>> You'll remember that in Unit four of our course, we studied fallacies and one
of the first fallacies that we studied was the fallacy of equivocation, a fallacy
that results from using an expression in two different ways.
Well, one very nice example of the fallacy of equivocation was provided by the
argument I Am Nobody, submitted by Ubof/g Alanek/g, who I presume is somebody.
Ubof's argument goes as follows. Premise one, I am nobody.
Premise two. Nobody is perfect, conclusion, therefore I
am perfect. Now, superficially, this argument might
appear valid. Consider parallel arguments.
If I am Clark Kent and Clark Kent is Superman, doesn't it follow that I am
Superman? If the number two is the lowest prime
number and the lowest prime number is the first even number, then doesn't it follow
that the number two is the first even number?
Sure. So what's wrong with Ubof's argument?
Well, what's wrong with it is that it suffers from a fallacy of equivocation.
In particular, the verb to be that occurs in both premises one and two, can mean two
different things. Sometimes the verb to be is used to
express a claim of identity. When I say, I am Clark Kent, what I am
saying is I am identical with Clark Kent. Clark Kent is a name for the very same
thing as me. There's an identity between me and Clark
Kent. Sometimes however, the verb to be is not
used to express identity but rather to express predication.
To express the fact that a certain thing has a certain feature or property.
So for instance, if I say my car is red, I'm not saying that my car is identical
with redness. I'm saying that my car has the property or
the feature of being red. So the verb to be can be used in these two
different ways. And in Ubof's argument, the verb to be is
used differently in the first premise than it is in the second premise.
In the first premise, I am nobody, the verb to be as inflected in am, seems to be
used to express an identity. I am identical to nobody.
In the second premise, nobody is perfect, the verb to be is not used to express an
identity. It's not saying that there's an identity
between nobody and perfection. It's saying that nobody has the feature or
the property of being perfect. And so the verb to be is used in different
ways in the two premises. Since it's used in different ways in the
two premises, we can't connect up the two premises to draw the conclusion that I am
perfect. This argument suffers from another
problem. Which is that, while it uses the word
nobody, as what seems to be a noun referring to a particular thing.
In fact, the word nobody isn't a noun that refers to a particular thing.
The word nobody is a quantifier. Meaning no person whatsoever.
And when we plug that explanation of nobody into premise one, then we get, I am
no person whatsoever. Which is clearly a false statement.
Because anyone whatsoever, who can refer to themselves using the first person
pronoun I, must be some person. And so they can't be no person whatsoever.
And so in addition to the ambiguity of the argument, there's also the necessary
falsehood of premise one. Now, of course, if we're using nobody the
way it's idiomatically used sometimes in English.
To mean I'm not a significant person. All right, then I am nobody doesn't mean I
am no person whatsoever. It means I'm not a significant person.
I'm not a major player, I'm not a person of note.
Okay, but from the fact that I'm not a person of note.
And from the fact that nobody is perfect. Nothing follows about my perfection.