Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Welcome back to another episode of the FitABC podcast, where each episode makes you just a little more impervious to manipulation, false advertisement and propaganda! By the way, if you’re new to the podcast, I’d like to encourage you to do 2 things: 1. Go back and start at the beginning, with episode 1, and listen all the way through from the start. This podcast builds on itself and it’ll put the pieces together for you in an organized way to listen in that order. And 2. Take my Meme Fallacy quiz! I created a quick quiz with 10 different memes to see if you can guess which fallacy is being committed in each meme! You can find it at filteritthroughabraincell.com/quiz.
Ok, let’s start off by reviewing one of the fallacies we covered earlier this season, the Ad Hoc Fallacy. Now, I’d encourage you to hit pause real quick and test yourself! See if you can remember what the Ad Hoc Fallacy is! The Ad Hoc Fallacy happens when someone makes a statement or explanation purely for the sake of saving an argument or hypothesis from being shown to be wrong. It’s when someone uses a hasty or unsupported explanation to rescue an argument that’s being challenged or shown to be false.
So, if someone is committing an Ad Hoc error, the question to ask yourself or them is this: “What evidence is there to support your claim?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 113.
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And, speaking of the new school year (at least for my listeners in North America!) if you’re gearing up for a new school year and would like a way to teach critical thinking to your middle or high schooler in an easy way, I’m going to be opening the doors back up to Crazy Thinkers on August 28th, just in time for the new school year. I am excited to tell you that I’m adding a 10-week course called Brain Cell University where I”ll be teaching the skills of good thinking, which can then be applied to anything! Most logic courses out there spend most of their time teaching you the fallacies, but I give all that to you for free here on the podcast. In Crazy thinkers, I take you deeper and go beyond just learning ABOUT the fallacies to learning to use the SKILLS of good thinking and apply them to real-life scenarios.
In Brain Cell U, you’ll learn the exact method I use to think about what I’m seeing & reading, you’ll learn the tools of learning that have been handed down for hundreds of years but are missing in our school systems, and you’ll get an introduction to Formal Logic.
Also, your student will come away having mastered the top 40 fallacies that they’re likely to encounter in culture and they’ll complete the Truth Project where they’ll have an opportunity to do a deep dive and discover the truth about a topic of their choosing for themselves. I’m super excited to be launching this and I’m so grateful to my
Founding Members who have been a part of Crazy thinkers from the beginning and have patiently waited for this to get launched! If you want to hear all the details & get notified when doors open in a few weeks, get on the waitlist at filteritthroughabraincell.com/crazy. And yes, this is perfect for homeschoolers, but you can also use it for fun learning even if your teen attends regular school!
Alright, let’s dive into today’s new fallacy, the Argument from Omniscience. Now, let me start off by defining the word Omniscience. Omniscience is defined as the state of knowing everything, and isn’t an attribute that any human has or can have. Different faiths, including mine, as a Christian, believe that God is omniscient and has all knowledge of everyone and everything, but obviously, it’s not something people can do. So, back to our fallacy: The Argument from Omniscience happens when someone says stuff that they could only really know if they are all-knowing about a particular person or topic. They try to make an argument based on information they couldn’t possibly have, like knowing what someone else is thinking, or knowing EVERYTHING they’ve ever done in their life or what they do every minute of the day. This fallacy is also sometimes called the fallacy of Amazing Familiarity.
People committing this fallacy commonly use words like "all", "everyone", "no one", "everything", "always", or "never". A simple example would be if I were to say, “Everyone knows chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream.” Ok, so you can see that this is a fallacy because not only does not everyone believe chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream, but also, there’s no way that I could even know what everyone believes.
Another example would be if Kim said, “I know Landon would never cheat on his taxes. He’s an honest person and has never cheated on anything in his whole life!” Ok, well, maybe Kim is trying to speak to Landon’s good character, but can she REALLY know that Landon has NEVER cheated ever on anything in his life? Does she have that kind of omniscient knowledge? Not likely.
There are 2 big problems behind the Argument from Omniscience: First, People aren’t omniscient! Nobody knows EVERYTHING about another person. There’s no way they could. And you would need omniscience to know about everyone's beliefs or about everything in existence. And second, because the arguer does not have omniscience, there’s a very good chance that they could be wrong and that there are other examples that will prove them wrong. Because the Argument from Omniscience is based on things that the speaker cannot know, it’s sort of like the Appeal to Ignorance fallacy that we covered back in episode 28 and they’re both fallacious for the same reasons.
Now, speaking of religion, this fallacy happens sometimes when people claim to know God’s mind in areas He hasn’t specifically spoken about. It can sound like this, “I know the Bible says not to get drunk, but He wouldn’t mind if we get drunk in our own home.” Ok, can you see the fallacy here? When people make claims that they know the mind of God outside what God has said, we need to exercise discernment and I feel skepticism is definitely in order. Now, I’m not saying that people can’t hear from God, but when someone claims to know God’s mind, we just need to exercise discernment.
Question to ask yourself if you think you’re facing an Argument from Omniscience is this: “How could they possibly know that?’ *repeat*
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?”
