In the Star Trek episode, Galileo Seven, a landing team from the Enterprise crashes on a hostile planet inhabited by primitive, gigantic humanoids. In command of this landing party is none other than the Enterprise’s resident logician, Mr. Spock. Also in the landing party is his hyper-emotional foil character, Dr. Leonard McCoy.
Throughout the course of this episode, Spock makes one attempt to get the landing party rescued, attempts that he thinks are logical and well thought-out. However, each of these plans fails, resulting in more disaster, because Spock makes a critical error in reasoning each time. No matter how much evidence mounts to the contrary, he keeps basing his new plans on the assumption that these giant humanoids are going to behave in a rational manner.
Now, McCoy, Spock’s ever-emotional foil character (probably acting as a proxy for the writer of that episode) treats this as supposed proof that logic isn’t all that Spock has it cracked up to be. Instead of placing the blame on a fallacy slipping into Spock’s logic, McCoy blames logic inself for the progressive worsening of the landing party’s predicament.
This famous example is the first case study in Julia Galef’s 2011 lecture, The Straw Vulcan. She specifies the name for the fallacy that one attributes the irrational conclusions of this fallacy to logic rather than to a flaw in logic. This fallacy (the Straw Vulcan fallacy) she calls out both where McCoy makes this mistake in the episode and when other people do it in real life.
However, as repeatedly as she names the fallacy that McCoy commits in this scene, she doesn’t provide any name for the fallacy that Spock is committing. Yes, she highlights that fallacy very adequately, but never provides a name for it.
This is an important thing, though, because this fallacy crops up a lot. It is not proper rationality, but often is committed by people who are trying to be rational or who fancy themselves to be rational. It may even be committed sometimes by people who, otherwise, are pretty good at being rational.
One blatant example of this fallacy is some of the answers that were given to a certain Quora question that I came upon recently. In case the question in the future gets merged with another one or otherwise gets reworded, the current wording of this question at the time that this article is written is as follows: Are there people who hunt bright, brilliant souls from any society while they are alive, kill them, and then take their souls to be used supernaturally for another society to uplift the intelligence or spirituality of that society or community?.
An overwhelming number of respondents to this question answered that it is not possible that there are people who engage in such a practice, because there is no evidence of a number of suppositions that this practice would hinge on, such as the existence of supernatural souls, the notion that those souls could be captured and harnessed, etcetera. But essentially, their structure of their argument is that (a) the beliefs that one would hold to engage in such a practice are superstitions therefore (b) there is no chance that anyone does this.
Now, I do not know whether or not there are people who engage in the practice described in this question. What I do know, however, is that this argument against the possibility that there are people doing it is total bunk. The fact that all of the premises to this practice are superstitious mumbo-jumbo does indeed prove that anyone who does this is highly superstitious (in addition to being morally bankrupt, because this practice does in fact involve murder). However, I also know that there are lots of people who are quite irrational and superstitious.
If this kind of reasoning were followed consistently, then we’d have to conclude that Creationists don’t exist, because it is highly irrational and superstitious to believe in Creationism. Yet, nonetheless, even though Creation itself isn’t real, Creationists are, unfortunately, quite real. And there are known to be people who follow irrational, superstitious nonsense, even to the point of racking up the cost in human life – such as the anti-vaxxers.
Now, it is definitely wrong to discredit logic out of the presumption that use of logic implies use of this fallacy. In fact, the opposite of true. Using this fallacy is a failure to use logic in the fullest. However, there is no denying that it happens that people who are trying to be logical can at times commit this fallacy. Therefore, we need to have a way to call people out when they commit this fallacy, and to aid people in training themselves to avoid it.
For all these purposes, it would help if this fallacy had a name. But for all my searching, I was unable to find any name for this fallacy. Therefore, I hereby propose that this fallacy be known as the Galileo Spock fallacy – Galileo in reference to the episode in which Spock commits this fallacy, and Spock in reference to the usually-logical character who commits that fallacy in the episode.
The Galileo Spock fallacy could be defined as an informal fallacy that is committed when someone reasons based on a higher-than-justified level expectation of a particular person will behave rationally in a particular situation.
It may be that this fallacy has already been catalogued by someone somewhere by another name. I, however, wasn’t able to find it any such things. I was able to find references to this fallacy – including people catching others at this fallacy. But nowhere have I seen this fallacy being given a name. This is why, unless I learn some other name really soon, that is the name that I will use when I enter this fallacy into the Discursive Compendium of Fallacies and Malconducts.
