Camel cigarette advertisement

This classic magazine for Camel cigarettes is probably true. Of course truth-in-advertising laws were not as stringent fifty years ago as they are nowadays, but even without further research into the credibility of the sources (something that we certainly must do when we put together our own arguments), this main claim of this ad seems reasonable enough.

Now before the pitchforks and torches come out from a horrified class of anti-smokers, let's remember a couple of things:

  1. as we have discussed elsewhere, claims need to be put into context; at the time this ad was produced, smoking was not vilified; it was not considered evil, horrible, dangerous, loathesome; it was widely accepted

  2. the ad uses hard numbers (a great strategy, by the way), but it doesn't really say all that much; let's look at what it actaully does say

"nine out of ten doctors agree..."

Matching doctors with numbers is a time-tested advertising technique that actually marries two (often more) fallacies working for it: 1) it uses Misleading Statistics, and 2) it is an Appeal to Authority

but wait! before you read much further...
This would normally appear in a pink sidebar, but I don't want anyone to zip past this section; it's importatnt

It's a good idea to be sure that you know what a fallacy is. Your handbook discusses fallacies in some detail, and "Love is a Fallacy" shows some fallacies in action. Here is a very important distinction:

Fallacy and False are not the same things. True and False deal with absolutes, often with truths that cannot be demonstrated but which must be (or not). For example, it is absolutely true that the universe was created OR that it was not created. Let's not deal with the who, what, where, when, why, and how of such a thing, but one of those two statements must be true (and the other false). Here's the kicker--we cannot demonstrate either one. We can believe one thing or another; we can argue for lifetimes about it; we can go to war over such things, but we cannot demonstrate them.

As it turns out, this class (most college/university classes) are about things that you can demonstrate, claims you can support with concrete examples (observations, experiences, research). In a way this takes a lot of pressure off you. Imagine being graded on your ability to explain the following:

When she was just eight years old, my daughter, sitting in her car seat in the back seat of my Honda Civic, asked me a question. I had just picked her up from school (a Catholic elementary school), and apparently the subject of creation had come up in school. Her little voice came from behind me as I was driving:

"Dad."

"Yes Michelle."

"Did God create everything?"

Now this is not the sort of heady question that is easy to asnwer at the best of times, but it's particularly challenging when navigating late-afternoon L.A. traffic, but I gave an answer that I thought might satisfy her.

"Yeah, sure. Why not?"

I turned my attention back to driving. About three minutes passed. Michelle was quiet, trying to work something out, and then her voice, sounding more puzzled than ever, came again:

"Dad?"

"Yes, Michelly."

"If God created everything..."

...

"Where was He?"

Now, if you've seen the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa is teaching Bart the zen of mini-golf, when he finally has his mind-clearing epiphany, and his eyes turn to pinpricks, you have the essence of this moment. There, at age eight, my daughter hit upon one of THE QUESTIONS about life, the universe, and everything that cannot be answered. How could a being create something from nothing if the being has to be-in-or-contain something to exist in the first place. The classic paradox here is often expressed with the question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Obviously, chickens come from eggs, so there needs to be an egg that the chicken hatches from; however, eggs are laid by chickens, so there needs to be a chicken to lay that egg. But that chicken must have come from an egg. But where did that egg come from if not from a chicken? And on and on the puzzle goes until we cross our eyes and give up.

The question may (probably does) have an answer, but we cannot know it because our brains work to sort things out using reason/logic, and we create artificial categories to organize information to make "sense" of it.

Yes, this is sad. Humans do not know everything, and if some humans have ever known such impossible-to-make-sense-of things, they have not been able to articulate this knowledge to other humans. Such things as creation are part of human belief systems, not observable, demonstrable knowledge.

Again, fortunately, you are not (at least in this class) expected to prove impossible-to-prove things. You are only required to share experience and observation and research, to make a case (support a thesis) based on evidence (things that can be tasted, touched, seen, smelled, heard), based on reason/logic. And notice that you do not even need to prove things; you just need to back up claims with reasonable evidence. When you don't, when you manipulate a case using material that is not concrete and not logical, that is where fallacies come in.

now let's get back to those doctors
Did you think I had forgotten about them?

The Camel ad at the top of the page claims, "More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!" The survey backing this up was nationwide, and the sample size is impressively large--113,597 doctors "from coast to coast." Why ask doctors? They, theoretically, are concerned about our health, and this ad points out how Camels will not irritate our throats as other cigarettes do (cancer was not a widespread concern at the time, by the way). To emphasize the authority of the Doctors, notice how the "D" is capitalized to make it stand out; that's a nice touch. Some people, assuming that doctors always know what's best (they are authority figures) will accept this without question. The large number in the survey makes the conclusion even more convincing, but notice what the ad does not claim: it does not state that 56,799 (exactly one more than half the sample) or more doctors praised Camels.

Would it make a difference if 130 doctors smoked Camels, 114 doctors smoked Lucky Strikes, 106 doctors smoked Chesterfields, 101 smoked various other cigarettes, and 113,146 said they would never smoke any cigarette?

People often find numbers convincing; they seem solid and unchangeable, but statisticians (working for advertisers, politicians, lawyers, CFO's) often masterfully use statistics in very inventive ways to make things appear one way or another. Statistcs can be (they are not always) misleading.

Both Appeal to Authority and Misleading Statistics are fallacies; they warp an argument and can distract from concrete, reasonable evidence. There are many more sorts of fallacies. Again, review your handbook and Shulman's story, and you will still have only a handful, but you will certainly get the idea.

so why is love a fallacy?

It is worth considering the title of "Love is a Fallacy" in light of this lecture.

Notice what Shulman is not saying--he is not saying, "Love is False" (or untrue). People fall in love. However, love is an abstraction; not all people define love in the same, exact way. It is also often something that is not generally based on logic, on reason. In the story, logic should tell Polly that Dobie (the unnamed main character) is the more logical choice for a husband. He is educated, and he will likely move into a career where he can provide for a comfortable lifestyle. He pleads his case, but she would still rather go steady with Petey. Why? Because he is cool; he has a raccoon coat.

Emotion, not logic, often drives our choices in matters of love.


hulk smash!
NOTE: parts of this lecture are based on an inventive teaching demo I viewed

View the following two YouTube clips (they are advertisements for popular toys):

The distinctive differences in content and styles are obvious. The Hulk Glove and Mask commercial features heart-pumping music, stark lighting, intense colors, rapid camera cutting,--all elements designed to suggest action. The boys are punshing boxes, punching their gloves together, punching themselves in the head in their single-minded smash rampage. The My Little Pony Princess Wedding has a dreamy soundtrack, soft lighting, pastels pinks and purples, cute cartoon scenes intercutting the live shots--all reinforcing the fairy-tale romance. The girls are playing dress-up and putting their heads together talking and cooing over the pony bride to be.

To draw meaningful conclusions about larger issues, you need to look outside yourself, to do research.

To suggest that these (and other) advertisers play on popular stereotypes to make their products attractive to specific target audiences is obvious. It's no surprise there are "boy" commercials selling "boy" toys and "girl" commercials selling "girl" toys. Is that because males and females are inherently different and can be easily summed up by stereotypes. Well, maybe. Coming up on the reading list is an essay by Virginia Adams called "Males and Females: Differences Between Them." Adams uses a wide range of scientific evidence to demonstrate that there are indeed some basic neurochemical and psychological differences that appear in a large number of boys and girls as they move through different developmental stages, but consider the following two real examples:

When my children were both in pre-school, I remember going to pick them up after work, and I was chatting with Angelique, my daughter's teacher, when another man came to pick up his son. He was across the room, but it was apparent from his raised voice and animation that he was upset about something. Angelique knew the situation. The father was upset because the pre-school allowed his son to play with dolls with the girls. No son of his was going to play with dolls. He was expected to drip machismo at age four. The school, as you might expect, did not force gender-specific play on the kids, and, eventually the father pulled his son from the school. It turns out this was not uncommon at the school, and Angelique had seen the same at other schools. Parents wanted to force their children to be manly-boys or girly-girls even though the children had very little problem playing with trucks one minute and the play kitchen the next.

To some extent stereotypes are grounded in some sort of history or tradition. The Irish (my heritage is Irish) do often like potatoes, and it's no surprise considering that was one of the few foods they could grow on the bits of land the English landlords allowed them to farm for hundreds of years (those of you who have seen The Titanic, the key reason so many Irish were travelling to America was a massive potato blight had wiped out their one main food sources; they were dying in huge numbers in Ireland). Does that mean all stereotypes are correct? Of course not. Many crops grow on Irish farms nowadays. Most so-called Irish such as myself have never even been to the country (I was born in Seattle; my family had been in the U.S. for sevearl generations). Also, there are many in Ireland who just don't like potatoes. There was a historical occasion that led to a generalization, and the generalization stuck.

Some stereotypes are negative and hurtful; some are neutral and rather silly (it was often said in my generation, for example, that girls who wore glasses were smarter than those who did not; as it turns out, girls who wore glasses needed sight correction...just like I do). One truth that we can apply to all sterotypes is this: they are over-generalizations. Another is this: they are not always true, even if some people assume they are.

but don't boys smash and girls swoon over romantic pony weddings?

Here's another interesting point to consider:

As often as not it is the parents of children who make the purchasing decisions. An adult may think that a delicate tea set would be the perfect birthday present for a five-year-old daughter, but the little girl may open the box, mutter a polite, "Thanks," and push the unopened box to the back of her closet. She may be more interested in a bug-collecting set. The mom has made an assumption based on a stereotype, and in many cases those sorts of assumptions are just wrong.

Well, sure, some do; however, it would be an incredible mistake not to add the word some here because some do not.

Advertisers count on all sorts of stereotyping, even if it's not especially true, because in the minds of the consumers there is often that buried stereotype that is unchallenged. Here's another real example; see how quickly you can spot the irony:

My sister-in-law, Patricia, hates to shop. She loves to buy things (online and from networks such as QVC), but the actual act of going out to a store and shopping is, in her words, "like hell." Her husband, Patrick (yes, they really are Pat and Pat), loves to shop. He will wander up and down the aisles of Ross with the same joy and ease he applies to looking at the offerings at Pep Boys, Costco, Home Depot, Sur le Table, and Robinsons-May. One Christmas Patricia was upset and perplexed. She had gotten her niece, Francine, the perfect gift--a toy supermarket set complete with a toy cart and lots of boxes, cans, and plastic items to pretend shop. Francine didn't care for the set, and it just sat in the box in a corner.

Why was Patrica surprised? Here is what she said: "I assumed that she would love to shop. After all, she's a girl. Women love to shop."

"But you are a woman, and you hate to shop."

"Well, that's different."

Now, before you start to laugh too long and loudly, this kind of comment is one of the most common logic errors in Freshman Composition papers. It shows up at later levels, in Speech classes, in research papers for other subjects. It also shapes the real-world decision-making of many people. Obviously, it is wrong. Sometimes it can lead to rather interesting (and unfortunate) situations.

and here's the problem

Patricia could not imagine that Francine would not like shopping even though she knew that did not agree with her own reality. She could not change her opinion. Of course we know some women who enjoy shopping, but it is not a truth about all women everywhere, and to apply it to "all" or "most" is a huge over-generalization. There are definite problems with over-generalizing, stereotyping, and just being unable to see the difference between opinion and reality:

Buying the Hulk Smash Gloves is trivial compared to what could go wrong with over-generalizing, but lets dial it down and apply it just to your writing. Writing that over-generalizes is not convincing. Arguments that over-generalize are fallacious (they are not based on logic), and they fall apart. We have already looked at how narrowing the focus from a generalzation to actual observation, experience, research will make your writing stronger, more vivid, more believable.

Avoid using words such as all, every, each, none, always, never and even most in your writing. The essay title "Not All Men are Sly Foxes" is an attack on this all-or-nothing sort of statement. The word some is usually safe, and pointing at specific cases is even better. Write about what you know (or observe or discover), not about notions that you imagine or about stereotypes that you've been conditioned to accept.