Shhh! Hey folks. Witgren again. Gotta be careful this time because, well...you know. THEM. THEY might be around any corner, and who know what they might be up to? <nudge> <nudge> Know what I mean?
So, let’s get on with this <SHHHH! They’ll hear us!>, put on our tinfoil hats and get on with talking about today’s fallacious offering: the Furtive Fallacy.
Ok, so what is the Furtive Fallacy? This isn’t one that most people have probably heard of by that name, as it’s generally applied to works of history, but, at it’s heart you could generally substitute “conspiracy theory.”
To define it, the Furtive Fallacy is a fallacy in which past negative outcomes are deemed to be caused by hidden misconduct by decision makers and those in positions of power. Note the word hidden.
Historian David Hackett Fischer, author of many books including Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (Oh, lawzy, I thought that title seemed awfully familiar as I researched this one, and as I was typing this the light bulb finally came on. This was a required text for one my courses for my history degree, these many years ago! ) identified this fallacy as “belief that significant facts of history are necessarily sinister.”
This one has largely been applied to formal works of history. For example, before Fischer formalized the name, historian Richard Hostadter had already criticized historians of the Progressive Era as generally tending to assume that events of the time were largely driven by bribery and secret back-room dealing, with little or no evidence to support such claims. Fischer himself went after historian Charles Beard (who he referred to as “the Greatest Muckraker of Them All,” in case you needed to know Fischer’s opinion of him) as an example of this fallacy. For example, Beard believed that FDR and his associates secretly manipulated events in American policy behind the scenes to deliberately bring the US into World War 2.
Beard also does something similar in his An Economic Interpretation Of The Constitution Of The United States. In that work, Beard assumes the Founders had secret economic motives behind the creation of the Constitution that were not made explicit in the documentation (except for some cherry picking by Beard from Federalist 10), but were effectively only discussed behind the scenes.
Ok, so this one’s getting a little into the weeds except for the real history nerds, I think. So let’s pull it back out and look at what it means for us.
The keys to the Furtive Fallacy are 1) an assumption that a negative event must have a deliberate cause, rather than being a random event; 2) that cause is due to deliberate malfeasance by people in power, and, crucially, 3) little to no evidence exists to support that belief. Obviously, if substantial evidence exists, it’s not a fallacy!
While I’ve noted this has mainly been applied to works by historians — usually by other historians — there is some value to knowing this fallacy for everyone else. Because this fallacy is really the basis of a lot of conspiracy theories. Think about all the people who think that that CIA was behind the JFK assassination, for example. Or that the government covered up (and is still covering up) having a crashed alien spaceship at Area 51. Or that the Masons have run the world for centuries. Or that the entirety of the world’s governments and scientists are hiding the fact that the world is flat. And so on and so on. While other fallacies may be committed along the way in justifying the belief in these things, at the very heart of them is the absolute belief that powerful people are doing secret things to manipulate events behind the scenes — despite little to no actual evidence to support such a claim. The Furtive Fallacy is the foundational bedrock of a lot of conspiracy theories out there.
And that’s all for now, gotta run because I think I hear them comals;dfkj;aewkl’afffffffffffffff
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Edit: Forgot to add the list of other Bootcamp installments to date! See below!
Friends, the Bootcamp series (Cognitive Bias Bootcamp and Logical Fallacies Bootcamp) are companion series intended to explain common biases and errors in our thinking and how to spot them and avoid them. Links to the complete series to date are below, so if you’ve missed any past installments, browse away!
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp:
The Strawman
The Slippery Slope
Begging the Question
Poisoning the Well
No True Scotsman!
Ad Hominem
False Dilemma
Non Sequitur
Red Herring
Gamblers Fallacy
Bandwagon Fallacy
Appeal to Fear
The Fallacy Fallacy
Appeal to Personal Incredulity
Appeal to Authority
Special Pleading
Texas Sharpshooter
Post Hoc
Appeal to Nature
Cognitive Bias Bootcamp:
Bystander Effect
Curse of Knowledge
Barnum Effect
Declinism
In-Group Bias
Hindsight Bias
Survivor Bias