Part One: Analysing the Claim

Critical Thinking

Analyse the Claim: The Danger of Evasive Language

We have all heard the evasive sophistry of comments such as “Mistakes were made,” “Lessons were learned,” “Procedures were not followed,” emanating from the political, bureaucratic, and corporate worlds. What they all have in common is a conspicuous absence of agency. There is no personal or institutional attribution. There is no one and nothing to blame; it is just the way it is.

However, in this dynamic world that we live in, there is always someone or something that is responsible for the actions that occur, whether intentional or not. Bureaucracies, corporations, and politicians consistently and carefully frame their actions through words that strip away their responsibility for the consequences of their actions. If you cannot identify who did what, you cannot allocate responsibility. Truth and justice become buried in the shadows of a vague and blurry perception of the world.

This takes us directly into the language of Newspeak that George Orwell wrote about in his novel 1984. In the book, Newspeak is the official language used by Big Brother, the guise in which the unnamed Party presents itself to the world. It is designed to conceal rather than reveal. It was created and shaped to constrain thought itself by the use of euphemism, circumlocution, and inverted meanings. The aim is to make some ideas literally unsayable and therefore unthinkable. In such an environment, it becomes impossible to test a precise claim. Blur the words, and you blur the world.

In the face of this ocean of obfuscation, we need to use critical thinking to determine the real from dangerous misrepresentations that can manipulate us for nefarious purposes while blinding us to the truth.

The first thing to do in any discussion or debate is to pin down exactly what is being asserted.

George Orwell and Hannah Arendt both show why this matters. Orwell warned that political language has techniques that are meant to deceive and mislead, and Arendt showed how bureaucratic habits of speech and responsibility-shifting enable evildoers to thrive in an unaccountable fashion.

Arendt observed that atrocity advanced not only through fanatics but also through ordinary functionaries. She found them just as culpable for evil events although they hid themselves behind forms, memos, and procedures. In the world of bureaucracy, no one is responsible for anything; there is only process and implementation taking place in a moral void.

Our first step to counteract these tactics is to name an actor, an act, and a standard. The antidote to these incredibly common strategies of self-absolution is to make a rigorous analysis of any given claim.

Declare clearly what is being claimed:

• By whom

• About what

• In what terms

• Treat any vagueness as a red flag

These steps serve to establish clarity. Without clarity it is just a knife fight in thick fog.

Formulate the Claim in Plain, Active English

This rephrasing is very important. In grammar the active voice has to have an agent. The passive voice can, but only with additional phrasing, so in ordinary use there is no one or nothing accountable for the action. It can give the impression to the unwary that, rather magically, something happened all by itself. Hence, there is a fondness for its use by those who wish to hide responsibility.

• Vague: “Mistakes were made”

• Clear: “The person didn’t do their job properly.”

Of course, there are plenty of contexts where using the passive voice is perfectly fine, but in the kind of argumentation we are discussing here it is best to view any occurrence as a red flag.

Classify the Claim

This is necessary work. Deceit works by giving the impression of substance where none exists.

Determine the type of claim it is by asking if it is:

Descriptive: Something happened - The train arrived at 8:05 a.m.

This is an observed fact.

Causal: Something caused something else to happen - The train was delayed because of signal failure.

Attribution of a cause (signal failure) to an effect (delay).

Normative: We should do something - Passengers should arrive 10 minutes early to avoid missing the train.

This claim tells us what to do.

Predictive: Something will happen - If it keeps raining, the football match will be cancelled.

A prediction of the future based upon the claim.

Each of these claims demands its own evidence in the form of records, experiments, forecasts, and so forth.

The job in each case is to elicit and determine the appropriate evidence.

Define Terms

Orwellian Newspeak is intended to narrow the range of thought. It works by contracting or inverting meanings so we have phrases such as enhanced interrogation, collateral damage, friendly fire, and ethnic cleansing. Phrases like these serve to make appalling actions and events sound innocuous. They hide the true intent and extent of wrongdoing of the perpetrators from scrutiny.

Therefore, our job here is to ground these expressions by bringing them back to reality. We do this by using ordinary, straightforward language and definitions whenever possible unless a technical standard is cited.

Find What Warrants the Claim

Especially in bureaucratic settings, there is an unstated assumption that procedural compliance absolves moral responsibility. This is where responsibility is often laundered. Therefore, watch for false or misleading implications. Make assumptions explicit and check if they are relevant and apply to the case in hand.

This underlying assumption that there was no moral dimension to the bureaucratic process was Adolf Eichmann’s get-out clause according to Hannah Arendt. The names were all correct for the trains to the camps so he did nothing wrong.

“As for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do - to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care.”

Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil

Set a standard of proof that would satisfy the claim to your satisfaction.

Answers to most questions are rarely set in stone. Science, according to Karl Popper, requires that a claim be falsifiable. It has to be testable. And if it fails the test then scientific investigation moves on to the next experiment. But despite the inherent uncertainty we can carry on living and acting with the confidence of knowing that we have the best available knowledge for our purposes for the time being.

There may be no absolute proof but it is still important to set a standard of acceptable for a claim. Minor claims may need very little evidence. Major claims of any kind certainly do.

Simply ask yourself, and then specify, what level of evidence would change your mind. Would a document from a given date suffice to prove or disprove a claim? Would an agreed-upon third party authority suffice to settle the debate? Would a heavily cited paper or a highly replicated finding be enough?

Qualifying the Claim

These three simple questions will do a great deal of the legwork in your inquiry.

How strong is the claim?

Is it certain, likely, or provisional?

What are the best alternative explanations?

Analyse claims by inquiring about agency to determine who or what was responsible, what exactly happened, that the timeline is clearly determined, and terms are made explicit. Also ask, what are the implicit ideas that warrant the claim? By doing this you can avoid a lot of traps.

Discourse is then focused on facts and responsibility, which are the preconditions for good judgement and proper accountability.

This is how you avoid Newspeak’s narrow over-certainty and vacuous hedging.

Why This Matters

Orwell showed that language can be engineered to make dissent inexpressible by the devaluation of the meaning of words. Arendt showed how bureaucratese can make wrongdoing seem a routine matter.

We live in a world dense with information. Much of it is presented in such a manner that demands that you think and behave in a certain way.

All this activity serves to take our attention away from the germane and important, our money from our accounts, recruit us into supporting some sort of nefarious cause, and generally manipulate us in such a manner that good sense is simply no longer enough to maintain our sanity and our freedom to think accurately and make beneficial assessments for ourselves and the world around us.

Without a doubt, there are people deliberately trying to manipulate us for their own benefit, not ours. They will abuse language to have us believe something or not to believe anything at all. They will hide behind their messaging, accentuating falsehoods, and diverting attention by obscuring meaning; hiding their true aims through misleading or meaningless words and images.

This is only step one in the toolkit. There are four more parts to this series on critical thinking. Hopefully, by utilising these well-known critical thinking techniques we are giving ourselves a chance in what otherwise would be an unfair fight.

Bonus:

To be able to write clearly is essential for clear thinking. To help avoid becoming trapped by the improper use of language, which is hard to do as it wallpapers our civilisation, then George Orwell’s advice for more effective communication from his essay Politics and the English Language is a handy thing to remind us that good communication is a simple matter, though not always easy.

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These are links to the other parts of this critical thinking series:

Part One: Analysing the Claim

Part Two: Inference and Evaluation

Part Three: Biases and Fallacies

Part Four: Challenging a Claim

Part Five: Practical Tools

I have also written a primer covering the basics of critical thinking and you can download a free PDF copy here at my personal website tommurphy.me