Chronological snobbery

Information about Chronological snobbery

Chronological snobbery is a logical fallacy coined between friends C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield describing the erroneous argument that the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior when compared to that of the present. Or as Barfield explains it, it is the belief that "intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century."[1] The subject came up between them when Barfield had converted to Anthroposophy and was persuading Lewis (an atheist at that time) to join him. One of Lewis's objections was that the religion was simply outdated, and in Surprised by Joy (chapter 13, p. 207-208) he describes how this was fallacious:

Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

Pattern

The form of the chronological snobbery fallacy can be expressed as follows:
  • You argue that A implies B.
  • A implies B is an old argument, dating back to the times when people also believed C.
  • C is clearly false.
  • Therefore, A does not imply B.

Examples

C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy (Chapter 13, p. 206) recounts his story:
First Harwood (still without changing his expression), and then Barfield, embraced the doctrines of Steiner and became Anthroposophists. I was hideously shocked. Everything I had labored so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends. Not only my best friends but those whom I would have thought safest; the one so immovable, the other brought up in a free-thinking family and so immune from all "superstition" that he had hardly heard of Christianity itself until he went to school. (The gospel first broke on Barfield in the form of a dictated list of Parables Peculiar to St. Matthew.) Not only in my seeming-safest friends but at a moment when we all had most need to stand together. And as I came to learn (so far as I ever have learned) what Steiner thought, my horror turned into disgust and resentment. For here, apparently, were all the abominations; none more abominable than those which had once attracted me. Here were gods, spirits, afterlife and pre-existence, initiates, occult knowledge, meditation. "Why–damn it–it's medieval," I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of the earlier periods as terms of abuse.


G. B. Tennyson in his book offers the following firsthand account:
I was attending a lecture with a varied but exclusively university-oriented audience of some five hundred when the lecturer, a Ph.D. in physics, said, almost in passing, "Remember that only three hundred years ago men actually believed the world was flat!" Considerable knowing laughter greeted this astonishing misrepresentation (or, should I say, falsehood?), and the assembled all murmured a kind of self-congratulatory hum of satisfaction with their own superior knowledge. At another point the lecturer dropped a reference to the onetime belief that the sun revolved around the earth. More laughter. The physicist, it was apparent, was merely offering burnt incense at the altar of some of our twentieth-century idols.

See also

External Links

References

1. ^ History in English Words p. 164


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Fallacies of relevance
GeneralAbsurdity • Accident • Ad nauseam • Argument from ignorance • Argument from silence • Bandwagon Fallacy • Base rate fallacy • Bulverism • Compound question • Fallacy of many questions • False compromise • Middle ground • Naturalistic fallacy • Proof by assertion • Irrelevant conclusion • Special pleading • Straw man • Style over substance fallacy • Two wrongs make a right
Appeals to emotionFear • Flattery • Nature • Novelty • Pity • Ridicule • Repugnance • Spite
Genetic fallaciesAd hominem (Ad hominem tu quoque) • Appeal to authority • Appeal to motive • Appeal to tradition • Appeal to wealth • Appeal to poverty • Association fallacy • Chronological snobbery • Ipsedixitism • Poisoning the well • Appeal to Etymology • Reductio ad Hitlerum
Appeals to consequencesAppeal to force • Wishful thinking
A fallacy is a component of an argument that is demonstrably flawed in its logic or form, thus rendering the argument invalid in whole. In logical arguments, fallacies are either formal or informal.
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C. S. Lewis

Born: 29 November 1898(1898--)
Belfast, Ireland
Died: 22 November 1963 (aged 66)
Oxford, England
Occupation: Novelist, Scholar, Broadcaster
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Owen Barfield (November 9, 1898 – December 14, 1997) was a British philosopher, author, poet, and critic.

Barfield was born in London. He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a 1st class degree in English language and
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Anthroposophy is a spiritual philosophy based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner which postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development - more specifically through conscientiously
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Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Author C.S. Lewis
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre(s) Autobiography
Publisher Harvest Books
Publication date 1955
Media type Paperback
Pages 252
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Rudolf Steiner (25 February 1861 – 30 March 1925), born in Donji Kraljevec, Croatia, was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, educator, artist, playwright, social thinker, and esotericist.
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Not to be confused with Historical fallacy.
The historian's fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing
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Presentism is a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past. Most modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they believe it creates a distorted
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Whig historiography perceives the past as a teleological progression towards the present. In general, Whig historians look for and favour the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress in any historical period.
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Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion or irrelevant thesis) is the formal fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but doesn't address the issue in question.
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Ad Lapidem is a logical fallacy where someone dismisses a statement as absurd without giving a reason why it is supposedly absurd. It is considered close to the ad hominem fallacy. [1]

References

1.

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The logical fallacy of accident, also called destroying the exception or a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid, is a deductive fallacy occurring in statistical syllogisms (an argument based on a generalization) when an exception to the generalization is ignored.
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Ad nauseam is a Latin term used to describe something that has been continuing "to the point of nausea."[1] For example "This topic has been discussed ad nauseam"; it has been discussed extensively and everyone is tired of it.
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argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam ("appeal to ignorance" [1]) or argument by lack of imagination, is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that a premise is true only because it has not been proven false or that a premise
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The argument from silence (also called argumentum a silentio in Latin) is generally a conclusion based on silence or lack of contrary evidence.[1] In the field of classical studies, it often refers to the deduction from the lack of references to a subject in the
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An argumentum ad populum (Latin: "appeal to the people"), in logic, is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it; it alleges that "If many believe so, it is so.
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The base rate fallacy, also called base rate neglect, is a logical fallacy that occurs when irrelevant information is used to make a probability judgment, especially when empirical statistics about the probability are available (called the "base rate" or "prior probability").
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Bulverism is a logical fallacy coined by C. S. Lewis where rather than proving that an argument is wrong, a person instead assumes it is wrong, and then goes on to explain why the other person held that argument. It is essentially a circumstantial ad hominem argument.
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A compound question is one that actually asks several things which might require different answers. In a trial, a compound question will likely raise an objection, as the witness may be unable to provide a clear answer to the inquiry.
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Many questions, also known as complex question, presupposition, loaded question, "trick question", or plurium interrogationum (Latin, "of many questions"), is an informal fallacy.
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A false compromise (also known as a gray fallacy) is a logical fallacy: X and Y are opposite alternatives. So Z, a middle path, is the best choice. This fallacy is very similar to argumentum ad temperantiam (middle ground).
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Middle Ground may refer to the following:
  • Middle Ground (India), an island within Mumbai Harbour
  • Middle Ground (United States), an island in the U.S. state of Massachusetts
  • Middle Ground (magazine), an academic journal
  • "Middle Ground" (The Wire

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The naturalistic fallacy is often claimed to be a formal fallacy. It was described and named by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica.
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Proof by assertion is a logical fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted (argumentum ad nauseam).
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Ignoratio elenchi (also known as irrelevant conclusion or irrelevant thesis) is the formal fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but doesn't address the issue in question.
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Special pleading is a form of spurious argumentation where a position in a dispute introduces favorable details or excludes unfavorable details by alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations themselves.
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straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw man argument" is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent.
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Style over substance is a logical fallacy which occurs when one emphasises the way in which the argument is presented, while marginalising (or outright ignoring) the content of the argument. In some cases, the fallacy is employed as a form of ad hominem attack.
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Two wrongs make a right is a logical fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that if one wrong is committed, another wrong will cancel it out. Like many fallacies, it typically appears as the hidden major premise in an enthymeme—an unstated assumption which must be true for
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Appeal to emotion is a logical fallacy which uses the manipulation of the recipient's emotions, rather than valid logic, to win an argument. This kind of appeal to emotion is a type of red herring and encompasses several logical fallacies, including:

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