You Don't Say

Presume the 2008 presidential race pits Hillary Clinton against Dick Cheney.

1) If Hillary Clinton wins the next presidential election, Cheney will retire to private life.

2) If Cheney dies before the election, then Clinton will win it.

3) If Cheney dies before the election, then Cheney will retire to private life.

Whoops. Two truths don't always make a third. The solution is in the logical nicety that "different conditionals assert different forms of implication."

That illustration comes from an article in which Carlin Romano, philosophy teacher, picks apart the brouhaha over Bill Bennett's black babies bombshell. He concludes:

Hoi polloi, as opposed to haughty philosophers, read the antecedent of a hypothetical proposition as a glimpse into the hidden mind of the speaker. The hitch is that in speculating about Bennett's inner thoughts, critics hypothesize themselves. If Bennett secretly thinks African-Americans are more likely than others to be incipient criminals, or is cagily racist, then he should be condemned for that, independent of his line of reasoning. But if Bennett, who says he tried to counter absurdity with absurdity, spoke of black babies rather than all babies (plainly a crime reducer) in order to cast the rival hypo in its most offensive possible form — and because to say just "babies" in his ad hoc sentence would have made the hypothetical a self-defeating human-race reducer as well — then he's actually on the side of his critics.

That's the problem with the hypomanic anti-hypo crowd, eager to nail political opponents with a gotcha quote. They rely on a "master narrative" hypothetical: If someone floats a thought in the antecedent of a conditional, the floater actually believes it or wishes it to happen.

We have a big, fat nonphilosophical word for that type of reasoning.

Hypocritical.