Yesterday as I was shooting assault rifles at a Springville firing range with a spirited Kazakh Mongolian friend of mine, I got to thinking about rhetoric. No, not “the undue use of exaggeration or display” or “the study of the effective use of language” but the “art of influence and persuasion”. Specifically, as I squeezed the trigger on the fully automatic Colt M16 and let out a maelstrom of fiery lead towards the paper target, I wondered about the naysayers of artificial intelligence.


They use the now famous sentence, “Time flies like an arrow*“, which can be interpreted in a half dozen ways, in their argument that computers will never be able to understand people because of complex ambiguity in language. That sentence, they rightly state, can only be understood in context, you see. As an atomic entity, it doesn’t convey any information.

Likewise, the opponents of traditional marriage argue that you cannot define marriage as a union between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation because, after all, some couples are unable (or unwilling) to have children! Point, set, match.

Except not quite. Both of these claims are flawed because they attempt to wholly invalidate a subject through the use of outlier cases. That type of argument may sound convincing, but it is unsound.

There’s a name for this faulty generalization — “material fallacy” (also dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, the converse fallacy of accident, a reverse accident, and destroying the exception).

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* also, “Fruit flies like a banana“