Hey what’s up Thinkers! Kathy Gibbens here…
Let’s start off today’s episode by reviewing a fallacy we covered earlier this season, the Big Brain/Little Brain Fallacy. The Big Brain/Little Brain fallacy happens when a leader tells their followers to not ‘worry their little brains’ about something and let the leader do all the thinking for them because they’re smarter or have superior thinking abilities.
The question to ask yourself when someone is trying to convince you that you should think with their brain is this: “Is it really true that I should outsource my thinking to that person?”
If you want to review or hear more about this fallacy, go back & check out Episode 158.
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Alright, let’s dive into today’s new fallacy, the Fallacy of Every and All. The Fallacy of Every and All happens when someone makes a statement that contains words like ‘every’ and ‘all’ as well as words like ‘some’ and ‘few’ and then they mix those words up. And I know that sounds confusing, but let me give you an example.
Suppose I were to say, “Everyone knows someone…I am someone…therefore everyone knows me!” You might chuckle and say that my logic is flawed, and you’d be right. In the argument I’m making, "everyone knows someone," the word "someone" means "just some other person" whereas in the second part of the sentence, I’ve changed it to mean "a very specific person...me". What I’ve done is I’ve equivocated or mixed up the meanings of the word "someone". It seems like I’m making some sort of clever statement, but really I’m just mixing up words.
The problem behind the thinking here is that the person committing this fallacy is treating words like ‘someone’ and ‘everyone’ as if they’re equally interchangeable, when that’s not actually the case. If this was Algebra, they’d be saying that X=Y, when in reality, X does not actually equal Y. This fallacy may sound a little bit familiar and that’s because the Fallacy of Every and All is a combination of two fallacies you’ve already learned about: The Part to Whole Fallacy, which we covered in episode 35 and Equivocation, which we covered back in episode 14. They’re equivocating the usage of certain words that shouldn’t be equivocated.
This fallacy reminded me of this cute little story that I’ve heard several times in my life. I don’t know that it’s an EXACT example of this fallacy, but it definitely goes along with it and it’s a cute, real-world example of what this fallacy can sound like, so I thought I’d read this to you. It’s called ‘That’s Not My Job’ and it goes like this: “This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.” Confusing? Yeah! That’s what happens when somebody commits the Fallacy of Every and All. See what I did there?
Question to ask yourself if you think you’re facing the Fallacy of Every and All is this: “Hold on, did they just mix those words up?” *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?”
