41 Suppressed Quantification

Let us look at this last example a little more closely. Notice that the major premise is "unquantified," that is, it is not stated whether every A.S.C. member is a communist or whether only some members are communists. The audience turned the proposition around, converted it, for the reason that it would be patently idiotic to say that all communists belong to this scientific organization -- some of them are housewives or journalists. It would be true that some communists are A.S.C. members if all or some of the members are communists. Yet the speaker does not say "some." To do so might suggest a weakness of assertion. If the speaker does not quantify, the audience might be led to supply "only," thus: "Only communists belong to the A.S.C," which is equivalent to "All members of the A.S.C. are communists." Now if the speaker wants the audience to supply "only," why does he not say it himself? Presumably because the statement would be false, and somebody might easily expose it as false. Though the speaker refrains from saying "only," the audience can still uncritically supply it, and the point is won for propaganda -- and lost to reason.

It is a fallacy to exploit this ambiguity of the English language or to be taken in by it. "Women are able to endure more than men." All women, or some of them? "Children are cruel." Inevitably? Occasionally? Characteristically? "We live lives of quiet desperation." Most of us some of the time? All of us most of the time? Some of us some . . . ? "We" Americans? "We" moderns? "We" humans? "We" sensitive, civilized people?

The handbooks treat this fallacy often as one of improper generalizing, and in conversation sophisticated persons often warn against making broad observations about women and life. All of this is well intended, but it seems to miss the point. It assumes that occurrences of this fallacy are taken to mean all, where their in-sidiousness lies in their ambiguity in respect to all and some.

The audience can escape from the snare of a speaker who wants them uncritically to supply "all" or "only" by actually supplying these terms in a very critical, conscious way. And speakers can avoid becoming the first victims of their own rhetoric or victimizing others, by asking themselves precisely what they want to say by such a sentence as "Communists are members of the A.S.C." If they do mean only Communists are members, they can say this and get a valid argument. If they mean that seven members of the board of directors are members also of the Communist Party, they can say so. And if they feel that is a very high percentage, they can say that, too. Similarly, in the case of "Children are cruel," one can ask himself whether he means perhaps that children characteristically tend to be cruel in certain situations. If this is what he means, he can specify the situations. Such discussion may not be compressed and neatly aphoristic, but what one says may increase the store of knowledge instead of nonsense.

EXAMPLE COMMENT
Comic books are the literature of the young. And what a literature! They show cruelty disguised as virtue, virtue exposed as foolishness, stupidity and vulgarity enthroned as the normal and sane. They have dug themselves so solidly into the culture of our children that, to succeed, radio and television programs must mimic them in crudity and nervous excitement. Sunday schools have to tell the living story of the Bible in colored pictures wretchedly printed on pulp paper, and in installments . . . Let the student translate this bit of rhetoric into perhaps less epigrammatic but more rational prose.