LOGIC AND DECEPTIVE WORDS
By Jon Rappoport,
Author of the LOGIC AND ANALYSIS COURSE
MAY 21, 2010. When a report is issued that contains vague words, it turns out to be a mess. However, much of the time, people don’t ask for clarification of these terms. They allow words and phrases to float by like wispy clouds.
Even bigger trouble ensues when words seem to be straightforward but really aren’t.
As a medical reporter, I spent years rooting out such deceptive terms.
A few examples:
“Hundreds of people have TESTED POSITIVE for the disease.”
“Healthy people should avoid INFECTED patients if possible.”
“The patient who died was PREVIOUSLY HEALTHY, underlining the virulence of the virus in his body.”
On the surface, these words seem clear. But they usually aren’t.
What test was being used, after which hundreds of people were said to be positive for a disease? Was the test useful? Was it relevant?
I frequently discovered the test measured a certain response of the immune system—and this positive response traditionally meant the patient was healthy. But all of a sudden, the core meaning of the test had been turned on its head. It was now taken to mean the patient was ill, or would soon become ill.
It was such a boggling reversal I had trouble believing my eyes. And yet, there it was. It was as if medical researchers were saying, with no reasonable justification, “Healthy equals sick.”
Many people assume the word “infected” means sick. However, it often means “tested positive”—and then when “tested positive” was tracked down, it fell into the same bizarre trap I just described.
In a number of cases, where patients were reported to have died from a fast-acting viral infection, and were said to have been “previously healthy,” this turned out to be a complete fiction. The patients had long medical records listing other diseases, and the drugs that had been used to treat those diseases were demonstrably toxic and injurious. On top of that, some of the patients had a considerable street-drug history. Therefore, the notion that they were just fine until the marauder virus attacked them was totally false. Their immune systems, in fact, had been hanging on the ropes for a long time.
The deception in the terms “tested positive for the disease,” “infected,” and “previously healthy” required some investigation before they could be rightly understood.
I’ve seen many journalists who, when a “new epidemic” is announced, buy right into the official statistics on “infected” and “positive” people—without ever questioning what those terms actually mean to the medical bureaucrats who throw them around.
This is really a matter of logic, because deceptive terms torpedo the reasoning process. It’s like driving with faulty brakes and a hole in the gas tank. At some point, bad things are going to happen.
Many people can spot obviously vague words—but words that seem specific and official often escape notice. It takes work to dig below the surface and discover the words are being used deceptively.
Needless to say, schoolchildren aren’t shown these things. And most adults don’t learn about them, either.
I’d take this a step further. Very large numbers of people don’t even realize there is a reasoning process taking place. They don’t see that some press reports, for example, are trying to use information to come to a logical conclusion. Therefore, the whole question of whether certain key terms are being used in a deceptive fashion doesn’t concern them.
I call this ignorance “apple-pie state of mind.” You know, people say you can use apples unfit for eating and still make a good pie. Well, maybe. But in the realm of rational reasoning, if you have bad apples, you’re going to come to a bizarre and misleading conclusion.
This is one reason I created the LOGIC AND ANALYSIS course. I had to start somewhere. Education is the right place. Minds need to be sharpened. People need to understand what the reasoning process is all about, and how it can go right and how it can go wrong.
There are many ways it can go wrong. For both schoolchildren and adults, discovering these factors comes as a revelation. The clouds part and the sun illuminates the landscape, at last.
Just as many lawyers—who are taught a little logic—use their skills to argue any side in any case without a shred a conscience, many journalists use whatever reasoning skills they have to tell a good story, regardless of the truth. Governments and corporations sell their cases to the people, while obscuring the illogic of their presentations. We’re inundated with twisted logic, and it should be a central part of educational system to reveal this and root it out—with great specificity.
Recently, a Supreme Court decision was handed down concerning the extent to which children could be punished for very violent crimes. In its declaration, the Court majority opinion cited “international standards” on what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. This seemingly obvious phrase has broad appeal to people who want to “harmonize” the laws of nations. But it was a bizarre moment, to say the least. On what basis could the US Court refer to the laws and customs of other countries in deciding an American case?
Where is the detailed justification for such a move? Where is the detailed judicial debate that unearths and examines the acceptable method for making Supreme Court decisions? In other words, where is the logical argument that would lay out how the Court is supposed to deliberate and not supposed to deliberate?
The press covered the case in its usual fashion—these experts say this, and those experts say that. End of story. Move on.
It’s precisely this attitude that undermines a society.
Creating a demand for explicit and complete logic has to start in rooms of education.
Jon Rappoport is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a course for high school students and adults. He has been working as an investigative reporter for 25 years. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize early in his career, he has published articles in LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. He has taught in several private schools in New York and Los Angeles. At Amherst College, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy, he studied formal logic under Joseph Epstein, a revered professor of philosophy. Mr. Rappoport can be reached at qjrconsulting@gmail.com His work can be found at www.nomorefakenews.com and www.insolutions.info