catch as catch can

[quarrel]

This bit of trivia came up on Jeopardy: one early draft title of Catch-22 was Catch-11, but it was rejected for being too similar to Ocean’s Eleven, which had just been released one year earlier.

There is this thing called the “tone argument”, which is when you dismiss an argument (or simply don’t listen) because you don’t like how forceful or emotional the speaker is, irrespective of whether the point and/or reasoning is sound. It’s frequently employed in discussions of racial and sexual equality, where a person, frustrated by a lifetime of illegal discrimination and negative societal bias, fights hard for equality and is told that she would be more likely to convince people she’s right if she weren’t so insistent. There is this sad negative correlation where the more severe a social injustice is, the less likely its victims are to be viewed as capable of rational participation in addressing the issue. Catch-22.

Claims of belief-influencing bias are another example. “You are a member of a privileged class that suffers from, and perpetuates, a widespread notion that there is no privileged class.” Once again, it’s a Catch-22. You cannot respond to this claim without supporting it. If you believe it, you support it explicitly, and if you don’t believe it, you act the way it predicted and thus support it implicitly. Fortunately, this one’s easier to break out of: point out the logic-lock and start bringing evidence in. (If you can. You might be wrong, you know?) You could also point out the non-falsifiable nature of the claim and use that to invalidate it as an argument, but that goes over laypeople’s heads.

Here’s another one, kind of: “Members of Political Party A lie significantly more often than members of Political Party B.” If this is true, the press is caught in a Catch 22: truthfully report the full extent of the issue, and thus seem biased and lose credibility, or avoid (or just downplay) the matter and fail in their duty to inform the public.

If it’s true. Because that’s contested.

• “Person A lies. Person B lies too. Ergo they’re both equally bad.” I hear this mostly from people who dislike politics.
• “Person A lies more often than Person B…according only to people who double-check Person A’s statements with more scrutiny than they use on B.” This was — allegedly — the reasoning behind the Mitt Romney campaign pollster who said, “Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” (I say “allegedly” because the one and only time I brought this up in a face-to-face discussion, I was berated for going by an interpretation of what the speaker meant rather than a direct reading of what he actually said. Alas, I did not have the exact quote with me to defend my heterodox stance. I’m also not sure it would have mattered.)
• “Person A lies more often than Person B, but Person B lies more severely than Person A.” I’ll be honest: this approach makes a lot of sense to me. Consider if I accuse you of being a left-handed red-haired woman and you claim I’m ineligible to vote due to a felony conviction. I’ve lied up to three times, but you’ve still made the more serious faulty allegation. Granted, there’s still the matter of determining how serious any given lie is, but the issue of whether lies vary in severity is, I would hope, cut and dried.