2.6 Fallacies of Linguistic Emphasis

Recall from section 2.1 that natural languages like English are unruly. They are full of ambiguity, shades of meaning, and vague expressions; they grow and develop and change over time, often in unpredictable ways, at the capricious collective whim of the people using them. Languages are messy and complicated;  fallacies of linguistic emphasis involve the exploitation of this state of affairs.

Clever debaters and arguers take advantage of the vagaries of language to make convincing arguments that are nevertheless fallacious. This exploitation involves the manipulation of linguistic forms to emphasize facts, claims, emotions, etc. that favor one’s position, and to de-emphasize those that do not. We will survey four techniques that commit the fallacy of linguistic emphasis.

2.6.1 Accent

This fallacy is one of the original 13 fallacies that Aristotle recognized in his Sophistical Refutations. Our usage, however, will depart from Aristotle’s. He identifies a potential for ambiguity and misunderstanding that is peculiar to his language—ancient Greek. That language—in written form—used diacritical marks along with the alphabet, and the transposition of these could lead to changes in meaning. English is not like this, but we can identify a fallacy that is roughly in line with the spirit of Aristotle’s accent: it is possible, in both written and spoken English (along with every other language), to convey different meanings simply by stressing individual words and phrases.

The devious use of stress to emphasize contents that are helpful to one’s rhetorical goals, and to suppress or obscure those that are not—that is the fallacy of accent.

There are a number of techniques one can use with the written word that falls in the category of accent. Perhaps the simplest way to emphasize favorable contents, and de-emphasize unfavorable ones, is to vary the size of one’s text. We see this in advertising all the time. You drive past a store that’s having a sale, which they advertise with a sign in the window. In the largest, most eye-catching font, you read, 70% OFF! Wow,” you might think, that’s a really steep discount. I should go into the store and get a great deal. At least, that’s what the store wants you to think. They’re emphasizing the fact of at least one steep discount. If you look more closely at the sign, however, you’ll see the things that they’re legally required to say, but that they’d like to de-emphasize. There’s a tiny ‘Up to’ in front of the gigantic 70% OFF!. For all you know, there’s one not-especially sought-after item tucked in the back of the store, that’s discounted at 70%. Everything else has much smaller discounts or none at all. Also, if you squint really hard, you’ll see an asterisk after the 70% OFF!, which leads to some text at the bottom of the poster, in the tiniest font possible, that reads, While supplies last. See store details. Not available in all locations. Offer not valid weekends or holidays. All sales are final. This is the proverbial fine print. It makes the sale look a lot less exciting. So they hide it.

Footnotes are generally a good place to hide unfavorable content. We all know that CEOs of big companies—especially banks—are paid immense sums of money. Some of it is just their salary and stock options, and those amounts are huge enough to overawe people. But there are other perks that are so over-the-top that companies and executives feel like it’s best to hide them from the public (and their shareholders) in the footnotes of CEO contracts and SEC reports. Michelle Leder runs a website called footnoted.com, which is dedicated to combing through these documents and exposing outrageous compensation packages. She’s uncovered executives spending over $700,000 to renovate their offices, demanding helicopters in addition to their corporate jets, receiving millions of dollars worth of private security services, etc. These additional, extravagant forms of compensation seem excessive to most people, so companies do all they can to hide them from the public.

Another abuse of footnotes can occur in academic or legal writing. Legal briefs and opinions and academic papers seek to persuade. If you’re writing such a document, and you relegate a strong objection to your conclusion to a brief mention in the footnotes (or worse, in endnotes so that people have to flip all the way to the back to see them), you’re de-emphasizing that point of view and making it less likely that the reader will reject your arguments. That’s a fallacious suppression of opposing content, a sneaky trick to try to convince people you’re right without giving them a forthright presentation of the merits (and demerits) of your position.

The fallacy of accent can occur in speech as well as writing. The audible correlate of fine print is that guy talking really fast at the end of the commercial, rattling off all the unpleasant side effects and legal disclaimers that, if given a full, deliberate presentation might make you less likely to buy the product they’re selling. The reason, by the way, that we know about such horrors as the possibility of driving while not awake (a side-effect of some sleep aids) or extreme compulsive behaviors (a side-effect of some drugs used to treat Parkinson’s and restless leg syndrome), is that drug companies are required, by federal law, not to commit the fallacy of accent if they want to market drugs directly to consumers. They have to read what’s called a major statement that lists all of these side-effects explicitly, and no fair cramming them in at the end and talking over them real fast.

When we speak, how we stress individual words and phrases can alter the meaning that we convey with our utterances. Consider the sentence These pretzels are making me thirsty. Now consider various utterances of that sentence, each stressing a different word; different meanings will be conveyed:

And so on. We can capture the various stresses typographically by using italics (or boldface or all-caps), but if we leave that out, we lose some of the meaning conveyed by the actually stressed utterance. One can commit the fallacy of accent by transcribing someone’s speech in a way that omits stress indicators, and thereby obscures or alters the meaning that the person actually conveyed. Suppose a candidate for president says, I hope this country never has to wage war with Iran. The stress on hope clearly conveys that the speaker doubts that his hopes will be realized; the candidate has expressed a suspicion that there may be war with Iran. This speech might set off a scandal: saying such a thing during an election could negatively affect the campaign, with the candidate being perceived as a war-monger; it could upset international relations. The campaign might try to limit the damage by writing an op-ed in a major newspaper, and transcribing the candidate’s utterance without any indication of stress: The Senator said, ‘I hope this country never has to wage war with Iran.’ This is a sentiment shared by most voters and even our opponent. This transcription, of course, obscures the meaning of the original utterance. Without the stress, there is not an additional implication that the candidate suspects there will in fact be a war.

2.6.2 Quoting out of Context

Another way to obscure or alter the meaning of what someone actually said is to quote them selectively. Remarks taken out of their proper context might convey a different meaning than they did within that context.

Consider a simple example: movie ads. These often feature quotes from film critics, which are intended to convey the impression that the movie was well-liked by them. Critics call the film ‘unrelenting’, ‘amazing’, and ‘a one-of-a-kind movie experience’, the ad might say. That sounds like pretty high praise. I think I’d like to see that movie. That is, until I read the actual review from which those quotes were pulled:

The words ‘unrelenting’ and ‘amazing’—and the phrase ‘a one-of-a-kind movie experience’—do in fact appear in that review. But situated in their original context, they’re doing something completely different than the movie ad would like us to believe.

Politicians often quote each other out of context to make their opponents look bad. In the 2012 presidential campaign, both sides did it rather memorably. The Romney campaign was trying to paint President Obama as anti-business. In a campaign speech, Obama once said the following:

Yikes! What an insult to all the hard-working small-business owners out there. They didn’t build their own businesses? The Romney campaign made some effective ads, with these remarks playing in the background, and small-business people describing how they struggled to get their firms going. The problem is, that the quote above leaves some bits out—specifically, a few sentences before the last two. Here’s the full transcript:

Oh. He’s not telling business owners that they didn’t build their own businesses. The word ‘that’ in you didn’t build that doesn’t refer to the businesses; it refers to the roads and bridges—the unbelievable American system that makes it possible for businesses to thrive. He’s making a case for infrastructure and education investment; he’s not demonizing small-business owners.

The Obama campaign pulled a similar trick on Romney. They were trying to portray Romney as an out-of-touch billionaire, someone who doesn’t know what it’s like to struggle, and someone who made his fortune by buying up companies and firing their employees. During one speech, Romney said: I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. Yikes! This guy gets off on firing people? What, he just finds joy in making people suffer? Sounds like a moral monster. Until you see the whole speech:

He’s making a case for a particular health insurance policy: self-ownership rather than employer-provided health insurance. The idea seems to be that under such a system, service will improve since people will be empowered to switch companies when they’re dissatisfied—kind of like with cell phones, for example. When he says he likes being able to fire people, he’s talking about being a savvy consumer. I guess he’s not a moral monster after all.

2.6.3 Equivocation

The phenomenon of homonymy (Greek word, meaning ‘same name’) is common in natural languages. This is when words have the same spelling and pronunciation, but different meanings—like ‘bat’ (referring to the nocturnal flying mammal) and ‘bat’ (referring to the thing you hit a baseball with). This kind of natural-language messiness allows for potential fallacious exploitation. A sneaky arguer can manipulate the subtleties of meaning to convince people of things that aren’t true—or at least not justified based on what they say. We call this kind of maneuver the fallacy of equivocation. Here’s an example.

See what he did there? ‘Bank’ can refer either to a financial institution or the side of a river—a river bank. Fred and Linda’s favorite picnic spot is on a river bank, and Fred did indeed spend the whole day at that bank. He’s trying to convince his wife he hasn’t been cheating on her, and he exploits this little quirk of language to do so. That’s equivocation.

Polysemy (a Greek word, meaning ‘many signs or meanings’) is a similar linguistic phenomenon that can also be exploited to equivocate. This is distinct from but similar to, homonymy. The meanings of homonyms are typically unrelated. In polysemy, the same word or phrase has multiple, related meanings that have different senses. Consider the word ‘law’. The meaning that comes immediately to mind is the statutory one: A rule of conduct imposed by authority. The state law prohibiting murder is an instance of a law in this sense. There is another sense of ‘law’, however; this is the sense operative when we speak of scientific laws. These are regularities in nature—Newton’s law of universal gravitation, for example. These meanings are similar, but distinct: statutes, and human laws, are prescriptive; scientific laws are descriptive. Human laws tell us how we ought to behave; scientific laws describe how things actually do, and must, behave. Human laws can be violated — I could murder someone. Scientific laws cannot be violated: — if two bodies have mass, they will be attracted to one another by a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them; there’s no getting around it.

A common argument for the existence of God relies on an equivocation between these two senses of ‘law’:

This argument relies on fallaciously equivocating between the two senses of ‘law’—human and natural. It’s true that human laws are by definition imposed by an authority, but that is not true of natural laws. An additional argument is needed to establish that those must be so imposed.

A famous instance of equivocation of this sort occurred in 1998 when President Bill Clinton denied having an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky by declaring forcefully in a press conference: I did not have sexual relations with that woman—Ms. Lewinsky. The president wanted to convince his audience that nothing sexually inappropriate had happened, even though, as was revealed later, lots of sexual stuff had been going on. He does this by taking advantage of the polysemy of the phrase ‘sexual relations’. In the broadest sense, the phrase connotes sexual activity of any kind. This is the sense the president wants his audience to have in mind so that they’re convinced by his denial that nothing untoward happened. But a more restrictive sense of ‘sexual relations’—a bit more old-fashioned and Southern usage—refers specifically to intercourse (which Bill and Monica did not engage in). It’s this sense that the president can fall back on if anyone accuses him of having lied; he can claim that, strictly speaking, he was telling the truth: he and Monica didn’t have ‘relations’ in the restrictive sense. Clinton later admitted to misleading the American people—but, importantly, not to lying.

The distinction between lying and misleading is a hard one to draw precisely, but roughly speaking it’s the difference between trying to get someone to believe something false by saying something false (lying) and trying to get them to believe something false by saying something true but deceptive (misleading).

Besides homonymy and polysemy, yet another common linguistic phenomenon can be exploited to this end. This phenomenon is implicature, identified and named by the philosopher Paul Grice in the 1960s. (Reference: Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words, 1989, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.)  Implicatures are contents that we communicate over and above the literal meaning of what we say—aspects of what we mean by our utterances that aren’t stated explicitly. People listening to us infer these additional meanings based on the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative, observing some unwritten rules of conversational practice. To use one of Grice’s examples, suppose your car has run out of gas on the side of the road, and you stop someone walking by, explaining your plight, and they say, There’s a gas station right around the corner. Part of what was communicated by this utterance is that the station is open and selling gas right now—that you can go there and solve your problem. You can infer this content based on the assumption the conversational partner is being cooperative; if the station is closed or out of gas—and they knew it—then they would be acting unhelpfully and uncooperatively. Notice, though, that this content is not part of what was literally said: all you were told is that there is a gas station around the corner, which would still be true even if it were closed and/or out of gas. In this way, implicatures are yet another subtle aspect of meaning in natural language that can be exploited to equivocate.

So a final technique that we might classify under the fallacy of equivocation is false implication— saying things that are strictly speaking true, but which communicate false implicatures. Grocery stores do this all the time. You know those signs posted under, say, cans of soup that say 10 for $10? That’s the store’s way of telling us that soup’s on sale for a buck a can; that’s right, you don’t need to buy 10 cans to get the deal; if you buy one can, it’s $1; 2 cans are $2, and so on. So why not post a sign saying “$1 per can”? Because the 10-for-$10 sign conveys the false implicature that you need to buy 10 cans in order to get the sale price. The store’s trying to drive up sales.

A striking example of false implicature is featured in one of the most prominent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on perjury law (Bronston v. United States, 409 US 352 – Supreme Court 1973). In the original criminal case, a defendant by the name of Bronston had the following exchange with the prosecuting attorney: Q. Do you have any bank accounts in Swiss Banks, Mr. Bronston? A. No, sir. Q. Have you ever? A. The company had an account there for about six months, in Zurich. As it turns out, Bronston did not have any Swiss bank accounts at the time of the questioning, so his first answer was strictly true. But he did have Swiss bank accounts in the past. However, his second answer does not deny this. All he says is that his company had Swiss bank accounts—an answer that implicates that he himself did not. Based on this exchange, Bronston was convicted of perjury, but the Supreme Court overturned that conviction, pointing out that Bronston had not made any false statements (a requirement of the perjury statute); the falsehood he conveyed was an implicature. Note that the court didn’t use the term ‘implicature’ in its ruling, but that it was the thrust of their argument.

2.6.4 Manipulative Framing

Words are powerful. They can trigger emotional responses and activate associations with related ideas, altering the way we perceive the world and conceptualize issues. The language we use to describe a particular policy, for example, can affect how favorably our listeners are likely to view that proposal. How we frame issues with language can profoundly influence how persuasive our arguments about those issues will be. The technique of choosing words to frame issues intentionally to manipulate your audience is what we will call the fallacy of manipulative framing.

The importance of framing in politics has long been recognized, but only in recent decades has it been raised to an art form. One prominent practitioner of the art is Republican consultant Frank Luntz. In a 200-plus page memo he sent to Congressional Republicans in 1997, and later in a book (Frank Luntz, 2007, Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear. New York: Hyperion.) he stressed the importance of choosing persuasive language to frame issues so that voters would be more likely to support Republican positions on issues. One of his recommendations illustrates manipulative framing nicely. In the United States, if you leave a fortune to your heirs after you die, then the government taxes it (provided it’s greater than about $5.5 million, or $11 million for a couple, as of 2016). The usual name for this tax is the ‘estate tax’. Luntz encouraged Republicans—who are generally opposed to this tax—to start referring to it instead as the death tax. This framing is likelier to cause voters to oppose the tax as well — taxing people for dying? Talk about kicking a man when he’s down! (Polling bears this out: people oppose the tax in higher numbers when it’s called the ‘death tax’ than when it’s called the ‘estate tax’.)

The linguist George Lakoff has written extensively on the subject of framing (e.g., his 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant!, White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing.) His remarks on the subject of tax relief nicely illustrate how framing works:

Carefully chosen words can trigger all sorts of mental associations, mostly at the subconscious level, that affect how people perceive the issues and have the power to change opinions. That’s why manipulative framing is ubiquitous in public discourse.

Consider debates about illegal immigration. Those who are generally opposed to policies that favor such people will often refer to them as illegal immigrants. This framing emphasizes the fact that they are in this country illegally, making it likelier that the listener will also oppose policies that favor them. A further modification can further increase this likelihood: illegal aliens. The word ‘alien’ has a subtle dehumanizing effect; if we don’t think of them as individual people with hopes and dreams, we’re not likely to care much about them. Even more dehumanizing is a framing one often sees these days: referring to illegal immigrants simply as illegals. They are the living embodiment of illegality! Those who advocate on behalf of such people, of course, use different terminology to refer to them: undocumented workers, for example. This framing de-emphasizes the fact that they’re here illegally; they’re merely ‘undocumented’ — they lack certain pieces of paper. It also emphasizes the fact that they are working, which is likely to cause listeners to think of them more favorably.

The use of manipulative framing in the political sphere extends to the very names that politicians give the laws they pass. Consider the healthcare reform act passed in 2010. Its official name is The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Protection of patients, affordability, and care—these all trigger positive associations. The idea is that every time someone talks about the law prior to and after its passage, they will use the name with this positive framing and people will be more likely to support it. As you may know, this law is commonly referred to by a different moniker: ‘Obamacare’. This is the framing of choice for the law’s opponents: any negative associations people have with President Obama are attached to the law; and any negative feelings they have about healthcare reform get attached to Obama. Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel demonstrated the effectiveness of framing on his show one night in 2013. He sent a crew outside his studio to interview people on the street and ask them which approach to health reform they preferred, the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. Overwhelmingly, people expressed a preference for the Affordable Care Act over Obamacare, even though those are just two different ways of referring to the same piece of legislation. Framing is especially important when the public is ignorant of the actual content of policy proposals, which is all too often the case.