What you see is not what you think you see...

Recently a cop was accused of obstructing justice and perjury after asserting that he did not see his colleagues unlawfully beating up another, undercover cop (they though he was the suspect in a crime the force was investigating). Turns out the first cop was chasing a suspect in the same crime, and ran right by the cops doing their nefarious duty. However, his story that he just didn't see the violence was so incredible to the court, that his conviction stood.

This story prompted Union College researchers to conduct a study (of undergraduates), where the subjects were asked to follow someone and make mental notes about him. Seems that about two thirds of the time, the subjects did not see a fight which had been staged for the purpose.

This research shows that we have a better opinion of our ability to absorb visual cues around us than we do. Such an insight is important when dealing with coworkers who present vastly differing versions of events. Maybe they just literally saw things differently. For this reason, it is important to always get both sides of a story when making employment decisions based on employee reports.

False Premise

All logical arguments are based up initial assumptions, called premises, that must be true for the conclusion to be true. Because the initial assumptions must not be false, it is important to scrutinize propositions before stating them. For instance:

a. All dogs have rabies. (Premise.)
b. Franco is a dog. (Premise.)
c. Franco must have rabies. (Conclusion.)

Because (a) is demonstrably false, (c) has to be false under this argument. That doesn't mean the dog mentioned does not have rabies, but it means you cannot prove it as above.

The real world is rife with this particular logical fallacy. Often this occurs when people make assumptions about the world around them. In the employment context, this might come up in wage claims, when employees extrapolate what happened to other to themselves; or in discrimination claims when employees make assumptions about another person because of their sex or race.

Watch out for these in all drafting employment manuals, too. Assumptions about how and when people act can accidentally impose contract law onto a poorly crafted handbook.

Arguing from Ignorance

Common sense is our most basic fall-back when confronted by things outside our understanding. My boss likes to call it the "sniff test." Does some knew information conform to what we already know? If it does not, we're likely to reject it; if it does, we're more likely to accept it. Rejecting an argument based on a personal failure to understand is the argument from ignorance (specifically an argument from personal incredulity). That argument goes something like this:

• I don't understand a.
• Therefore no one can understand a, and therefore a must be false.

Stated succinctly, the argumentum ad ignorantiam goes:

A premise is true only because it has not been proven false, or is false only because it has not been proven true.

That level of sophistication (or lack thereof) may be fine when filtering out the mental cruft of daily life, but when it comes to legal analysis, common sense is insufficient. Instead, a position must be backed up by fact and law. However, the common-sense filtering system may be important to determine which of many arguments to spend the time refuting.