The central fallacy: the second-worst argument in the world

In 2012, Scott Alexander wrote about what he considered to be “the worst argument in the world”. Essentially, the form of this argument, as he laid out, is to use the inherent characteristics of a category to criticize a noncentral or marginal member of that category. In doing so, you would attempt to create associations between central members of that category and noncentral members, in order to impugn a noncentral member by implicitly ascribing characteristics that don’t actually apply to it. For instance, consider the category “criminals”. If you think of a criminal without specific context, people like Al Capone or Arthur Sackler probably come to mind: someone who cares nothing for the laws that uphold civilized society, and lies, cheats, and steals his way to personal benefit without letting those laws bind his conscience or actions. Martin Luther King - the main example Scott uses in his essay - is also a criminal, in that he broke the law, and was sent to jail for it (hence the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail). However, King, while technically a criminal, is far from the qualities we traditionally attribute to criminals (and which apply to such people as Capone and Sackler). King deliberately chose to break the law in an act of civil disobedience, in which one chooses to defy the law and accept the consequences in order to bring attention to the unjust nature of that law. This was not someone who ran around robbing banks or committing fraud or swindling people into getting addicted to deadly drugs; King was an otherwise law-abiding citizen who, in one instance, made the calculated choice to violate an unjust law in order to force people to consider whether that law should really remain in force. Today, almost everyone would agree that what King did in Birmingham was good and right, that the law he broke was profoundly unjust, and that he was a criminal in only the narrow technical sense. Or, as Scott wrote in his original post: Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: “But Martin Luther King was a criminal!” Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. Since we don’t like these things, calling someone a “criminal” naturally lowers our opinion of them. The opponent is saying “Because you don’t like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King.” But King doesn’t share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King. This all seems so nice and logical when it’s presented in this format. Unfortunately, it’s also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to respond “Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn’t! You take that back!” This is why the noncentral is so successful. As soon as you do that you’ve fallen into their trap. Your argument is no longer about whether you should build a statue, it’s about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the argument. Ideally, you should just be able to say “Well, King was the good kind of criminal.” But that seems pretty tough as a debating maneuver, and it may be even harder in some of the cases where the noncentral fallacy is commonly used. Having looked at that example closely, we can now zoom out and consider the broader contours of category theory. Decades of research have shown that categories, as we perceive them, are not fixed Platonic absolutes in which all members are equally central and equally relevant. Rather, a category is more like a fuzzy conceptual ‘bucket’ with imprecise borders, and with gradients of applicability within those borders.[1] The noncentral fallacy exploits these gradients in one direction. I suggest that the second-worst argument in the world - let’s call it the central fallacy - is that which exploits these gradients in the other direction. Whereas the function and purpose of the noncentral fallacy is to attack an idea, concept, or individual by associating it with core members of a category it only marginally belongs to, the purpose of the central fallacy is to defend an idea, concept, or individual. It proceeds by observing that this idea, concept, or individual (let’s call it X) belongs to a category (of which it is a core member); that some other thing Y also belongs to that category (though Y is only a marginal member of said category); and then arguing that since Y