Galileo, Therefore I’m Right
There was some discussion yesterday of what to call the ‘argument’ that goes along the lines ‘Galileo was ignored/suppressed/censored, I’m ignored/suppressed/censored, therefore my ideas are on a par with Galileo’s ideas.’ I said I simply thought of it as the Galileo fallacy. (Chris Williams on the other hand offered an alternative in the Bozo the clown fallacy. ‘They laughed at Newton, they laughed at Einstein…’ ‘Yes and they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.’ That works.) Once I’d said that, I thought I might as well google it – and behold, a few citations of the Galileo fallacy.
At Bad Logic for instance.
Just about every logical fallacy ever imagined turns up in pseudoscience, including: “Galileo Fallacy” “They laughed at Galileo, and he was right. They laugh at me, therefore I must be right.” Variation common in education: “Einstein didn’t do well in school, therefore any kid who does poorly in school is like Einstein.”
And in this list of fallacious arguments, under Appeal to Pity (Appeal to Sympathy, The Galileo Argument):
Some authors want you to know they’re suffering for their beliefs. For example, “Scientists scoffed at Copernicus and Galileo; they laughed at Edison, Tesla and Marconi; they won’t give my ideas a fair hearing either. But time will be the judge. I can wait; I am patient; sooner or later science will be forced to admit that all matter is built, not of atoms, but of tiny capsules of TIME.”
Apparently people who edit philosophy magazines see a lot of that kind of thing. ‘Please read my complete theory of everything, available at www.randomnutter.com.’
And there’s a variation at Evowiki: Galileo Wannabe:
You commit this fallacy if you compare yourself to Galileo Galilei or another scientist suppressed by authorities or disbelieved by your peers. This is very popular among pseudoscientists…A popular answer is, “they laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Columbus, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown”. Indeed, being “suppressed” is not correlated to being right.
No, it’s not, but it’s such fun to imply that it is!
Update: I missed one. At Orac Knows, we have Galileo’s Gambit, enriched with a lot of parallel examples.
How about “They didn’t burn Galileo at the stake. I’m going to do better than that…”
Of course, here’s another discussion of the Galileo Gambit.
Ah – brilliant. Sorry I missed that, Orac. Can I publish it? Give it another public?
Re the idea that “Einstein didn’t do well in school”, there are some popular misconceptions about Einstein’s school achievements. It is true his record at his Gymnasium (grammar school) was not particularly good (largely because he was antagonistic towards the teaching methods that prevailed in such schools), but he excelled in physical science and maths. (In his own time he was reading maths and science books well beyond the level of his schoolmates.) But as early as seven years old his mother wrote in a letter that “once again he was ranked first, he got a splendid report card”.
I was reading somewhere that the confusion over Einstein’s school record comes about because the school authorities flipped the grading scale just after he left. That is, the scale ran from 1 to 5, with 1 being top, then they inverted it so that 5 became top. That raises the question why did they do such a thing? But educational administrators have plans for change and always have.
This may have been in the Guardian.
Of course Galileo wasn’t just laughed at, he really was persecuted. But not by scientists. He was persecuted by the Church. There is a definite implication in the Galileo fallacy that scientific authority is essentially religious. I think it’s that failure to understand why science works rather than a simple failure of logic that drives the fallacy.
It’s not just editors of philosophy magazines who get letters from nutters. The Galileo fallacy gets 40 points here:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
A slight misattribution here: the Galileo Wannabee article is not from Wikipedia, but Evowiki. The Panda’s Thumb made the same error (probably where you got it from).
“Re the idea that ‘Einstein didn’t do well in school'”
the character Clavin (from calvin & hobbes) puts it perfectly:
they say einstiein got bad grades, well mine are even worse!
There’s a variation of this saying that Michael Shermer uses from time to time. It addresses people who try to argue that “They laughed at the Wright Bros, therefore I’m right,” and goes like this:
“Sure they laughed at the Wright Brothers. So what? They also laughed at the Marx Brothers.”
Phil
Thanks for correction, Nick – I didn’t get it from Panda’s, got all the links from google. I just wasn’t paying attention. Hey, Galileo wasn’t always paying attention, therefore etc.
>Sure they laughed at the Wright Brothers. So what? They also laughed at the Marx Brothers.< Reminds me of the late stand-up comedian Bob Monkhouse: “They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”
[…] they laughed at Galileo and they laughed at Thomas Edison, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. I’ve found that quote in several places around the internet. Dudley added “The job of science is to figure out who is Edison and who is Bozo.” That […]