Logic

It seems to me that one of the great failings of our educational system is that we never teach our children how to think, and by that I do not mean that we need to try to indoctrinate them into some particular ideology or collection of thoughts. I mean they never learn how to reason properly and how to bring logic to an argument, a conversation, an election, or a decision, whether it is personal or for business. Americans tend to founder about logically. (This may also be true in other nations, but that is not my concern. I am an American, and Americans are all I really know about. For me to go beyond that boundary would be unreasonable.)

This subject has been on my mind recently because of politics and responses to recent posts of mine concerning Shakespeare and the mythical “authorship question.”

Notions put forward by the Clinton campaign as their vision of a cakewalk to coronation has fallen to pieces have repeatedly been self-serving, desperate, and lacking in logic. I’ll take a couple of quick examples to show what’s wrong.

One argument that really gets under my skin is the one that states that Hillary should be the candidate because she can “win in the big states.” The problem with this is that there is no logical connection between the results from these states in the primaries and the results in the general election. Some of those states are solidly Republican, and no Democrat could take them in the general election. Others are strongly Democratic, and unlikely to tumble the other way regardless of the candidate. And in pick ‘em states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, who’s to say how an Obama/McCain election would play out? The argument is nonsense because it relies on an analogy that cannot be made.

The second one that grates on my nerves is the one about certifying the delegates from Michigan and Florida based on the results of the primaries they held outside of party rules. The Clintons try to cast this as being about voting rights, which it isn’t. No one was disenfranchised. There is no requirement that any state hold a primary in order for that state’s party to determine how its delegates will be selected for the National convention. There is no legal requirement for any system or set of systems to be used.

However, the Democratic parties in both these states were warned by the Democratic National Committee that their delegates would not be seated if they held their primaries before Feb. 5th, and they did so anyway. At the time, they figured that there would be some runaway leader and that it wouldn’t matter whether their delegates were seated or not. It must also be remembered that all the candidates involved agreed to this procedure. It didn’t sneak up on anybody, least of all the Clinton campaign. Harold Ickes, one of that campaign’s bigwigs, signed off on that rule when it was made. The good Senator and a prominent member of her family only started worrying about “disenfranchising voters” when it became politically expedient for them to do so. In this case, the argument is flawed because it is not properly based in the facts.

Just yesterday, she was quoted as saying, “I keep telling people, no Democrat has won the White House since 1916 without winning West Virginia,” which attempts to establish causality where none exists. Which is so much of what you get from the Oxfordians.

In their enthusiasm for their cause, they tend to fall into a series of logical traps, one of the most common of which is assuming causality where none can be shown. In the comments to a post called “Beards,” a commenter writes that Shakespeare’s name is not on any quarto published before 1598. He then notes that Lord Burghley–the queen’s chief adviser and the most powerful man in England at the time–died in 1598. He then avers (although I have not taken the time to track down the facts because I have a job and a family that come before this argument) that Shakespeare’s name first appears on a quarto after Burghley’s death. He then comes to the conclusion that Burghley’s death somehow precipitated the emergence of Shakespeare’s name on the quartos.

However, this is, quite technically, a logical fallacy. It is called post hoc ergo propter hoc, and it is the supposition that simply because one event follows another that the first event caused the second. Other events–such as the jailing of the printer who published a pirated edition of Romeo & Juliet–are ignored and skipped over. Can they show cause and effect from the facts? No. Since they wish to see a connection, the connection is formed.

Another example (and many more can be found) of the poor reasoning associated with the Oxfordian cause is their assertion that the Earl must have written Hamlet because he was once abducted by pirates and, in a letter from Hamlet to Horatio, it is claimed that Hamlet’s ship was beset by pirates. There is, of course, the usual twisting of facts, and Hamlet is made out to have been dumped naked on the shores of Denmark when his letter, in fact, states that he was treated well and released. However, without the twisting, the occurrence of pirates in both the life of the Earl and the fictional Prince of Denmark sounds coincidental. It must be jerryrigged in order for it to make sense as a “clue.” Of course, the whole logic is flawed. That Hamlet was abducted by pirates is nothing more than a plot device and nothing that the writer couldn’t have devised without having had the experience for himself. Further, using the same logic, I can state that there are pirates in Treasure Island, and that therefore the Earl is also the author of the works of Robert Louis Stephenson. It’s all wishful thinking and not based in fact and the scientific method.

Now, to be fair, Shakespeare’s orthodox biographers are not immune to to such capering. Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World read more like a boy’s adventure novel than a serious biography, and the only reason why I didn’t fling it out the window while reading it was because I was on a plane at the time and doing so would have condemned 150 innocent people to a fiery death. It is speculative and fruity with phrases such as “he must have” and “we can infer,” phrases that are merely cover for the plain and simple fact that the author is making most of it up out of whole cloth. (The Oxfordians prefer formulations such as “many people believe,” which really means “because I assert.”)

Claire Asquith wrote a book called Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare in which she puts forward the theory that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic and that he merely wrote his plays as an excuse to transmit coded messages to the other secret Catholics in his audience. This one I had to put aside before I harmed someone by turning it into a projectile. It suffers from the same basic flaw that I find in the Oxfordian cause: “Evidence” is manufactured by the simple desire to find it. She manages to turn these magnificent, breathing, and breathtaking plays into a sort of Orphan Annie decoder ring to no one’s benefit.

There have been two other major biographies in recent years that I have read, Michael Wood’s Shakespeare and Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography. Both try valiantly to hew to the facts, but can’t in the end. Michael Wood, unfortunately, hasn’t met the piece of gossip or most far-fetched connection that he doesn’t love, and he speculates wildly about things that can’t be known. Ackroyd, whose book is chockful of useful information about Shakespeare and the period he lived in, often falls into the trap described above in which he uses phrases like “he must have” to dress up the assertion of pure opinion as statements of verifiable fact. It’s too bad. It’s a good book, but it could have been truly a fine one with less speculation.

The difference between the Oxfordian (and other pretenders) cause and the orthodox view, however, is that it is possible to write an orthodox book that is based entirely in fact. I can say this because the best of the recent biographies, Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage, does precisely that. Bryson is to-the-point and entertaining, and his book is the perfect starter volume for the person who is just dangling a toe in the biography of Shakespeare.

It’s fun to speculate. I am hardly immune to it. However, there is a difference between speculation and scholarship. The human mind is a wonderful thing, but it likes to see order and patterns where none exist. This is why we can look at clouds and see baskets of kittens and Moe hitting Curly with a wrench in their forms. This is why we have the scientific method. You form a hypothesis and test it against the facts. And if that works to the disadvantage of your hypothesis, you don’t re-engineer the facts and skip the ones you don’t like. You get a new hypothesis. One based in facts, not in suppositions.