October 5, 2009 was the first day for Justice Sototmayor in the U. S. Supreme Court. Two cases were argued that day before the Court. Justice Sotomayor was very assertive during the arguments.

Several commentators observed that Justice Stomayor asked more questions of the advocates on her first day than Justice Thomas has asked during his entire time on the Supreme Court.

Therefore, __________.

One thing about which we can be relatively certain, most humans will never allow such a fact to just sit.  We will make meaning from that fact. The event occurred, and the result is simply too juicy, too rife with possibility for us to simply observe that one Justice almost never says anything during Court proceedings, and the other will apparently say a lot.

Assumptions will go to work, and soon enough, an inference will appear. I know mine went to work immediately upon hearing the observations of the commentators.  I refuse to think: “indecipherable reality.” I want to place this event into a pattern of meaning, and I will.

Because we have this tendency to infer, and to not be all that careful at times about the quality of the inference, we can almost always upon encountering an inference, issue a CT alert.

Most rapists are male.  Therefore, most males are rapists.

When you look at a fallacy after it has been so-labelled, the sloppiness is apparent. Yet, think of the injustice done to citizens of arabic appearance simply because most members of Al Quaeda have that appearance, and are consequently deemed “especially suspect.” An Indian business person going through airline screening might as well get mentally prepared for the strong possibility that he or she will be searched.

With this fallacy, the problem is not so much the qualifier itself, but with the relationship between the qualifier and the entity it is modifying. The ease with which this fallacy is committed should alarm us anew about the need to be especially alert when we see numerical qualifiers.

President Carter recently announced to what he surely knew would be an impending firestorm of public outrage that  ”I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

Yikes. How in the world would one get the numbers to make a claim like that one?

If only he had not said “overwhelming portion” his claim, it seems to me would have been defensible. The magnitude of qualifiers matters big time in terms of the quality of an argument. His reasoning that he had lived in the South and seen the ugliness of racism gives him no special vantage point for making a numerical assessment of that degree. On the other hand, had he said “some not insignificant portion”, I , at least would have found it impossible to gainsay his conclusion.

Most journalists who responded, in my hearing anyway, engaged in blindness to frequency modifiers that was even more egregious.  Again and again they derided President Carter for having said what he never said, viz., “He should know that many people just do not like the policies of the President.”

I somehow believe that President Carter is well aware of that piece of  ”wisdom” that journalist after journalist sanctimoniously repeated as if President Carter were a naughty schoolboy. Notice the license here with respect to numerical qualifiers.  Apparently, they had no awareness that there is nothing logically improbable about “overwhelming portion” and “many people” sharing this argumentative bed. They were vigorously pushing the argument that may never have needed to exist. And, oh, the smugness of the delivery!

Garrett Hardin warns us against what he calls cognitive innumeracy. He doesn’t mean so much that our arithmetic and statistical tools are decrepit.  Rather, he warns us against not including numbers when numbers are absolutely required to make sense out of an argument.  In other words, some arguments imply magnitude, proportion, and size relationships, but the person making the argument or processing it does not seem to appreciate the need for the numbers.

In simple instances of innumeracy there is a claim that X is greater than Y with no reference to whether the difference is tiny or gargantuan.  Either through inability or guile, the author of the argument and the recipient form a partnership of innumeracy, one rife with manipulative potential.

Critical thinking requires constant vigilance for instances where numbers are almost everything in terms of the quality of the argument, but the person making the argument either withholds or does not realize the significance of the numbers.

Bertrand Russell:  What humans most need is a will to doubt.

William James had famously said many years earlier that what humans most need is a will to believe. But surely the vast majority of our experiences should tell us that humans are best described, in  Jerome Bruner’s words as “homo credens,” the believing person.

To the extent that this portrayal is the raw material with which we must struggle, learning critical thinking is an uphill struggle.  Whether from an affiliative urge, deep insecurities that cause us to yearn for acceptance, or some other adaptive pattern, we approach doubt with shields at ready.  Seeing doubt as the launching pad for growth is our challenge.