The Nominal Fallacy and the Loss of Personal Relationships

            A fallacy is a form of faulty reasoning. These forms litter our thinking, and one who seeks truth must exercise great caution to avoid them. Take the democratic fallacy (argumentum ad populum) as an example. This form of reasoning holds that a proposition is true because most people believe it to be true. This model of reasoning can lead us to err: if 9 out of 10 people believe the northern star resides in the southern hemisphere, those people are still wrong. The truth of a proposition is not up to a vote.

Perhaps a more pernicious fallacy is the nominal fallacy (from the Latin nomen, meaning name). This fallacy posits that when you apply a name (or label) to something, you have explained it. Put differently, a name transmits explanatory content. So framed, this is a descriptive form of the fallacy: a name describes (i.e. explains) that to which it applies. But I believe the fallacy also occurs in a prescriptive or normative form—a point of relevance to what follows. In the prescriptive form, a name both describes (explains) and evaluates.

The nominal fallacy—in its descriptive and prescriptive forms—permeates all intellectual endeavors. To elaborate, imagine a person attaches the label “democracy” to a particular society. Has he thereby descriptively explained that society or its form of social organization? No. Has he even prescriptively fixed its value or worth as a form of social life? No. The name itself carries no explanatory or normative information. Understanding and evaluating a society requires careful assessment of its institutions, cultures, and mores.

But as intellectually lazy creatures (and we all are), employing a label as a shortcut to knowledge is satisfying. Labels free us of the labor necessary for authentic understanding. In freeing us, however, they deceive us, leading us into an encounter not with the reality we try to understand, but with a pale conceptual counterpart that bears a cartoonish resemblance. The nominal fallacy, therefore, confers the gift of cheap, pseudo knowledge.

Aside from the epistemic error flowing from this form of reasoning, it also carries with it a deeper, existential problem. Specifically, when we use labels or names to explain a person, we no longer enter into a personal relationship with him or her. We instead strap a cartoonish, abstract concept onto that person, which shields us from a direct encounter. So shielded, we do not see a flesh and blood person, a unique individual, but a mere representative of some pernicious or virtuous class or group.

Who hasn’t heard a political opponent charging his interlocutor (if that term even properly applies) as a “racist” or a “liberal snowflake.” In taking up this debate tactic, the political opponent believes he has explained his interlocutor while revealing something about his interlocutor’s worth. But the nominal fallacy, as already noted, bears the cheap gift of pseudo knowledge. It gives rise to an illusion in the mind of the political opponent—an illusion that makes him feel virtuous.

He is far from it, though. Not because he errs, but because he has severed himself from a direct encounter with the person he maligns. His interlocutor is not a person with a family and career, with hopes, desires, and fears. No. For the political opponent, his interlocutor is a racist or a liberal snowflake—a manifestation of an abstract class or group. And the interlocutor knows he has not been treated as a person, but as a proxy for something worthy of derision.

The nominal fallacy—while easy and satisfying—is, I believe, a form of intellectual cowardice. One who employs it is never forced to look another person—a real individual—in the eyes. He instead dehumanizes the other and then looks at a mere object of his outrage. This form of cowardice, therefore, makes political conversations easier and more difficult. Easier because it frees participants from any meaningful intellectual work. More difficult because it raises the cost of engaging in any type of dialogue whatsoever. As responsible citizens, we must avoid this form of thinking like a cancer. Our republic—which depends on our having difficult conversations in a respectful way—cannot long survive its presence.