Free Speech, Cancel Culture, and the Faculty Fallacy
How far have we come, and is this really where we wanted to end up? I recall the Free Speech Movement of the 60s, and in fact I was there. UC Berkeley, and all other college campuses, said that no one was allowed to voice a political opinion on campus. Even JFK was not allowed to speak at UC Berkeley because he was a politician. The students believed that they had the right to express their belief that the Vietnam War was immoral. The students fought, and the students won.
But did they really? Because the message now is different. The message now is that expressing a dissenting opinion is the equivalent of hate speech. It may cost you your job and much more.The development of our current Cancel Culture has the ability to divide us but also to deprive us of the voice of dissent, which is what the FSM was all about.
This is where the Faculty Fallacy plays into the equation. It refers to the advancement of a narrative not based on statistical data but rather resulting from political persuasion or preference, peer pressure, intimidation, harassment or threat of censorship, cancellation, retribution, ostracism or removal from faculty staff or contract termination. The faculty fallacy is a reasoning error that because all academia agree on something then it must be right (aka a faulty generalization) other than a flaw in the logical form of the argument containing an informal fallacy which may be formally valid but still remains rationally unpersuasive.
Though the form of the argument may be relevant, fallacies of this type are the types of mistakes in reasoning that arise from the mishandling of the content of the propositions constituting the argument. Therefore it follows that if the content of the proposition is a faulty generalization (aka an inductive fallacy) then the most important issue concerns inductive strength or methodology (for example, statistical inference). In the absence of sufficient evidence, drawing conclusions based on induction is unwarranted and fallacious. For instance, hasty generalization is making assumptions about a whole group or range of cases based on a sample that is inadequate (usually because it is atypical or just too small). Stereotypes about people or occupations are a common example of this error in logic.
While never a valid logical deduction, if such an inference can be made on statistical grounds, it may nonetheless be convincing. This is because with enough empirical evidence, the generalization is no longer a hasty one. However, when such data is available and demonstrates the very opposite to be true, and in the presence of such data, academics who know or suspect it to be false yet persist in presenting a faulty or hasty generalization, it then becomes a faculty fallacy. The faculty fallacy is the antithesis of critical thinking and flips academic freedom on its head.
I hear echoes of the 60s, pre-Free Speech Movement: if you say anything contradicting the current flow of public thought, you have a reactionary agenda, you are racist, you are cancelled. Academia who fall in line and don’t stand up for free speech have forgotten that the voice of dissent keeps us free.
