The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
from David's Sling by Marc Stiegler
The fallacy of gray is a common belief in people who are somewhat advanced along the path to optimal truth seeking which claims, roughly, that because nothing is certain, everything is equally uncertain.
This fallacy is invoked by those who wishmakes a lot of sense once people notice very common and predictable emotional swings proximate to attack a well-performing system (e.g. Science),possible attachment to an emotivist ("boo vs yay") or binary ("black and white") labeling of an entity, or situation, or system, or choice.
If someone says "Hurrah for X!" then X can often be attacked by saying that X is just kind of blah.
If someone says "Down with X!" then X can often be defended by saying that X is just kind of blah.
Either of these "blah" assertions could count as the fallacy, if that was the totality of the argument.
This fallacy is possible because it really is the case that a variety of ambiguous signals can exist in proximity to a complex object, and there truly can be a mixture of positive and negative aspects to any given thing in the world, and also objects can have aspects that might be instrumentally useful or harmful to different plans whose total net value is not entirely determined by any single local factor.
Also, a very normal response to complexity like this is for cognitive dissonance to lead the person to have some single simply up/down association... to achieve cognitive closure swiftly. People might call this tendency a bias towards certainty.
Then, knowing this bias exists, someone who wields the fallacy of gray can score debate points on people with a simplistic binary attitude, without seeming to strongly or obviously take sides.
This does represent a kind of progress or increase in power levels.
However, in calling the fallacy of gray a fallacy, some even better thing is imagined.
The better thing, simply put, is to become quantitative and detail oriented.
A VNM rational agent will have probabilistic beliefs, p, where 0<p<1, about what's likely to fall out of various choices, and a coherently linear model of value, v, with no behaviorally significant "natural zero". Then every option is basically assigned the value p*v, and the agent simply always make choices in favor of what the agent calculates gives the most utility, under uncertainty.
Suppose there is a choice between
something with p*v = -1,000,000 net utility under uncertainty or
something with p*v = -1,000,001 net utility under uncertainty...
...then the VNM agent simply chooses the option that is greater, or "less negative", and picks -1,000,000.
The negative sign, and all those zeros... that is just in the math.
The VNM agent feels no psychic cloud of badness because of the negative sign, or because of how big the number was.
If you want...
This fallacy is invoked by those who wish to attack a well well-performing system (e.g. Science), by saying that it is still imperfect. This then excuses the imperfections of the invoker's chosen system. For example "Science is based on faith too!"
This fallacy is invoked by those who wish to attack a well performing system (e.g. Science), by saying that it is still imperfect. This then excuses the imperfections of the invoker's chosen system. For example "Science is based on faith too!"
The fallacy of gray assumes that,is a belief that because the extremes on a given measure are impossible, all cases are equivalent. For example: because no statement may be proven with absolute certainty, all statements arenothing is certain, everything is equally uncertain. A subscriber to theOne who commits this fallacy may reply to being toldthe statement that the oddsprobability of winning a lottery is only one in a million by saying: "There's still a chance, right?"
The fallacy of gray isassumes that, because the extremes on a belief thatgiven measure are impossible, all cases are equivalent. For example: because nothing is certain, everything isno statement may be proven with absolute certainty, all statements are equally uncertain. One who commits thisA subscriber to the fallacy may reply to being told that the statement that probabilityodds of winning a lottery is only one in a million by saying: "There's still a chance, right?"
The fallacy of gray is a belief that because nothing is certain, everything is equally uncertain. One who commits this fallacy may reply to the fallacy of gray is one who returns to astatement that probability of 1winning a lottery is only one in a million that "there'by saying: "There's still a chance, right?"
The fallacy of gray is a belief that because nothing is certain, everything is equally uncertain. One who commits the fallacy of gray is one who returns to a probability of 1 in a million that "there's still a chance, right?"