The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (8 page)

ZEUS:
What is that? [
The missile comes down from the sky and blows up on the battlefield, killing everyone. The screen fills up with white ash. Moments later, Butters digs himself out of the ash and dusts ­himself off. He looks around and walks off to his left
.]

BUTTERS:
Huh … [
With nothing but white around, he ­concentrates real hard and soon Imaginationland returns. The Barrier repairs itself, and all the imaginary characters reappear
.]

JESUS:
He did it!

FANCIFUL MAYOR:
[
Poof
] Oh look, I’m back!

LUKE SKYWALKER:
Nice going, kid. [
The other good imaginary ­characters congratulate him
.]

FANCIFUL MAYOR:
The evil characters! They’re all behind the wall again.

STAN:
Dude! How did you do that, Butters?

BUTTERS:
Well, I just … used my imagination.

ALL:
Awwww! [
Everyone has a good laugh
.]

Of course, one philosophical question remains. If Butters imagined everyone back after the blast, are
any
of them real?

1
. Ulrich Beck,
World Risk Society
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited,”
Theory, Culture, & Society
19:4 (2002): 39-55; see also, Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in
Critical Sociology: Selected Readings
, ed. Paul Connerton. (New York: Penguin, 1976), 224.

2
. Beck, “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited,” 39.

3
. Bruce Hoffman,
Inside Terrorism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

4
. Beck, “Living in the World Risk Society,”
Economy and Society
35:3 (2009): 335.

5
. Ibid., 335.

6
. Ibid., 336.

7
. Beck,
World Risk Society
, 44.

8
. Beck, “Living in the World Risk Society,” 340.

9
. Ibid., 342.

Robert Arp

The Goth kids on
South Park
crack me up because they remind me of the Gothers at the high school where I taught in the early 1990s, sitting around looking like the bastard children of Robert Smith and Tori Amos. In fact, my first reaction to seeing a group of kids dressed like that at a mall is automatically to think, “They’re
all
saturnine, shady, surly, and, of course, suspect.” Alliteration aside, that conclusion is unfair, isn’t it? It’s an example of the
fallacy of hasty generalization
. A
fallacy
is an inappropriate or incorrectly drawn conclusion from reasons that don’t support the conclusion, and
hasty generalization
is a common fallacy often lampooned on
South Park
. In a hasty generalization, a person concludes something about members of a whole group based upon their observations of characteristics of a small number from the group. Most times, when we think to ourselves “they’re all like that” in talking about anything—cars, movies, Goths—based on a small sample of the group we’re talking about, we’re guilty of hasty generalization. There’s usually no way to ­
definitely
conclude something about the characteristics of an
entire
group since we have no knowledge of the entire group. The next member of the group we run into may turn out to be totally different from the others we’ve encountered thus far. In fact, many of those little Goths at the high school where I taught were not at all saturnine, shady, or surly once you chatted with them, and I was reasoning ­fallaciously by immediately jumping to that conclusion.

Any form of
stereotyping
constitutes a hasty generalization, almost by definition. Consider the way Kyle’s Jewish cousin, Kyle 2, is stereotyped in “The Entity,” or how Mexicans are type-cast as lazy, how gays are
all
flamboyant like Big Gay Al or Mr. Slave, and African-Americans are reverse type-cast as “richers” in “Here Comes the Neighborhood.” Even Officer Barbrady commits the fallacy of hasty generalization in “Chickenlover” when, after reading a copy of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
, he concludes that all books must be this bad, and reading “totally sucks ass.” The creators of
South Park
play on people’s hasty generalizations to make their points episode after episode, not only because prejudice is something that
morally
harms people, but also because it
logically
“harms” people’s thinking as well.

This chapter offers a short logic lesson as an introduction to what philosophers and other critical thinkers do when they offer and ­criticize arguments. Logic is the study of the principles of correct reasoning associated with the formation and analysis of arguments.
¹
The creators of
South Park
, for the most part, know these logical ­principles. They purposely violate them, though, to show the absurdities contained in certain beliefs, opinions, ideas, and arguments. In fact, much of
South Park
’s humor concerns logical violations and the absurdities, contradictions, and problems that result. The way people reason—­correctly or incorrectly—has real consequences. It affects the principles they adhere to, the laws they make, the beliefs they’re ­willing to die for, and the general way in which they live their lives.

For example, in the episode “Death,” the entire community boycotts the
Terrance and Philip Show
(and sacrifices members of the community to get it taken off the air) because Mrs. Broflovski kicks off a campaign to show that it promotes immorality. Of course, this parallels reality all too often, and raises questions as to whether TV promotes immorality, as well as what people are willing to do about their perception that it does. Can we draw the general conclusion that a show like
South Park
, even if viewed by children, is bad for
all
­children, from evidence that it’s bad for
some
children?

Consider a parallel case. Are all Americans immoral? And if they are, should they be punished by flying planes into skyscrapers? How we live our lives, as well as how we affect others’ lives, depends upon whether we reason correctly or incorrectly (you may even find what I have said to be logically questionable). In what follows, we’ll consider some basics of logic using examples from
South Park
episodes, and show some differences between correct and incorrect reasoning.

Logic
is the study of the principles behind reasoning correctly using arguments. An
argument
consists of two or more claims, one of which is called the
conclusion
. The conclusion is supposed to be supported by or demonstrated by one or more premises. A
premise
is a claim in the argument that is supposed to support or demonstrate the conclusion. The fundamental purpose of an argument is to persuade or convince someone of the truth of a conclusion. In other words, when we offer an argument, we want others to be persuaded or convinced of the conclusion we arrived at and believe to be true, and we use other claims as support for the truth of that conclusion.

My fallacious argument about Goths can be rephrased like this: “Because every Gother I’ve ever met and known has been saturnine, shady, surly, and, of course, suspect [the premise], therefore all Gothers I’ll meet in future will be saturnine, shady, surly, and, of course, suspect [the conclusion].” A complete argument has at least one premise and only one conclusion, but arguments usually have two or more premises. So, for example, in the episode “Ike’s Wee Wee,” Cartman put together an argument for why we should be convinced drugs are bad that sounded like this: “If you do drugs, then you’re a hippie; if you’re a hippie, then you suck; if you suck, then that’s bad [premises]; So, if you do drugs, then that’s bad [conclusion].”

Both the conclusion and the premises in an argument are claims. A
claim
is a statement or judgment that puts into words a person’s beliefs or opinions. Meaningful claims tell us that something is or is not the case about reality. Claims can be either true or false (not both). For example, the claims “I am typing this chapter on a laptop” and “Chewbacca is a Wookiee” are true, whereas the claims “Rob Arp was the 40th President of the United States” and “The sun revolves around the earth” are false. A claim is found true or false through
evidence
, which includes sense experience, explanations and theories, the testimony of other people, and appeal to appropriate authority. “I am typing this chapter a laptop” is true because of the evidence of my own senses; “Chewbacca is a Wookiee” is true by the definition of “Chewbacca”; “Rob Arp was the 40th President of the United States” is false because of the testimony of the senses of others and authorities; and “The sun revolves around the earth” is false because of indirect sensory evidence and the well-established heliocentric theory that shows the planets orbit the sun. It’s difficult or even impossible to show that some claims are true or false with evidence. Claims like “God exists,” “Abortion is always immoral,” and “I have an immortal soul” fall into this ambiguous category. That is probably why ideas, issues, and arguments surrounding these claims are considered to be
philosophical
.

As rational critical thinkers, we have beliefs we think are true about reality, and we express those beliefs or opinions in written or spoken claims. But we can’t stop there. We often have to convince others why we hold these beliefs, and when we do this, we must give a reason or set of reasons (the premises of our argument) for why we hold to a particular belief (the conclusion). So, for example, in “The Passion of the Jew,” Kyle believes strongly that the Jewish community in his hometown should apologize for Jesus’s death. If asked why the Jewish community in his hometown, or anyone, should be convinced or ­persuaded to apologize, Kyle might offer the following:

Let’s note a few things about this argument: first, it’s written in
standard form
. Putting an argument in standard form means placing the premises of the argument first, the conclusion last, and clearly dividing the premises and conclusion like I’ve done above. This is a handy tool because it keeps the logical form and the parts of the argument clear. As we’ll see later, standard form makes the argument easier to analyze when we’re trying to see if the conclusion follows from the premises, as well as seeing whether all the premises are true.

Notice the word
since
at the beginning of the premises and the word
therefore
at the beginning of the conclusion. The word
since
is an example of a premise indicator word, like
because
,
for
,
for the reason that
, and
as
, among others. The word
therefore
is an example of a conclusion indicator word, along with words like
hence
,
so
,
thus
,
this shows us that
,
we can conclude that
, and
we can reason/deduce/infer that
, among others. Premise-indicating and conclusion-­indicating words are important because they help us find the premises and conclusion in an argument. At times, it can be difficult to tell if someone is putting forward an argument or not. It’s therefore helpful to look for these indicator words to see if there’s an argument in front of you and, if so, then you can identify what the conclusion and the premises of the argument are. Unfortunately, indicating words aren’t always present, and people sometimes place the conclusion in different places in their argument (sometimes it will be the first claim, sometimes the second, sometimes the last). In such cases you’ll have to infer and supply these words to make the structure and parts of the argument apparent.

There are two main kinds of argument,
deductive
arguments and
inductive
arguments. In deductive arguments, the arguer intends her conclusion to follow from the premises with
absolute certainty
. This means that if all her premises are true, then the conclusion must be true without a doubt. To say that a conclusion
follows
from a premise means that we’ve reasoned appropriately from one claim (the premise) to another claim (the conclusion). Cartman puts forward a deductive argument in “The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000” episode that goes something like this:

If the two premises are true, the conclusion must absolutely be true. We can also see that there’s no other conclusion that could correctly follow from these premises. In fact, from looking at the premises alone you know the conclusion before even seeing it. The previous argument about Jews apologizing for Jesus’s death is also a deductive argument. Just like with the Tooth Fairy argument, if all the premises are true then the conclusion must be true; there’s no other conclusion that possibly could be drawn from the premises, and you know exactly what the conclusion is without even seeing it.