Why Fallacies are False -- 014, Labels

One of the things that results in fallacies is labeling. You just saw that labeling conjugations as going by tense, instead of aspect, created strawman arguments in translations from Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek.

A number of fallacies involve labels.

One is the loaded label. You use a word with a large emotional load to turn people for or against something, and the label might not fit what you hang it on. But it can also be a false dilemma. Currently 10% of the US population is multi-racial; they don’t fit labels like black or white.

But more than that, I have replied to people time and again showing them that “black” or “white” is bullshit. I had the most fun with this on the anti-Semitic posts that said Jews were or were not white. It ignored the DNA reality, and issues of conversion.

The Semites originated in NE Anatolia between Lake Van and the Caucasus by 4000 BCE. Men descended from them in the direct male line have Y-chromosome subclades of J1 or J2. This includes Muslim Palestinians as well as Jews, Arabs, and Canaanites.

The Indo-European people originated in the same region and became distinct from other groups by 2500 BCE. Men descended from them in the direct male line have Y-chromosome subclades of R1a and R1b.

Jews descended from Indo-European converts, then, have Indo-European genes. And yes, these Jews can be targets of anti-Semitism, a label invented in the 1800s by a French political party for their own anti-Jewish policies.

Before the Semites, a people lived in the same region of NE Anatolia. One of their descendants turned up in Denmark. Her ancestors left Anatolia about 8000 BCE, at the time of development of a wheat strain which could not sow itself and required human intervention.

That is, on the cusp of domestication and agriculture.

Descendants of these emigrants washed up all over Europe. They were the Basques, and the people who built Stonehenge. (The Celts are Indo-Europeans.)

Our lady got the nickname Lola. She lived about 3700 BCE, before the Indo-Europeans existed. She had blue eyes. And she had dark skin.

1/ Most of you would say she was Caucasian because her people came from near the Caucasus.

2/ Others would say she wasn’t white because her skin was dark.

3/ But she had blue eyes, and some of you probably think that blue eyes go with white skin.

So now you see that all the “white” “black” “brown” stuff is bullshit. You need to look at the DNA.

Lola had K1e mitochondrial DNA, meaning that her foremothers were hunter-gatherers, not farmers like the Semites and Indo-Europeans. The mothers of the Neolithic early agricultural period had mtDNA haplogroup subclade T2b, although K subclades hung around because the migrants did not take all their women to Europe.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13549-9

You can say a lot of meaningless things with labels. You can use a word for an abstract concept and treat it as if it were concrete. This is reification, the problem with talking about evolutionary selection. Evolution is a concept. What really makes the selection is whatever events wipe out a population. Whatever population remains then has the opportunity to leave descendants that occupy the new blank spot in the ecology. They may evolve as they take advantage of it. That’s the lesson of Darwin’s Galapagos finches.

You can assume that everybody means the same thing by certain words. Any dictionary can show that this is false. Sometimes it’s a case of the referential fallacy, which assumes that a word says something inherent about an object or situation (its essence) when actually it’s a matter of perception or happenstance (accidence). That goes back to my vicious dogs discussion.

You could also be using a word in the wrong setting (context). When you talk about “intent” in a courtroom, you mean that no responsible person would do whatever was done, unless they desired the given outcome which is covered by the legal code. When your lawyer then goes out in front of news cameras and says you didn’t intend to do it, she’s trying to confuse the public into thinking you couldn’t possibly be found guilty. The name for this fallacy is ambiguity.

You can also have the redefinition fallacy. When somebody says “If we define X as [whatever]”, watch out because they’re getting into redefinition. Make them get out the OED and prove that some group of people really define it that way in the context of which you are speaking. The OED only adds an entry based on multiple uses by multiple people over some period of time in multiple environments. A discussion does not stand or fall by just one person’s definition of a word.

One sign of a cult is to have special connotations for certain words; knowing those connotations is how you show you are part of the cult. This partakes of the redefinition fallacy, but it’s also part of that litmus test to see if you’re part of the cultural subset.

And if people start calling you names for not agreeing with them, that’s the ad hominem fallacy and they automatically lose.