute keeps us from dying a) while we are falling and b) as long as we have it on. Restrictions keep some people from dying (those who can’t get treatment due to an overloaded healthcare system and possibly those who get the virus later when better treatment is available) while a) the local healthcare system would otherwise be overloaded and b) the restrictions are kept in place.

Is “the curve is flattening” more analogous to taking off the parachute while still falling or taking off the parachute after landing? Even if the curve has flattened and the local healthcare systems can manage the load, removing the restrictions might result in the overload still. If you take off a parachute after you landed, there is virtually no chance that you are still at risk of falling to your death.

Overall, I would say that this is a decent analogy, more on the side of strong than weak. Recall that strong claims are not necessarily true claims; the strength of the claim is independent of its veracity. Likewise, strong analogies that reduce to an opinion don’t necessarily make for a good opinion.

✓ Filter All Relevant Assumptions Through These Same Rules. The main assumption here is that lifting restrictions while the curve is flattening / when the curve has flattened will result in a disaster analogous of taking off a parachute in mid-air. The other assumption is that leaving the restrictions in place will result in a better outcome than removing the restrictions. There also seems to be an assumption that “restrictions” are all or nothing, with no option to remove some restrictions while leaving others. These assumptions should be evaluated.

The Supernatural

A common misconception is that supernatural or faith-based claims are “beyond” reasoning when, in fact, the vast majority of faith-based claims are not immune to the scrutiny of good reasoning. Acknowledging the limits of your knowledge and exploring biases are rules that are perhaps even more relevant with these kinds of claims since people tend to have an even greater emotional commitment to faith-based claims. And many faith-based claims are still ultimately claims about the natural world—usually violations of natural law, which can be investigated scientifically and reasoned.

Let’s apply these rules to one of the most common faith-based claims in the West:

Prayers work.

✓ Acknowledge the Limits of Your Knowledge Regarding the Claim. There isn’t much here that requires any relevant knowledge.

✓ Explore Your Biases Related to the Claim. I am an atheist (i.e., I don’t believe that any gods exist to answer prayers). However, I would love it if such a being existed.

✓ Isolate the Actual Claim. The claim is already isolated.

✓ Clearly and Precisely Define Each Relevant Term. What is prayer? Are we talking about a sort of meditative prayer or a petitionary prayer? Are we referring to praying for our own needs or those of others? To whom does the prayer need to be directed, if anyone? It may be the case the one making the claim is claiming that every kind of prayer works, as long as it is directed to the right being. This is a shotgun approach where so many claims are presented that they all cannot be addressed, so it is best to start by focusing on one clear and precise claim:

Asking a Catholic Saint to heal your physical body works.

What kind of physical ailments are we referring to, and how do we know when they are healed? Do severed limbs count? If not, why not?

Asking a Catholic Saint to cure your cancer works.

What is meant “works?” This seems like a term that needs to be operationalized.

✓ Use Terms That Reflect the Scope of the Claim Accurately. Does it work all the time? Sometimes? We can address this when we operationalize “works.”

✓ Operationalize Terms When Possible. How do we measure “works?” How do we distinguish between healing through medical intervention and the effects of prayer? How do we distinguish between healing through passing time and the effects of prayer? How do we distinguish between spontaneous remission and the effects of prayer?

Asking a Catholic Saint to cure your cancer works as indicated by a statistically significant difference in recovery as compared to those who don’t pray.

✓ Make the Claim Falsifiable When Possible. The claim is falsifiable as it currently is written. The claim is not that a Catholic Saint is the one responsible for the healing, just that the process of asking a Catholic Saint for healing has a statistically significant effect. This is testable.

✓ Express an Accurate and Meaningful Level of Confidence. This has been addressed by operationalizing “works.”

✓ Convert Causes to Contributing Factors When Appropriate. This claim is vague enough so that no cause is being claimed, but one is implied. The one making the claim might not want to go as far as to claim that there is a supernatural cause and may be fine with the conclusion that the cause can be psychosomatic —a placebo effect of sorts. Again, we never want to create a strawman of the claim, so get clarification if possible. Assume such clarification was offered:

Asking a Catholic Saint to cure your cancer results in the Catholic Saint facilitating the healing through God’s power, as indicated by a statistically significant difference in recovery as compared to those who don’t pray .

Although we took a step forward in the strength of the claim by being more specific as to the cause, we took a giant step back in strength by putting forth an unfalsifiable claim, that is, there is no way to demonstrate that the Catholic Saint facilitated the healing through God’s power. Since this would effectively be a dead end, we might suggest leaving out the cause and moving forward to debate/investigate the more generic claim.

✓ Make Strong Analogies and Call Out Weak Ones. No analogies were used in this claim.

✓ Filter All Relevant Assumptions Through These Same Rules. The one making the claim might assume that Catholic Saints exist and can hear prayers, as well as that God exists and chooses to answer prayers. These are some significant assumptions that should be evaluated.