Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Y’all, we are celebrating today because this podcast just hit 200,000 downloads! WooHoo!! Guys, that’s a lot of downloads for a little podcast like this one, and I am ecstatic! I KNOW it’s because there are a lot of other people out there like me: we see the disaster that happens in society when people don’t know how to think for themselves & just accept any old message they’re told to accept. And we don’t want that for ourselves, for our kids and for our country. We know that a simple skill of thinking well is like having a super power when so many around you don’t have it! So, thank you! Thank you for listening, for sharing, for leaving a review, for sending me a message and most of all, thank you for being a THINKER!!
You know that I’m all about reviewing, so let’s start off by reviewing a fallacy we covered earlier this season, Presentism. If you want, go ahead and hit pause real quick and see if you can remember what the Presentism Fallacy is.Presentism is a way of analyzing history where the past is interpreted through present-day attitudes & moral standards. Where The Historian’s Fallacy was judging past decisions & actions based on their knowledge, Presentism is judging past actions by today’s standards & attitudes.
The question to ask yourself if you think you’re facing the Presentism fallacy is this: “What were the cultural beliefs & norms of that time? How are they different than ours today?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 80.
Today’s episode is sponsored by my e-book! That’s right, I’ve compiled an e-book of fallacies. One of the questions I get most often is whether I have a printable resource that people can access to help them learn or review the fallacies covered in the podcast. I’m happy to tell you that now I do! When you purchase the Logical Fallacies e-book, you’ll get immediate access to print it off and begin using it right away, and you’ll also get all future updates for FREE. I’ll eventually be including all the fallacies that I cover on the podcast, and I’m not done yet. So, when you buy the e-book, you’ll get all the updates as I continue to add fallacies as I continue working through them here on Season 1. I’ve already heard from several families who are printing off the book to use in their homeschool to reference & review the fallacies they learned in the podcast. And I’ll tell you this - I even use the e-book to help ME remember & review! There’s a lot of fallacies, and when I come across memes & headlines & bad arguments online, I don’t always remember all the names of the fallacies. Well, I’m easily able to flip through the book and find the fallacy, the definition, a quick example and the question to ask. It helps even me! I’ll put a link in the show notes where you can go and buy the e-book and have access right away.
Ok, let’s dive into today’s new fallacy. I’ll say this, it doesn’t have a simple, catchy name. I feel like it needs a better name! It’s just called the Fallacy of Confusing Explanations & Excuses. Yeah. I feel like a catchy Latin name is needed here, so if anybody wants to take a stab at coming up with one, let me know…maybe we can make it a thing. Anyways, the Fallacy of Confusing Explanations & Excuses happens when someone assumes that an explanation given for something is an excuse or an attempt to justify that thing.
Let me give a simple example of what this can sound like. Sarah shows up to work 2 hours late. Her boss asks her why she’s late and Sarah replies, “I was in a car accident on my way to work.” To which her boss responds: “I don’t want to hear your excuses - you were supposed to be here at 8!” Ok, can you see the fallacy? She wasn’t making an excuse, she was giving an account for why she was late. It was an explanation, but her boss took it as an excuse.
Or, here’s another example. A student fails to turn in an assignment when it’s due, and his teacher asks him why he didn’t turn it in. The student says that their house lost power last night so he wasn’t able to print the assignment off. The teacher says, “Well, that’s no excuse, you could have written it out by hand.” Was the student really trying to make an excuse or justify why he didn’t have his assignment? It’s a little hard to tell, isn’t it? He very well could have just been explaining what had happened. We’d have to ask the student if we really wanted to know if he’s making excuses or just explaining.
Now, sometimes this fallacy happens as a simple mistake when someone doesn’t really know the difference between an explanation and an excuse. And there is a difference. An explanation is describing or giving an account of the facts, the context or the history of a thing or an event, whereas an excuse is justifying the thing or the event. Do you see the difference? And yes, it’s squirrely when someone should be giving an explanation and they give an excuse instead, but it’s also bad thinking when someone just gives an explanation and it’s assumed that they’re making an excuse or justifying.
This fallacy also happens intentionally when a person just wants to “prove” that the other person is making excuses or justifying something, when they really weren’t. In this case, it’s totally manipulative.
Now, this fallacy also works in reverse. It’s also a mistake to assume that an excuse is really an explanation. This version of it doesn’t happen as often, but I wanted to point it out.
So, it’s really interesting because as I was writing this episode today, i came across a real-life example of this fallacy happening in the comment section of some news being reported. In today’s news, the Dalai Lama is being reported as having done something that we consider to be very inappropriate. I’m not going to go into the details of what he did, and I have not done a ton of research into it, nor am I likely to spend my time doing so…what I’m wanting to point out to you is from the comments that other people are making about it. So in the comment section of the post where I read about what the Dalai Lama had done, most people were commenting on how it’s totally wrong & inappropriate. There were a few people, however, who came on there defending the Dalai Lama and said that what the Dalai Lama had done was a traditional greeting and the people saying he was wrong to do it just don’t understand the culture. And of course, people came back at him accusing him of making excuses for bad behavior…and then of course the name-calling & fighting started, as often happens in the comment sections. Ok, so this is a great example of what the Fallacy of Confusing Explanations & Excuses can sound like. Something happens, someone tries to explain what happened and the other person accuses them of EXCUSING or justifying what had happened. But we have to ask the question: Is that really true? Were they trying to justify it? Honestly, we don’t know unless we ask them. We can’t really know their intention without asking a clarifying question. In this case, we’d have to ask the question, “Are you excusing the behavior just because it’s a tradition?” And it would be wise to ask the question, “Is it really true that that’s a tradition?” Just because something is a tradition, doesn’t make it right. Do you see how we can’t just take the stuff we’re being told at face value? Assumptions are dangerous. We have to ask further questions to try to discover the truth behind what we’re being told & to discover the intent behind what others are saying.
Question to ask yourself: “Are they stating facts or making excuses?” *repeat* And, if you can’t tell, it’s super simple - just ask the person!
Remember: When you learn HOW to think, you will no longer fall prey to those who are trying to tell you what THEY want you to think and it all starts with asking one simple question: “Is that really true?”
