Claims, arguments, and misinformation

There’s currently a big debate in psychology and philosophy about misinformation. I’ve particularly enjoyed the work of Dan Williams, who argues that misinformation in a “narrow” sense—false claims whose falsehood can be reliably and objectively ascertained—is relatively rare. In most contexts, it’s simply not particularly effective to make such claims, since they’re too easy to call out. Neither is it necessary, since you can mislead people in other ways—e.g. by presenting true information selectively. 

I think these points are all good and true. But I also think it can be good to provide some additional nuance.

When people argue for a particular position, they don’t just make factual claims (false, misleading, or otherwise). They also give arguments. Opinion pieces, political speeches, seminar comments, and so on, typically consist of a web of interconnected arguments and claims, aimed to establish a conclusion. The debate about misinformation tends to focus on factual claims, which can give a one-sided view of the informational landscape.

Now from a psychological point of view, it seems to me that arguments are somewhat different from factual claims. First, most people seem to think that false claims are much more problematic than fallacious arguments. My sense is that most people think that it reflects worse on someone if they make a false claim than if they make a fallacious argument. Arguments are viewed as more “subjective”.

Relatedly, we are usually more directly interested in factual claims than in arguments. We have a direct interest in what’s true, whereas our interest in arguments is typically more indirect. Their primary function is to help us learn whether a claim is true or not. That doesn’t actually mean that arguments are less important, but people often underrate the importance of things whose effects are merely indirect.

Moreover, it can often be hard to identify a fallacious argument as such. The web of interconnected arguments is often quite complex, and it’s not always clear exactly what arguments are being made. Therefore, catching out fallacious arguments can require quite a bit of attention. By contrast, in my experience it tends to be clearer what the factual claims are; and consequently, people who make false claims run the risk of being called out by fact-checkers.

For these reasons, it seems to me that it’s easier to get away with fallacious arguments than with false claims. Importantly, I think that is also true of fallacious arguments that can be objectively and reliably ascertained as such. Because people think that the evaluation of arguments is relatively subjective, because they think that arguments are less important than claims, and because fallacious arguments aren’t caught out the way false claims are, even making blatantly fallacious arguments isn’t that risky.

If this is right, then our prior should be that fallacious arguments that can be objectively ascertained as such should be less rare than corresponding false claims. And in fact, that was my experience when I argument-checked opinion pieces and political debates a few years back. Whereas outright factual inaccuracies were indeed rare, obvious fallacies like bare assertion (not giving any argument whatsoever for a claim in clear need of argument) and blatant strawmen (misrepresentations of the other side’s views) were common, in my judgement.

Of course, you can question that judgement. Whether we can objectively and reliably establish that some arguments are fallacious is a huge issue I cannot settle here. But I want to emphasise that the point that fallacious arguments are easy to get away with should carry considerable weight. Blatantly fallacious arguments sloshing around is simply much less surprising than blatantly false claims sloshing around. That shifts the burden of proof towards those who want to argue that blatantly fallacious arguments are nevertheless rare.

Now, if it’s true that blatantly fallacious arguments are common, then that changes our overall epistemic situation quite a bit. Remember that the misinformation debate tends to focus on factual claims. If they had been the only game in town, then objectively wrong epistemic moves—that could be called out as such by experts—would have been relatively rare. But since people also make arguments, there is a case that objectively wrong epistemic moves are fairly common, after all.