At Work Newswire

By Jefferson Flanders

One of the quirky appeals of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the way author Lewis Carroll constructs a world where the fundamental rules of logic—of sequential thinking and cause and effect—are slyly inverted or distorted.

Carroll’s imaginative tale offers its readers all sorts of illogic. Consider Alice’s conversation, early in her adventures, with the Cheshire Cat:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

What better example of circular reasoning could there be? The Cat posits that only the mad inhabit Wonderland—since Alice is in Wonderland, consequently she must be mad.

When Alice questions whether the Cheshire Cat is mad, the Cat gets her to “grant” that a dog is not mad, and then argues:”…a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad.” Alice spots the semantic flaw in the Cat’s thinking, though, noting sharply: “I call it purring, not growling.”

Alice could also have challenged the underlying, and unspoken assumption, made by the Cheshire Cat: because dogs are sane, anyone who deviates from what the Cat defines as proper canine behavior (growling when pleased, for example, instead of when angry) must consequently be insane (mad). The flaw, of course, is that the Cat—and Alice—are not dogs.

Sometimes the illogic in an argument stems from the premises, sometimes from the assumptions. With the Cheshire Cat, both assumptions (what constitutes a definition of sanity) and premises (that purring and growling are one and the same) are faulty, leading to an amusing, if flawed, conclusion.

Authors and comics know there’s humor in arriving at an absurd conclusion through a seemingly logical train of thought. Take, for example, Woody Allen’s Sleeper, where the movie’s protagonist, Miles Monroe, has been transported 200 years into the future. Monroe is shocked to learn that scientists now consider deep fat, steak, cream pies, and hot fudge to be healthy and have life-preserving properties, unlike “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.”

Allen counts on his audience accepting this assumption: we want to eat foods that will help prolong our lives. But he plays with the premises of the argument, with our notions of what is healthy (conventional wisdom holding that “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk” are wholesome, and foods with fat and cholesterol are not). What’s funny is Monroe’s discovery of this sudden contradiction—the substitution of what’s “good” for what’s “bad”—and what it says about our relative confidence in current medical knowledge.

Comic illogic can teach us something valuable about the thinking process; we can sharpen our critical thinking skills when figuring out the flaws in an absurd or fanciful argument (they’re usually what makes us laugh). Finding the shaky premises or flighty assumptions in the comic can be surprisingly good practice for de-constructing the more serious non-Wonderland arguments we encounter.

Jefferson Flanders is an author, educator and independent journalist. He blogs on issues of the day at Neither Red nor Blue.

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Copyright © 2007 Jefferson Flanders

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