4: Mrs Bulver's Theorum

So. Come to the common room to hear Dr C.S. Lewis, author of Mere Christianity and the Screwtape Letters prove logically that God created the Universe and then explain how He did so. Nothing too challenging: he’s got nearly an hour in which to cover it. 

But he doesn’t start with God. He starts with two elderly Victorians having an argument. 

What are they arguing about? What else but geometry? 

Some day (says Lewis) I am going to write the biography of Bulverism’s imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third – “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century. 

Very droll. But what point was Lewis making? 

We all know what an ad hominem argument is. You can’t prove your client is innocent on the basis of the evidence; so you say that the prosecution lawyer is a rogue, a fool, and what’s more, that he’s wearing a silly tie. You can’t explain why a 45% income tax on earnings above £150,000 would be impractical and unfair; so you go on and on about that time the leader of the opposition didn’t sing the words to God Save the Queen. Obviously this is a particularly egregious error when you are talking about geometry. 

We also know what it means to beg the question: to take your conclusion as your starting point; to take as proved the very thing which needs to be proved. My learned friend says that my client is a murderer: but how can you believe someone who would falsely accuse an innocent man? You have heard the witness say that he was on the other side of town when the crime was committed: but how can you trust the word of a murderer? 

Mrs Bulver is arguably guilty of a third offence against logic: she has introduced something irrelevant into the discussion. If there was a widespread belief that gender affected perception of Euclidean geometry, there might have been an excuse for saying that her husband believed in the inequality of triangles because he was a man. If he had said “I believe that this tie goes well with this shirt” she might perfectly well have replied “You say that because you are colour blind.” 

In the course of the essay, Lewis proposes eight further examples of Bulverism; four more turn up in his book on Miracles. Each of them is arguably circular, since they assume that the speaker is in the wrong. All involve an ad hominem argument: three attribute the opponent's beliefs to psychological causes; the rest allege an ulterior motive or vested interest. None of them commit Mrs Bulver’s fallacy of irrelevance: in each case the motive or cause has some plausible connection to the belief. The American Internet generally uses Bulverism as a synonym for personal attacks: but strictly speaking an argument needs to be both ad hominem and circular to qualify. 

Lewis examples fall broadly into four categories: axiomatic; facts; subjective beliefs and religious and political beliefs. Let's look at them one at a time...

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3: The Socratic Club

The essay on Bulverism was presented to the Oxford Socratic Club in 1944.

The Socratic Club was an Oxford student society. Despite its name, it wasn’t a club for people studying Greek philosophy or the works of Plato: it existed specifically to debate the case for and against Christianity. The student who started the club stuck up a hand-written notice inviting “all atheists, agnostics, and those disillusioned about religion or think they are” to come to the common room for a little chat. Astonishingly, quite a number turned up. The university rules required that student societies be sponsored by a member of faculty, and the Socratic Club rapidly became C.S. Lewis’s baby. 

The club was named after Socrates because it wanted to promote Socratic debate—elenchos. It was dedicated to the proposition that truth was adversarial. The best way of finding out if God existed was to get a Christian and an atheist together and watch them have an argument. Lewis says that he honestly tried to find credible opponents; and a number of Big Name Atheists—Jacob Bronowski, Iris Murdoch, J.B.S Haldane and C.E.M Joad—spoke at the club. But Lewis came to see it in gladiatorial terms. This wasn’t a mutual inquiry after truth. This was an “arena” in which Lewis either “wiped the floor” with his opponent, or else was himself “obliterated”. He talks about “coming under fire” from the atheists and dealing with the “recoil” of his own arguments. And he thinks that the debates are dangerous: “you [atheists] risk nothing: we [Christians] risk all.” 

We do not have a complete record of what C.S. Lewis said on this particular evening. Lewis’s essay was reproduced in the Socratic Digest: but only the first section, running to some 2,000 words, is printed in full. The rest of the speech is summarised by the editor, presumably from contemporaneous minutes. Other Socratic Club papers run to about 6,000 words, so what we have is the first 15 minutes of a 45 minute speech. Bulverism, then, is not much more than an introductory joke. Lewis would not have stood up in front of a university debating society simply to explain that the arguments ad hominem and petitio principii are logical fallacies. 

Lewis is doing what he always does. He starts out talking about something apparently trivial; and gradually peels off the layers until we see that he has really been talking about the meaning of the universe or the end of the human race. In Mere Christianity he starts out talking about two men arguing over a seat on a bus and ends up talking about Natural Law and the existence of God. In the Abolition of Man he starts out talking about a silly English textbook which conflates factual accuracy with artistic merit and ends up talking about....er... Natural Law and the existence of God. 

There is nothing wrong with this as an approach to popular apologetics. “I saw two men arguing on a bus yesterday, and do you know it made me stop and think...” is a better lead-in to talk about ethics on the wireless than “Since the dawn of time philosophers have wondered where our sense of morality comes from...” Proper philosophers do it too. Socrates once sat down in a market place and asked a slave boy a series of very simple questions. From his answers, he demonstrated (to his own satisfaction) the transmigration of souls and the existence of perfect forms. 

The questions were questions about geometry.

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2: Bulverism

Wikipedia defines Bulverism as the practice of assuming a speaker’s argument is invalid and then explaining why the speaker came to make that mistake. 

TV Tropes defines it as the practice of saying “You’re only claiming X to be the case because you want X to be the case!”

It is a silly word. It was made up by C.S. Lewis in order to make fun of a silly mistake sometimes made by silly people. He mentions it only once, in a light-hearted introduction to a serious religious lecture. He doesn’t use it consistently. Sometimes Bulverism is a rather dishonest rhetorical trick; sometimes it is a logical fallacy; and sometimes it is a very serious metaphysical error.

But Lewis’s silly word is frequently used seriously by conservative Christians. If you ever dare utter the phrase “you only think that because...” then someone from the American Internet will pop up and accuse you of Bulverism.

The website WriteAtHome uses the word to describe any allegation of conscious or unconscious bias. Do you think that a set of statistics about the benefits of home schooling may be skewed because they were collected by an organisation which exists to promote home schooling? You are guilty of Bulverism. Wonder if a certain individual wants government spending on state schools reduced because they happen to run a private tutoring business? You’re a Bulverist. Suggest on the other hand that state school teachers want the state education system to carry on so they can keep their jobs? Stop Bulverizing.

Another site, StandToReason (“Clear thinking about Christianity”) applies the word to claims that there are psychological or sociological components in the formation of religious belief. “You believe that Christianity is true because you were born in a Christian community”. Bulverism. “You believe that Christianity is true because you need a psychological crutch”. Bulverism.

A more extreme example comes from an essay called The Creepy Normalisation of Bulverism on a website called Intellectual Take Out. (I wonder if the writer really meant “creeping”?) It seems that Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, the Frankfurt School, Jacques Deriedda, Cultural Marxism and identity politics—henceforth known as “the usual suspects”—were all Bulverists. At any rate, they have created a culture in which “people of even moderately conservative views are fair game to be Bulverized”. It seems that leftists assume that the motives of the “oppressed” (with scare quotes) are always good and the motives of the non-oppressed (without quotes) are always bad. And this was what Lewis was warning us about. “You only say that because you’re (white) (Christian) (a man) (cis)!” is the go- to example of Bulverism.

It is true that in each case, someone has used “you only say that because...” as a rhetorical formula: you think that home-schoolers get good academic results because you support home-schooling; you believe in Christianity because you have a psychological or spiritual need for support; you don’t believe in the existence of racist micro-aggressions because you are a white person. But are all these cases fallacies? Are they all the same kind of fallacy? And are they the kind of fallacy that C.S. Lewis was making fun of?

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