The Power of the Premise
The Modern Survival Guide #24
This is the Modern Survival Guide, a guidebook I’m writing for things I think people need to know about living in the modern world. The views expressed here are mine, and mine alone, but I would make the argument that because I am a reasonably intelligent human being, and because I have lived a fairly complex life, therefore you might get something good out of my opinions. Coincidentally, in this entry I’ll be discussing the power of premises in arguments, and when I get done I won’t take offense if you take exception to the prior statement. Clear as mud? Lemme explain.
Throughout your life, you are going to be involved in arguments and discussions about a wide variety of important (and funny, and stupid) topics. And you’re going to hear about many, many more. Some of them will even decide the course of your life.
It’s worth noting that a fair bit of what we think is “true” is just the result of a very convincing argument or a certain point of view. For example, a growing number of people seem to think that vaccines cause autism. This is “true” to them, even if it’s hogwash to the rest of us, and it is absolutely a life-affecting belief.
Given this context, it’s worth understanding the structure of logical arguments, particularly their basic pillar of construction — the premise. A premise is simply a statement that is assumed to be true about the topic under discussion. It takes at least two premises, which generate a conclusion, to form a logical argument.
For example, look at the following claims:
Vaccines contain mercury. Mercury causes autism. Therefore vaccines cause autism.
The first two statements are premises; they form the core of the argument, with the final statement being its conclusion. This is an “a + b = c” type of logical setup, and it’s the simplest type of argument you’re likely to see. Most things that we think of as “true” are simply stacks of these arguments, leading all the way down to a final premise, labeled simply “Because.”¹
Right, so how is this useful? Well, next time you see a politician making some sort of pronouncement, or a celebrity endorsing a cause, or kids protesting in the streets, pay attention. They’re all doing their thing as the result of some kind of logical argument. If you don’t like that thing, defeating the argument will eventually stop them (or, more likely, future people) from doing that thing. And defeating the argument is always easiest when targeting one of its premises (as opposed to fighting the conclusion).
However, premises are very powerful. They are baseline assumptions — they set the framework for the argument and discussion. Therefore they are the means of controlling an argument, and so even fighting a premise can sometimes further the goals of the person making the argument.
Let’s look at that argument I wrote earlier:
Vaccines contain mercury. Mercury causes autism. Therefore vaccines cause autism.
Look at the premises. Do vaccines contain mercury? Does mercury cause autism? In both cases… no. This argument is totally false. But because these statements are presented as premises, and therefore assumed to be true, a certain percentage of the audience will just blindly buy into them. Also note that because I used these statements, the whole tone of the counterargument must focus on those points. This radically restricts what someone making a counter-argument can talk about.
Do vaccines contain mercury? Well, not anymore, and even when they did it wasn’t the same kind of mercury you’re familiar with, and it was a really small dose, and people tolerated it very well, so…
Does mercury cause autism? Well, mercury’s a heavy metal, and heavy metals typically cause significant systemic problems when people are exposed to them in high enough doses, but we have no idea what causes autism, and mercury’s effects are generally well documented and don’t include autistic behaviors, and anyway the body will eventually process mercury out, so…
No. And no.
But look what happened there. If I’m the person who made the original statement, I already won. Because some of the people reading this TLDR’d their way right out of this explanation already, because it takes so much longer to dispute a premise than it does to state one. Of the people who kept reading, some of them probably looked at all the if’s, and’s, and but’s that I had to use and decided I was full of crap, because the explanation wasn’t simple.
And I didn’t get to talk about any of the arguments in favor of vaccination at all. The conversation was utterly controlled by the first argument’s premises.
This is the power of the premise. People — especially PR gurus working in politics and corporate America — use premises in their arguments to control conversations. Then they count on you being too bored, too dumb, or too ignorant to notice that they’re doing this. This is a PR strategy called “narrative framing.” If you’ve never heard of this before, congratulations, today is your lucky day to see a piece of the curtain pulled back so you can take a look at how propaganda works in this day and age.
Framing a narrative using misleading, incorrect, our outright made-up premises is a major tool of con artists, marketing executives, and politicians the world over. It’s how people convince huge segments of the population that immigrants are more prone to be criminals, or vaccines cause autism, or aspartame causes cancer, or that patriotism means supporting your government no matter what, or that skin exfoliation is a good idea.
Defeating a premise takes a certain amount of intellectual rigor, a curious mind, and a fairly large amount of time. Recognizing a premise, on the other hand, just takes training. Once you know what to look for (remember the “a + b = c” structure) you’ll see premise everywhere. If you don’t have the time or inclination to fact check them, it’s more than worth your while to at least acknowledge their existence.
So the next time you see an argument develop on social media, or in the newspapers, on in a glossy beauty magazine, look to the premises. If you can disprove at least one of the premises of the argument, discount the argument. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, there are plenty of sites out there that happily do it for you (just be careful which ones you trust). And you’ll probably be better off, because building a life based on bad ideas, false arguments, and debunked evidence isn’t normally a good long-term decision.
¹You may recognize this from any discussion with a five year old that starts with the question “Why?” and ends with the parent snapping “Because!” when they run out of explanations. A good test of your own knowledge on any given subject is to see how far you can make it down that chain of “Why?” before you, too, are left with “Because.” I think three whys is a pretty good metric that you know what you’re talking about, at least enough to hold an opinion.
