What's a Gish Gallop?

I've recently discovered a new phrase, the "Gish gallop." It seems to me to fill a valuable vocabulary gap in discussions of argumentative styles, fallacies, etc. So I'll preserve my discovery here:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

The term refers to the debater's tactic of throwing out a lot of (individually weak) arguments in quick succession. It can be a devastating trick because it takes a lot less time to make any one claim than it does to do a careful dissection of its weakness.

So, if I were arguing the "pro" side of the proposition, "do pots of gold exist at the end of rainbows," [a deliberately ridiculous example], and I and my opponent each had five minutes for an opening statement, I could say:

1) It is arrogant to claim that such pots of gold don't exist, since it is impossible to imagine that the 'gold deniers' have personally visited both ends of any large percentage of rainbows;
2) something has to be at the end of a rainbow, by definition, so it seems plausible it will be gold;
3) folklore often arises from historical experience, so the Irish of yore must have found such gold;
4) there must be good reasons why gold has been regarded as of monetary value -- indeed, as identical with the underlying value of money -- through much of human experience -- possibly that is because it is what one finds at the end of a rainbow!;
5) lots of people fervently believe in leprechauns and, if leprechauns exist, they must have a means of financing themselves;

and I could throw out whatever else I could come up with. There are devastating counter-arguments to each of these, but my opponent is kept on the defensive if he does run down the list in his response -- he may of necessity, in order to be thorough on some of these points, omit others -- and if he omits anything, I will leap on that and say, "Aha! even the gold deniers can't counter my argument number 27!"

That's the Gish Gallop. It is named in honor (so to speak) of Duane Gish, a biochemist and anti-Darwinian who became notorious in the 1970s and '80s for engaging in public arguments over evolution.

It is important to note that he was a biochemist because Gish gallopers in Gish' own field love arguments from authority, which they pose as a supposed wave of the future. "More and more scientists are turning against this evolution nonsense," they say, "so you should join the avant garde cause of creationism." For the record, then, although Gish did author at least 14 peer reviewed publications on biochemistry, none of them had any connection with evolutionary biology, and he stopped working in that manner when he took us his Higher Calling.

So far as I can tell, the last of Gish's genuine contributions to science was published in 1971, It was in the JOURNAL OF MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY, and it was about compounds of use in the suppression of immune reactions. https://pubs.acs.org/toc/jmcmar/14/12 That is an important subject and one wishes he had stuck to such a field.

At any rate, the practice of the Gish gallop is not at all limited to the cause for which Gish himself employed it. If only it could be so easily quarantined!

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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