Bad Moves - poor, yet often persuasive arguments

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Bad Moves is a series by philosopher Julian Baggini detailing the various ways in which arguments or points are made badly, but often persuasively. Julian Baggini is editor of The Philosophers' Magazine.

The innocent have nothing to fear

Motivation speculation

Category Mistakes

It worked for me…

Contorting to balance

Don't You Look Pretty Today

Mood music

Percipi est esse

Scare-mongering

Bold assertion

It didn’t work then, so…

Fallacy of equivocation

Partial defence = support

High redefinition

The gambler's fallacy

How else do you explain it?

It's a free country

Tu quoque

Ought without can

Genetic fallacies

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-to whomever it may concern.

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1. One most common: "How else do you explain it?"

Clearly there are some explanations which are worse than no explanations at all. Yet humans don’t seem comfortable living with the unaccountable. We even talk of things themselves demanding an explanation, when really it is us doing the demanding. Perhaps then we crave explanations, and this craving sometimes leads us to accept things we really have no good reason to.

How else do you explain the rhetorical force of asking how else you explain something? Asking a question like this shifts the onus from the claim-maker to the person accepting or rejecting the claim. Instead of having to provide evidence or arguments to defend her position, the claim-maker is demanding that the person assessing her view either offers a better explanation or shuts up. But this shifting of onus is unreasonable. If you offer an explanation, it is up to you to show that it is a good one, not for me to show I have a better one. My rejection of your explanation does not require that I have a better one to hand. In the same way, if someone writes a terrible poem, it’s no defence for them to argue that you couldn’t write a better one.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/badmovesprint.php?num=49