Facing Fallacies on the French Way
This blog post was written as my final project submission for the course PHIL 145 (Critical Thinking) at the University of Waterloo.
As I was hiking uphill through the Pyrenees mountains on rocky, uneven terrain in the blistering heat, aside from the breathtaking view and physical challenges, it was in fact the unusual social interactions I had encountered that made this experience a memorable one. On August 28th, 2017, I completed the Camino de Santiago, specifically the Camino Frances (the French Way), an 812-kilometer hike across the width of Spain over a span of 26 days. The first question that often arises when I talk about my experience is “wasn’t it hard walking for that long?” or “how much did you train beforehand?”. What I didn’t expect prior to beginning the journey was the mental strain, which I believed to have been truly greater than the physical, and the extremely interesting, beautiful, funny, and strange relationships I had with people along the way. Based on my own observations, the trail was primarily packed with Italians, Spanish, French, Germans, and oddly enough, very few North Americans, but quiet a number Koreans. This diversity made for an unusual mix of both culture shock and misunderstanding. I must also say that much of my own thought process throughout the 26 days have shown signs of a fallacious thinking. Critical thinking has helped me understand where and how some of these peculiar interactions and thoughts may have stemmed from.
I am going to describe interactions I encountered with other hikers and my own moments of self reflection along the Camino and how they coincide with fallacies of reasoning. I believe that there are many factors that caused these fallacies to be committed, such as a genuine lack of knowledge or misunderstanding, culture differences, or ignorance, but regardless each experience added to charm of the hike.
The following incident, I still find amusing to this day. I am a Canadian born Korean and the number of times I’ve been asked “North or South?” by my peers is endless. This is all supposed to be a joke of course. When asked by other European hikers where I’m from, namely the Italians, they looked at me with this “what’s this Asian girl doing in Canada” puzzled look. Eventually I just ended up telling people that I was Korean, so they could just assume that I was from Korea and I could carry on my way. The next question is what I really got a kick out of: “Are you from the North or the South?”. I’m certain this was not a joke. Eventually I got tired and just humored them with a stupid response, but to be fair, I don’t think their queries were meant to be offensive, they were just mildly ignorant or unaware. This interaction presents a multitude of fallacies. An argument from ignorance is a missing evidence fallacy that assumes that since something has not been proven false, it is therefore true — at a first glance, because I physically look Korean and there is no other evidence to prove otherwise, I must be from Korea. We may also look at this as a hasty generalization. This is another fallacy of missing evidence that consists of drawing a conclusion based on insufficient or biased evidence — Many of the Korean hikers on the Camino de Santiago are from Korea, you are probably also from Korea. It turns out the person that had stated this, had only spoken to about five Korean people… Perhaps the common cause of this misunderstanding (or lack of evidence to understand that asking “North or South?” is a pretty questionable question to ask…) is due to the lack of diversity or exposure in some European countries, such as Italy for example which consists of around 93% Italians* — but that statement I made in itself is probably also fallacious.
The next incident is one that I will admit having constantly committed: the slippery slope argument. The is a fallacy of casual reasoning that essentially consists of assuming that one event will cause a chain reaction of a bunch of others — a series of unfortunate events. Thinking back upon all the times I got caught in this mentality, it all seems kind of silly. In a moment of stress, aching feet, and hallucinations from the overbearing heat and long stretches of walking in the middle of nowhere, it seemed logical at the time. This is how my mindset went: Because I am a slow walker, I need to get the day started by 4am. If I don’t start by 4am, then the sun will be out, and I will spend most of my day in the heat. If I spend most of my day in the heat, then I will need more water, if I need more water, my hiking pack will be heavier. If my hiking pack is heavier then I will walk even slower. If I walk too slow then I won’t get a decent spot in the hostel. If I don’t get a decent spot then I will have a bad sleep, and if I have a bad sleep then I won’t be able to get up at 4am the following day. Therefore, I must get up at 4am. When a chain of events has inevitable cause and effect relationship, is isn’t considered a fallacy, but in this case, we see it as the concept of having a ‘bad day’, where I fallaciously reasoned that these will happen and assumed that it would all be acted out as true. We also see signs of a circular reasoning, a begging-the-question fallacy, where the statement made leads to the same conclusion (P, therefore P) — I must get up at 4am, because then I won’t be able to get up at 4am, so I need to wake up at 4am.
I made a friend who along the Camino who I hiked with for a small part of the trail, also an Asian North American girl from Colorado. Her dad recently passed away from cancer and she was carrying a stone from his favorite mountain in her hometown to place along the trail of the Camino de Santiago — an irrelevant detail to this academic project, but I thought it was touching. An unwarranted assumption known as the fallacy of composition is inferring that something is true of the whole since some parts are true. This is where our thought process went wrong: If we hike faster, we will get a good spot and first choice in the hostel. But hiking in a large group is so much more fun! Therefore, is all the hikers hike faster, they can all get a good spot and first choice in the hostel. — yeah it doesn’t really work like that…
So that is a small fraction of my experience where I see that it coincides with critical thinking. The biggest take-away from this hike is that critical thinking helps us immensely to understand others, become less ignorant beings, and view multifaceted things and people from a wider perspective. Perhaps it also gives you thicker skin when a statement is made that takes you off guard, and it most certainly helps us think more rationally (one time during my 26 days I
woke up and started hiking at noon, and it wasn’t a catastrophe…). Thinking critically helps us enjoy the beautiful moments in life.
-M
*source: http://www.istat.it/en/archive/129859
** All photos are my own.