Logical Fallacies And You!

It is by no means always fallacious to present a one-sided argument. As is usual with fallacies, we have to take the context of the argument into consideration. For instance, a trial attorney presents a one-sided case in favor of a client. It is not a defense attorney's job to present the evidence for the defendant's guilt, rather that is the job of the prosecutor. Likewise, the prosecutor's job is to present a one-sided case for conviction. Both sides are presented in a trial, just not by the same persons. This is the way that adversarial systems, such as the legal system, work: each side presents a biased case, and the jury comes to a decision based upon hearing both sides. In this way, even though each side is slanted, all of the relevant evidence is presented by whichever side it happens to favor.

Other contexts of argumentation are similarly adversarial, for example, partisan politics such as election campaigns. A candidate's campaign will present only a positive case for the candidate's election, and a case against the candidate's opponents. However, the other side can always be relied upon to present the negative case. We voters, by listening to both sides of the campaign, can make an objective decision about how to vote based upon all the available evidence. This is why it is important to pay attention to all sides during a campaign, and to hear different political points of view. People who listen to only one side will inevitably form one-sided opinions.

Another major source of non-fallacious bias is in the world of advertising. We have no reason to expect advertisers or salespeople to tell us what is wrong with their product, or why we should buy some other manufacturer's product instead. This is why we should take such pitches with a heavy dose of skepticism. Unfortunately, all too seldom do we hear the other side of the argument, as promoters of products seem to be reluctant to criticize competitors. As rational consumers, we need to turn to consumer publications to hear the other side of the story.

One-sidedness is fallacious in contexts where we have a right to demand objectivity. Two such contexts are news stories and scientific or other scholarly writing:

Most major American newspapers aspire to a reputation for objectivity, or fairness, on their news pages. For instance, they restrict partisan political commentary to the editorial and op-ed ("opposite the editorial") pages. News stories, of course, are not usually arguments, so it would be—strictly speaking—incorrect to accuse a biased story of committing the fallacy of One-sidedness. Since it isn't an argument at all, it isn't a fallacious argument. But slanting in a news story may lead the reader into drawing false conclusions, which means that the story is a boobytrap, and the reader's reasoning is fallacious, albeit inadvertently.
Scholars are expected to examine all of the evidence and come to a conclusion. Thus, a one-sided lack of objectivity is a cardinal scholarly sin. This is why scholars should listen to others in their field even when—in fact, especially when—they disagree. It is only when scholars have heard and weighed all of the evidence, and considered all of the arguments, that they can come to an objective conclusion.

Reader Response:

It seems to me there are many kinds of one-sidedness that are strategies more than arguments. For example, what I call "controlling the microphone." If somehow one side can control when a microphone is turned on (literally or figuratively), then the opposition may not be heard. If one side controls access to mass media, to certain publications, etc., then only their side is presented or their opponents' arguments are filtered to their advantage. Congress has variants of this, for example, "filling up the amendment tree" which prevents opposing amendments from being added. Or simply limiting debate before all the issues have been aired. The judicial branch may deny someone a hearing which lets the status quo stand without further argument. Large advertisers try to fill the airwaves with their pitch, leaving little space for the opposition. I'm tempted to call these something like meta-fallacies or hyper-fallacies because they aren't arguments per se but strategies for promoting something.―Ralph Gillmann

I would resist the temptation if I were you. A "meta-fallacy" would be a fallacy about a fallacy, and a "hyper-fallacy" would be a fallacy on steroids, neither of which seems right. The examples that you give are all good examples of what I call "boobytraps", that is, nonarguments that can cause someone to fall into fallacious reasoning. Much of what is called "slanting", or―in the context of propaganda―"card stacking", is the setting up of one-sided boobytraps.

Slanting can be one of the most insidiously deceptive boobytraps, because simply leaving out relevant information can lead people seriously astray. In order to do this, dictatorships and totalitarian governments have always attempted to monopolize the news media and education, in order to control what information people receive. It's almost impossible to detect such one-sidedness if you lack other sources for the relevant facts, which is what makes a free press so important.

This fallacy is often known by the Latin name "ignoratio elenchi", or "ignorance of refutation". The ignorance involved is either ignorance of the conclusion to be refuted—even deliberately ignoring it—or ignorance of what constitutes a refutation, so that the attempt misses the mark. This explanation goes back to Aristotle's On Sophistical Refutations, the focus of which is fallacious refutations in debate. As with all of Aristotle's original fallacies, its application has widened to all arguments.

Of course, fallacies of ambiguity involve irrelevance, in that the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion, but this fact is disguised by ambiguous language. However, Aristotle classifies Ignoratio Elenchi as language-independent, though he does say:

One might, with some violence, bring this fallacy into the group of fallacies dependent on language as well.

But this would make Ignoratio Elenchi so wide that just about every fallacy—with the exception of Begging the Question—would be a subfallacy of it. This is too wide to be useful, so I will follow Aristotle in restricting it to non-linguistic fallacies, excluding those disguised by ambiguity or vagueness.