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SECTION II.: FALLACIES, BY WHOM TREATED OF HERETOFORE. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2 [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 2.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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SECTION II.

FALLACIES, BY WHOM TREATED OF HERETOFORE.

The earliest author extant, in whose works any mention is made on the subject of fallacies, is Aristotle; by whom, in the course or rather on the occasion of his treatise on logic, not only is this subject started, but a list of the species of argument to which this denomination is applicable, is undertaken to be given. Upon the principle of the exhaustive method at so early a period employed by that astonishing genius, and, in comparison of what it might and ought to have been, so little turned to account since, two is the number of parts into which the whole mass is distributed,—fallacies in the diction, fallacies not in the diction: and thirteen (whereof in the diction six, not in the diction seven) is the number of the articles distributed between those two parts.*

As from Aristotle down to Locke, on the subject of the origination of our ideas (deceptious and undeceptious included,)—so from Aristotle down to this present day, on the subject of the forms, of which such ideas or combinations of ideas as are employable in the character of instruments of deception, are susceptible,—all is a blank.

To do something in the way of filling up this blank, is the object of the present work.

In speaking of Aristotle’s collection of fallacies, as a stock to which, from his time to the present, no addition has been made, all that is meant is, that whatsoever arguments may have had deception for their object, none besides those brought to view by Aristotle, have been brought to view in that character and under that name: for between the time of Aristotle and the present, treatises of the art of oratory, or popular argumentation, have not been wanting in various languages and in considerable number; nor can any of these be found in which, by him who may wish to put a deceit upon those to whom he has to address himself, instruction in no small quantity may not be obtained.

What in these books of instruction is professed to be taught, comes under this general description:—viz. how,—by means of words aptly employed, to gain your point,—to produce upon those with whom you have to deal—those to whom you have to address yourself, the impression, and, by means of the impression, the disposition most favourable to your purpose, whatsoever that purpose may be.

As to the impression and disposition, the production of which might happen to be desired—whether the impression were correct or deceptious—whether the disposition were, with a view to the individual or community in question, salutary, indifferent, or pernicious—was a question that seemed not in any of these instances to have come across the author’s mind. In the view taken by them of the subject, had any such question presented itself, it would have been put aside as foreign to the subject; exactly as, in a treatise on the art of war, a question concerning the justice of the war.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Cicero, and Quintilian, Isaac Voss, and, though last and in bulk least, yet not the least interesting, our own Gerard Hamilton (of whom more will be said,) are of this stamp.

Between those earliest and these latest of the writers who have written on this subject and with this view, others in abundance might be inserted; but these are quite enough.

After so many ages past in teaching with equal complacency and indifference the art of true instruction and the art of deception—the art of producing good effects and the art of producing bad effects—the art of the honest man and the art of the knave—of promoting the purposes of the benefactor, and the purposes of the enemy of the human race;—after so many ages during which, with a view to persuasion, disposition, action, no instructions have been endeavoured to be given but in the same strain of imperturbable impartiality, it seemed not too early, in the nineteenth century, to take up the subject on the ground of morality, and to invite common honesty for the first time to mount the bench, and take her seat as judge.

As to Aristotle’s fallacies—unless his petitio principii and his fallacia, non causa pro causâ, be considered as exceptions,—upon examination, so little danger would be found in them, that, had the philosopher left them unexposed to do their worst, the omission need not have hung very heavy upon his conscience: scarce in any instance will be discovered any the least danger of final deception—the utmost inconvenience they seem capable of producing seems confined to a slight sensation of embarrassment. And as to the embarrassment, the difficulty will be, not in pronouncing that the proposition in question is incapable of forming a just ground for the conclusion built upon it, but in finding words for the description of the weakness which is the cause of this incapacity—not in discovering the proposition to be absurd, but in giving an exact description of the form in which the absurdity presents itself.

[* ]Σοφισμα, whence our English word sophism, is the word employed by Aristotle. The choice of the appellation is singular enough: σοφος is the word that was already in use for designating a wise man. It was the same appellation that was commonly employed for the designation of the seven sages. Σοφιστης, whence our sophist, being an impretative of Σοφος, was the word applied, as it were in irony, to designate the tribe of wranglers, whose pretension to the praise of wisdom had no better ground than an abuse of words.