Is such a battery of arguments permissible in legal contexts, e.g. in a criminal defense?
It's only inconsistent if you use "and" rather than "or."
Kettle Logic
31–40 of 85 posts
Re: Kettle Logic
#32Or, as my generation learned it from Bart Simpson, "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything!"
Those claims are all in principle consistent with each other?
Re: Kettle Logic
#33Oh gosh, I have stories about this sort of logic from my time in American high school and college competitive debate.
Usually, the affirmative team is proposing a plan that implements a resolution, and the negative team has to present arguments which convince the judge that either the plan, or the whole resolution is a bad idea.
A trivial example of the kind of "Kettle" logic that we had to deal with on the affirmative, is the belief that performative contradictions are simply part of "Competing Interpretations" and are totally fine for the negative team to use. This meant that it was common for a team to simultaneously argue that 1. The affirmative plan crashes the economy and 2. That Capitalism is a fundamentally unjust system and that the affirmative plan reperpetuates it. If you (the affirmative) argued against point 1, the standard plan by the negative was to jettison their arguements and concede to whatever affirmative points and turn them to help their 2nd point ("Well, your plan helps the economy so much that it makes capitalism that much more powerful!")
Smart teams argued that such "Performative Contradictions" and "Competing Interpretations" were fundamentally abusive. This was the correct strategy and by forcing the debate to devolve into these discussions of obscure theory we lost whatever educational value that the activity had about the topic.
Kettle Logic is the first time I've had a name for this that wasn't a debate community term-of-art.
Re: Kettle Logic
#34There is a joke I love that illustrates the concept: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client was nowhere near the scene of the murder, he didn't mean to pull the trigger, and that son-of-a-bitch had it coming!"
What would that be in programmer speak?
The intern had no write access to the production database, he didn't mean to do the commit, and our network engineers had it coming?
Re: Kettle Logic
#35Or, as my generation learned it from Bart Simpson, "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything!"
Those claims are all in principle consistent with each other?
Yeah, I am confused as well.
Those three claims are logically consistent.
They may be in poor taste but they don't fit kettle logic as far as I understand.
Re: Kettle Logic
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The jury can decide that any given testimony is a lie and weight it accordingly.
Defense theories are not testimony and, ideally, should not be considered in the evaluation of testimony. (In practice, humans don't consistently compartmentalize well enough to reliably avoid this, though.)
"defense theories" are going to have evidence associated with them. At that point my point applies.
Re: Kettle Logic
#37Similar to the narcissist's prayer:
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it.
Re: Kettle Logic
#38So this is the strategy the UK government has been using for the last few years.
Sounds very Russian too !
Re: Kettle Logic
#39There is a joke I love that illustrates the concept: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client was nowhere near the scene of the murder, he didn't mean to pull the trigger, and that son-of-a-bitch had it coming!"
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Re: Kettle Logic
#40It seems that this is a sort of "dual" to what's called "Argument in the alternative" [1], which I've seen confused for kettle logic more often than I've seen kettle logic used itself. It's a subtle distinction. Argument in the alternative considers multiple different possibilities as hypotheticals in order to rule them all out, but isn't that kind of what kettle logic does as well? Can a kettle logic argument be eas…
The "even if" bit from your link is helpful to consider.
Kettle logic:
1. I wasn't there.
2. I was there but had no motive.
3. I was there, had motive, but had no means.
Argument in the alternative:
1. I wasn't there.
2. Even if I was there, I had no motive.
3. Even if I was there and had motive, I had no means.
The first makes three conflicting statements. The second makes 3 consecutive arguments: I have an alibi, but if you don't believe my alibi, I still had no motive, and if you don't believe my alibi and that I lacked motive, I had no means.