Argument from Quotation
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[edit] Definition
Argument from Quotation is an informal logical fallacy, a variation on argument from authority, where a participant presents a purported quotation from an acknowledged expert in support of his view, but the quotation does not actually support his view. In some cases, the quote may be presented misleadingly, for example, out of contexts, and in more pernicious cases may simply never have existed. This reviled practice is sometimes called "quote-mining."
This is a fallacy because the quotation presented does not accurately represent the beliefs of the expert. Even if the quotation did represent the beliefs of the expert, it would still be a fallacious argument from authority. Despite this, arguments from quotation are commonly found, especially in the creationist literature.
[edit] Examples
Example 1:
- Protagonist: That movie was unbelievable. Bad acting, bad direction, and terrible script. Even the popcorn was stale. It will close in a week, and good riddance to it.
- Antagonist: Protagonist's movie review : "unbelievable ... acting, ... direction,... and ... script. Even the popcorn was ... good."
Example 2:
- Protagonist (Psalms 14:1): The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
- Antagonist: Even the Bible itself acknowledges that "there is no God" (Psalms 14:1). Obviously God does not exist.
[edit] Discussion
A famous quote, attributed to Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species, reads as follows:
- To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
This quotation is often brought up as evidence against the notion of evolution; if even Darwin himself, the father of evolution, could not believe that the eye evolved, evolution must be incorrect.
In full context, however, the quote becomes obviously a rhetorical flourish, as Darwin goes on to present an argument about how the eye could have evolved and to present various anatomical examples of the process of evolution. The full quotation reads:
- To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of Spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dex, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.
Darwin then proceeds to show exactly those "numerous gradations" across the animal kingdom.
This example shows clearly how one can extract out-of-context quotations that appear to show the opposite of the author's intended meaning. It is not clear whether people who cite just the first part of the quotation above are being deliberately deceptive (having read and chosen to omit the second half), or whether they are acting out of ignorance, having never read the full quotation and reproducing it only from other secondary sources. In either case, however, it is an act of sloppy, misleading, and incompetent scholarship.
An even more incompetent act is to create quotations that never existed. However, once quotations are created, they often achieve a life of their own. For example, Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty," during the original Star Trek series; Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson," in the writings of A. Conan Doyle; no one in Casablanca said "Play it again, Sam"; E.T. did not say "E.T. phone home"; and Carl Sagan never said "billions and billions" during Cosmos. Despite this, these pseudo-quotations are often reproduced as though they were real, and a scholar might be tempted to quote a secondary source that cites them, not knowing that they were never said or written.
The internet has served to magnify this effect. For example, a particular quote has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson on numerous websites, and reads, "Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have...The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases." In reality, Jefferson never said this; the quote is from a 1958 speech by Barry Goldwater. Even Penn and Teller, in an episode of Bullshit!, misattributed the quote, showing that even skeptics are prone to this mistake.
[edit] Exceptions to the Rule
It is sometimes necessary to edit quotations, for example, to correct grammatical errors, to modernize or regularize spelling, or to reduce a lengthy block of text to a more manageable length. However, standard scholarly practices should always be followed; for example by using appropriate bracket and ellipsis notation to indicate where changes have been made.
In cases where a quotation has been edited, but the editing still preserves the meaning of the original, no fallacy has been committed.
