Is MIMS Affirming the Consequent?

Brendan Nyhan accuses Mike Huckabee of a logical fallacy:

Mr. Huckabee, for his part, responded with trademark humor. “The Air Force has a saying that says if you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target,” he said. “I’m catching the flak; I must be over the target.”

This is basically a form of affirming the consequent. If you're over the target, you'll catch flak and Huckabee is catching flak "therefore" he must be over the target. Nyhan says that MIMS makes the same error in "This is Why I'm Hot":

In particular, he thinks "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly / You ain't [hot] 'cause you're not [fly]" is an example of the fallacy. I disagree. Nyhan's reading depends on construing MIMS as trying to make a logical inference with "'cause" as a material conditional but there's no need to do that. Interpretive charity suggest that we should understand MIMS to be making two logically independent causal claims: (1) he's hot because he's fly and (2) you're not hot because you're not fly. Perhaps MIMS believes that x is hot if and only if x is fly, or perhaps he doesn't. I don't, however, see a fallacy here.

Comments

Both of you are assuming that "You ain't 'cause you're not" means "You ain't [hot] 'cause you're not [fly]". But there's no need for those to be the antecedents. If it is

I'm hot 'cause I'm fly
You ain't [fly] 'cause you're not [hot]

then it is a simple instance of the contrapositive, which would follow logically.

Posted by Cryptic Ned | January 11, 2008 4:36 PM

funny. true.

Posted by kay | January 11, 2008 4:36 PM

as an aside, why is that Mims' magnum opus causes such logical debates? here we are on the internet having a debate and hitler hasn't been mentioned yet!

obviously, mims is hot. otherwise such a thing would not be possible.

Posted by James Hare | January 11, 2008 4:39 PM

The issue here is whether the conversational "if" is the same as the logical "if" you studied in college. It's not.

Parental types often say things like "if you don't eat your beans, you can't watch the movie tonight" implicating that if you do eat your beans [all other things being equal], you can watch the movie.

Anti-aircraft defenses are, in all likelihood, placed over the target -- rather than in the middle of nowhere. Consequently, Huckabee's inference is probably OK.

Posted by Warren | January 11, 2008 4:43 PM

Parental types often say things like "if you don't eat your beans, you can't watch the movie tonight" implicating that if you do eat your beans [all other things being equal], you can watch the movie.

I think that's the same as the logical "if". By saying that the parents are saying that there is no possibility that a failure to eat the beans will be followed by watching the movie...but they are not necessarily saying that eating the beans is guaranteed to be followed by the movie. They reserve the option to come up with another reason to deny the child the movie.

Posted by Cryptic Ned | January 11, 2008 4:45 PM

No. If you are not hot "because" you are not fly, then being fly is a required condition to be hot. Is it not? Its a necessary but not sufficient condition, as I understand it.

Posted by Patrick | January 11, 2008 4:46 PM

Mims isn't saying that being fly is necessary for being hot, he's just saying that he, personally, is hot because he's fly. Other people might be hot for other reasons. That's why it doesn't follow to say that because someone isn't fly, he must not be hot.

Posted by Cryptic Ned | January 11, 2008 4:48 PM

Warren, that's not true, either. The bean-eating is a necessary but not sufficient condition for watching the movie. If you do not eat your beans, you can't watch the movie tonight. If you do eat your beans, you can or cannot watch the movie. Your moving-watching ability is still indeterminant. You can't just elide over the "all other things being equal," which is, in fact, central to the logical problem presented here.

Ned, I initially found myself sympathetic to your argument, but I think the third line gives enough context that we can assume that in both cases, the subject is initially being described as either hot or not hot, and is only causally being described that way due to relative flyness.

"This is why, this is why, this is why I'm hot"

I do, however, think it's logically not a fallacy because, as Matt points out, we might be seeing the If-and-only-if construction being implied here. I think that's exactly what we're seeing. In fact, that's a pretty common use of not being explicit about the condition. By failing to actually use the word "hot" or "fly" to describe "you" in contrast to "I," I think MIMS is very much asking us to infer the "if and only if" conditional structure.

Posted by jhupp | January 11, 2008 4:49 PM

You can be over a target and not catch flak.

Posted by Sirkowski | January 11, 2008 4:50 PM

It's not the fallacy of affirming the consequent. It's a version of the fallacy of denying the antecedent. Huck's argument looks like this:

If not-P, then not-Q

P

Therefore, Q

Posted by Dan Kervick | January 11, 2008 4:50 PM

Actually, Cryptic Ned, if he says that you are not hot "because" you are not fly then being fly is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for being hot. Being fly alone may or may not make you hot, but you cannot be hot without being fly.

Posted by Patrick | January 11, 2008 4:50 PM

I don't know about MIMS but Huckabee is not affirming the consequent. He's denying the antecedent.

Posted by Fred C. Dobbs | January 11, 2008 4:52 PM

Actually, Cryptic Ned, if he says that you are not hot "because" you are not fly then being fly is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for being hot. Being fly alone may or may not make you hot, but you cannot be hot without being fly.

Correct, if you assume the antecedents that Yglesias is assuming. But Mims's second statement makes a different logical claim from the first statement. Clearly if you take the two statements together they imply the "if and only if" relation, but one doesn't follow from the other. This is why we need to be sure about the antecedents before we can say that the "if and only if" relation exists.

Posted by Cryptic Ned | January 11, 2008 4:53 PM

everybody's seen the Village Voice MIMS vendiagrams, right?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | January 11, 2008 4:55 PM

I'm confused. If I fly over the target, then am I hot or not?

Posted by g | January 11, 2008 4:56 PM

Ned--

Yes that makes sense. Though it would seem to be a stretch to think that the two clauses were independent given the context, no?

Posted by Patrick | January 11, 2008 4:58 PM

Yes, if there was some other point in the song where he describes why he (or someone else) is fly, it would be more ambiguous. But he only goes so far as to describe why he is hot.

Posted by Cryptic Ned | January 11, 2008 5:00 PM

Is it possible that MIMS is saying "You ain't [hot] because you not [hot]"? The tautology conveying that your notness is irreducible and inexplicable by anything other than itself.

Posted by Matt Weiner | January 11, 2008 5:01 PM

Please don't ever mention MIMS again.

Posted by D. | January 11, 2008 5:03 PM

Oh to be a blogger!

Posted by freddiemac | January 11, 2008 5:04 PM

Matt Weiner: If you're hot you're hot, if you're not, you're not. Huckabee is not so hot for now and will catch flak if he's hot again. He will never be fly.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | January 11, 2008 5:14 PM

He's pretty fly -- for a white guy.

Posted by Rev. Samuel Ely | January 11, 2008 5:17 PM

If we take Mims to be logically consistent, then he's empirically inconsistent, because the concept "fly" does not exclusively contain the property "hot", nor is hotness a prerequisite to being fly. Mims could be arguing that being fly and being hot are synonymous, but who would be convinced of that? Interpretive charity doesn't work in this case, because it trades one problem for another. I would rather believe Mims is making a logical fallacy than an empirical mistake, because the former is less unflattering than the latter.

Posted by gerontion | January 11, 2008 5:33 PM

Dan is right, if we want to treat this as a formal fallacy. But Huckabee is actually just substituting his meaning for other people's activity. This is a common, cheap debating tactic. An example would be, "well I got you all riled up, so I must have struck a nerve." In this instance the speaker reassigns significance to someone else's apparently forceful speech. The insinuation is that your reaction means that they are right, when in fact we might be "riled up" because the speaker is an annoying asshole.

In terms of actual function, this is a strawman, simply.

Brendan Nyhan accuses Mike Huckabee of a logical fallacy

Later, Brendan warns that water might turn out to be wet.
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | January 11, 2008 5:38 PM

MIMS doesn't do logical fallacies.

Posted by Peter K. | January 11, 2008 5:40 PM

I'm confused. If I fly over the target, then am I hot or not?

That depends. Are you taking flack? If so, it is reasonable to conclude that, in the socioaesthetic context of the AAA gunners, you are indeed fly. Alternately, it is also possible that radar returns indicated that you were sufficiently flylike to justify opening fire, so don't start acting all big.
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | January 11, 2008 5:41 PM

He doesn't say "you ain't cause you're not," he says "you ain't cause you not."

Wonk minds often miss the poetry, don't they?

Posted by Garuda | January 11, 2008 5:44 PM

Cryptic Ned- if you tell a child, "If you don't eat your beans, you can't watch the movie," and the child eats his beans, and you deny the movie because the child hasn't finished his homework, you know what the child will say? He will say, "YOU PROMISED!"

And he will be correct.

There is a literature on this. Try searching Grice and conversational implicature.

Posted by Bloix | January 11, 2008 5:48 PM

Flak could be over a distant approach and nowhere near the target. So, Huckabee is fallacious deductively and incorrect inductively.

But have you considered Faith?

Posted by putnam | January 11, 2008 5:53 PM

Brendan Nyhan accuses Mike Huckabee of a logical fallacy

Stop attacking Huckabee's religion.

Posted by Al | January 11, 2008 6:30 PM

--I'm confused. If I fly over the target, then am I hot or not?

--That depends. Are you taking flack?

But if you're taking flak, you might crash and burn, which means you no longer fly over the target, but you're still hot--maybe too hot.

Perhaps we could ask John McCain for his take on this . . .

Posted by rea | January 11, 2008 6:35 PM

If you're not catching flak, you are not over a target = "Over a target" is a prerequisite to catching flak. But there might be other ways to catch flak. So catching flak does not NECESSARILY MEAN that you are over a target. But it certainly doesn't mean you're not catching flak, and is, in life, a good indicator that you are over a target. Plus it was a joke.

Posted by Phoebe | January 11, 2008 6:54 PM

I mean it doesn't mean you're not over the target. What is my problem? Why am I here and not doing something productive? These are true questions I should be pondering.

Posted by Phoebe | January 11, 2008 6:57 PM

Er. Matt, was there some point to this entire post?

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 11, 2008 7:14 PM

This is one of the best posts I have ever seen. Seriously.

Posted by S. PIhlaja | January 11, 2008 7:26 PM

MIMS appears to be using the two statements to demonstrate the proposition that "hot iff fly." Like MY says, nothing wrong with that.

However, this is a fairly trivial statement, since according to the Urban Dictionary, "fly" can be defined as "hot." MIMS, on grounds of significance, we request that you revise and resubmit your paper.

Posted by Mr. Noah | January 11, 2008 7:32 PM

If you're catching flak, then there is a high probability that you are either over, near, or approaching a target. A target. But Fred and Huck would disagree about what target Huck is over and what target he should be over.

You can easily be catching flak because you're over a target, but be over the wrong target.

Posted by AndrewN | January 11, 2008 7:34 PM

Are you taking flack? If so, it is reasonable to conclude that, in the socioaesthetic context of the AAA gunners, you are indeed fly...

I called those guys once. They towed my car and defended me against a low-altitude strafing attack. Which was much more useful than the time I called the AA gunners and ended up enrolled in a twelve-step program for dealing with enemy aircraft.

Posted by James Gary | January 11, 2008 7:40 PM

I have never seen a WHOLE COMMENT SECTION be a running troll before!!! This MUST be the greatest troll ever!!

Posted by WTF??? | January 11, 2008 8:28 PM

Doesn't the Air Force also have a saying that: "If you're not over the target, bomb the Chinese embassy instead"? And didn't Confucius say: "If you think the Canadian parliament convenes in the National Igloo, you might be a redneck"?

Posted by rapoli | January 11, 2008 8:31 PM

A bomber, say, 50 miles from its target can clearly catch flak on its approach - unless, and only unless, it's out of range of the enemy's anti-aircraft guns.

That's it. We're done.

Posted by Nathan Hammersmith | January 11, 2008 8:50 PM

Actually, we can call it affirming the consequent OR denying the antecedent. That's because Huckabee's conditional, "If not-Q, then not-P," is logically equivalent to "If P then Q." Do a truth table if you're skeptical. So depending on which version of the proposition you prefer, either he's affirming the consequent or denying the antecedent (if we interpret his other premise as equivalent to a double negation).

Hilarious post, man. The blogosphere could use more logic.

Posted by Brian | January 11, 2008 10:21 PM

DeKonztruk Da Text, Dawg.

Posted by mofo | January 11, 2008 10:29 PM

Interesting.
I'm tempted to disagree with both of you. I read in Mims the following axioms:

Posit a possible world, called MimsWorld.
MimsWorld contains only 1 entity that is fly.
Clearly Mims is fly. This is so self-evident as to eliminate the need for linguistic assertion of such.

Since it is indisputable that what is fly is hot, Mims is hot. And given the above axioms, you ain't cause you not.

Posted by Leon | January 12, 2008 12:44 AM

I’m catching the flak; I must be over the target.

Hasn't Huckabee heard of friendly fire? That's what primaries are about, after all.

Posted by Down and Out of Sài Gòn | January 12, 2008 1:40 AM

I don't know if MIMS is affirming the consequent.. I just know he's a really sh*tty rapper.

Posted by Xeynon | January 12, 2008 3:28 AM

Weren't there studies done after the earlier US/Iraq dustup that showed that Patriot missiles were far less effective than we had been led to believe? If Patriots aren't so hot, could they ever fly?

Posted by MikeJ | January 12, 2008 3:49 AM

I will defend Huckabee, up to a point.

There is a rule of inference that allows for his conclusion. This rules is used in artificial inteligence, in particular, in design of expert systems and is called "closed world assumption". Basically, it says that until you encounter symptoms to the contrary, you assume that you know all the relevant objects and rules.

An example cited in a lecture is like that: can you predict what will happen when you turn the key in the ignition of your car? Unless you know that there is a problem with the car, you will predict that the engine will start.

In this case, one can say that we are actually aware of the possibility of a dead battery etc. but we make a prediction based on conditional probability. Say, in at least 999 of of thousand cases in similar circumstances the car engine starts. But you must often act without such extensive experience, hence the rule.

This however opens two questions. One is: what is the content of the closed world of Michael Huckabee?

To formulate the second question, I will cite a military manual (not American one): "The target is the place where the target is located, when treated as a target". This is a deep philosophical observation. The target is a complex being: it has physical manifestations, but it is also the state of mind of the targeting person. For example, the target of the "fair tax" consists of "lucky duckies", the poor and lower middle class who pay hardly any income tax, while the rich would pay much less than now. And if you go after this target you get some flak.

Posted by piotr | January 12, 2008 7:06 AM

I once saw a biker wearing a t shirt with this message: "If you ain't a Harley rider, you ain't sh*t." I sought clarification by genially asking him, "Excuse me, sir, but does your shirt imply that if you ARE a Harley rider, you ARE sh*t?"

Did I misstep socially?

Posted by Will | January 12, 2008 7:15 AM

If you're a Harley rider, you are *the* shit, which is different from just being shit.

Posted by mq | January 12, 2008 11:46 AM

Pedantry is close to humor.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | January 12, 2008 2:11 PM

Do I read correctly that Mr Huckabee informed the media - and therefore the terrorists - how the Air Force finds its targets?

Posted by Hans B | January 12, 2008 5:30 PM

I haven't read other comments so if I'm repeating, apologies.

Huckabee's logic here makes me think of the usual MSM alibi when they get flak from left and right: "Well, we're equally hated by both sides so we're probably hitting it just about right..."

Posted by DairyStateDad | January 13, 2008 10:23 AM