Logical Fallacies, again

I'm always challenged when I teach logic in a composition course. It's not strict mathematical syllogism that the philosophers study/teach; it's the rhetorical syllogism Aristotle lays out for his students -- he calls this the "enthymeme."

I'm thinking of that kind of rhetorical reasoning as I read an article entitled "The Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid," which points out faulty causality. The writer is a smart blogger, Kathy G. of "The G Spot: Politics, Economics, Feminism, Labor, Culture, Ideas." She's responding to a Wall Street Journal article called "Vote Republican if You Want Equal Pay." The writer of that article "looked at Census data on women's pay relative to men's in every presidential administration from LBJ to the present. And lo and behold, he found that women's relative pay increased far more under Republican presidents than Democrat ones."

The cause? Well, you'll have to look at the article yourself, but let's just say that more than one thing can cause a statistic to rise (pay increases can show up in one group because another group's pay *decreases*). Kathy G. rightly points out that men's falling salaries during Republican presidents can make women's salaries appear to rise.

Uh huh. I like smart women.