Cognitive Tools: The Nominal Fallacy

I'm not a Taoist. I find a lot of its ideas interesting and I love to read the Tao Te Ching and reflect on what it says, but at heart I am too much a scientist. The second line of the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching says, "The name that can be named is not the eternal name" and a central tennet of Taoism is that giving a name to anything divides it from the united totality of the universe. The most famous Taoist symbol- that of Yin and Yang is a representation of the futility of dividing and defining things.

Yet labels have been a cornerstone of science since Aristotle and it are an immensely powerful tool when trying to understand the world. For example, the 2004 Nobel Price in physics winner Frank Wilczek wrote that, "When Murray Gell-Mann invented 'quarks,' he was giving a name to a paradoxical pattern of facts. Once that pattern was recognized, physicists faced the challenge of refining it into something mathematically precise and consistent, but identifying the problem was the crucial step toward solving it!" In other words, once we can give a name to an identifiable thing (or pattern), that allows us to analyze it and begin to understand it even when we lack complete information.

Not only that, but labels are a useful heuristic for understanding the world. We have to categorize things in order to get through our lives. For example, when you are at a new restaurant and see that they have steak tartare, there is no reason to assume that restaurant's dish is going to be a disgusting pile of meat that will get you sick. But, because you one time got terrible food poisoning from steak tartare, you put it in the "dangerous pile of disgust" category and order something else. You lack complete information regarding the safety and taste of the dish at this restaurant, but because it shares many characteristics with something you know you don't like, it fits the category and you can save yourself hours locked in a bathroom.

There is a problem with this thinking however. 

Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia Stuart Firestein calls it the "nominal fallacy;" the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information. The example he uses is "instinct." We ascribe a number of supposedly innate behaviors to instinct that are attributable to genetics and natal conditioning. When describing the way a chicken pecks the ground for example, we say that the behavior is instinctual and the chicken simply does it because it is part of its hardwired instincts to do so. The problem with this is that this label is a sufficient explanation for most people when, really, we had no clue about why chickens pecked the ground the way we do. In the 1920's, Chinese researcher Zing-Yang Kuo decided to go beyond the instinct explanation and actually discovered that chickens peck the ground the way they do because while they are in the egg, their necks are bent over and when their heart starts to beat, their head moves in precisely the same manner as they peck the ground. The chicken's movement isn't an innate instinct at all- it is a learned, pre-natal behavior. 

This example demonstrates the key problem of the nominal fallacy. Because we had a label that explained that behavior, people were content to use the word "instinct" as an explanation when really that didn't explain anything at all. Science and common discourse are full of other examples. "Gravity" quickly comes to mind- gravity describes how all matter in the universe is mutually attracted to everything else but the truth is that we have no idea how gravity works, if it is an independent phenomenon, or if instead it is the product of several separate processes. 

The problem is not specific to science either. Consider human behavior. When someone is an asshole to us, we say it is because they're an asshole. The label explains the behavior. The problem is that anyone who has seen a made-for-TV movie knows that people are never assholes just because they're assholes. The "bully" at school often has an abusive home life. The "idiot" may have a learning disability or simply not excel at analyzing poetry but may be brilliant at working with their hands. 

The problem becomes a more serious one when it gets thrown into politics. "Democrat" and "Republican" become shorthand for a whole host of views that almost no individual has in their entirety. Solutions for poverty get explained away as the poor being poor because they're the kind of people who are poor- lazy people who would rather spend their welfare checks on a new iPhone rather than getting a better job rather than being the product of a whole host of factors both in and outside their control. Crime gets explained the same way- criminals are just vile people who chose to sin rather than be upright, righteous citizens rather than being put into hard situations with little social support or practical, legitimate means of getting out of their situations.

Now this isn't to say that labels aren't useful analytic tools. The problem is that too often labels are inappropriately used as explanations for phenomena when the true causes or mechanisms are unknown. As Firestein wrote, "The power of language to direct thought should never be taken lightly, and the dangers of the name game deserve our respect."