I had to look that one up. My many years of casually reading philosophy hadn't introduced me to the term "apex fallacy." When the top Google result is Urban Dictionary, one might be forgiven for being skeptical that the term in question is a real thing. But you did provide me with a good laugh, so....thanks? A psuedoscientific term created by the misogynists who call themselves "Men's Rights Activists" to justify their claim that just because men control almost all the positions of power (the "apexes") doesn't mean that any discrimination against women happened. Normal human: "You ever notice all 43 American presidents have been men?" Misogynist: "That's the apex fallacy, I can find 43 poor guys, too! Therefore, women have just as much power as men -- no, even more power than men! Child support is theft! All rape reports are false!" foams at the mouthApex Fallacy
Your many years of reading philosophy have been wasted, apparently. Disregarding an argument just because it doesn't have a wikipedia article is not logical. The page you quoted contains a strawman fallacy (maybe you've heard about that?). Saying that men as a group can't be the victims of discrimination because every American president has been a man is fallacious thinking. The apex fallacy doesn't imply that women have just as much power -or more- as men; therefore that urban dictionary article is attacking a strawman.The apex fallacy refers to judging groups primarily by the success or failure at those at the top rungs (the apex, such as the 1%) of society, rather than collective success of a group. It is when people marginalize data from the poor or middle class and focus on data from the upper class.
I don't happen to agree with Grendel's disdain for feminists. However, I would like to mention that as a fly on the wall of this conversation thread, the only person that hasn't thrown out personal attacks or laughed out of hand at the other is Grendal. I also have never heard of the apex fallacy, and though the sources for it online may be questionable at best, and clearly the definition you found makes it sound ridiculous, is there not a potential for it to be valid? It is not unreasonable to me that the experience of those at the top of a social class is much different than those at the bottom. Meaning, the elite and wealthy men and women of the world may have a very different experience than the average Joe's/Jane's
I say yes, lots of unconventional explanations are potentially valid; they don't self-contradict. To decide if it is true, we can follow b_b's suggestion and look for evidence. Looking for evidence isn't any harder than looking for quotes and theories and analysis that support our idea, and we might even find evidence that improves our understanding of the real world! Suppose we find a pattern like this: Men hold the highest positions of power in politics and commerce, but just below the top level women hold all the "middle management" positions. You hardly see men again until you get down to menial positions. Since leaders depend on underlings for guidance, and there are far more middle managers than leaders, women hold most of the power in this scenario. I suggest you try it, really! We learn a lot more by reading about the world than arguing. I'll try it for where I live (I am searching as I type this, and intend to share what I find whether it confirms my current belief or not). In the United States, the highest political office is the President. It's a man. Next, symbolically, anyway, is the VP. He's named Joe. A photo of the president's "senior advisors" caught attention for having 90% white men. The cabinet appears to be majority male. On to Congress. A PDF says 104 of 535 seats are held by women. On the business side, women represent 4.6% of CEO positions among Fortune 500 companies. Looks like the national apex is pretty clearly male dominated. In my state, the top government positions are held by three men. The House of Delegates has 16 women and a much larger number of men. The governor is male. The company I work for has a male CEO, a male president, and a management team of seven, all men. The city I live in has a council of two women and five men (not counting the clerk). I find that I did learn something by looking at evidence: the pattern of leadership is more skewed than I thought. Of course it's possible that my location is unusual. To make the apex theory work, I would reword it like this: If you throw a dart and look at the organization it strikes, you will probably find more men than women holding leadership positions in that organization, regardless of the scale of the organization. Yet women really have all the power, because "The man is the head, but the woman is the neck!" It's not quite as convincing that way.I also have never heard of the apex fallacy, ... is there not a potential for it to be valid?
The broader point is this: The much easier thing to do when all the evidence suggests the opposite of what your ideological position leads you to believe is to invent an alternate reality. Have you heard of anogsognosia? It's a term applied to the phenomenon where by individuals will deny the existence of a disability, because they are unable to process that they have a disability due (likely) to some concomitant brain damage. In the term "apex fallacy" we find a good social analogy to that biological example. Some people have the idea that women have been responsible for some shortcoming in their life (which perhaps in some cases a woman was responsible, and the person decides all women are equally to blame). So they look for evidence around them, and what do they find? None, because none exists. Rational people look around and say, well I guess it was just my circumstance and not a general phenomenon. Irrational people (and what can make a person more irrational than ideology?) look around and say, "My arm isn't disabled! I choose not to move it!" 'Apex fallacy' is the pinnacle of denial for the ideology, a rhetorical trick that was made to sound intellectual because it has a philosophy word in it. I used ridicule in a previous response, and thenewgreen called me out for it, rightly I might add. That's not the right response. I actually feel bad for people who have fallen prey to their own inner demons. It's much easier to look outward than inward. But that doesn't really excuse the behavior, either. I don't think anyone who has a close personal relationship with a woman who makes her living in the corporate world could ever be convinced that women and men are treated equal. Even if the silly MRA crew is an insular internet-based community, attitudes like this thinly veiled woman hating have real consequences in the world for real people. Laughing at them isn't the most productive response, but sometimes laughter is all we have. It'd just be sad otherwise.
Eh, I have ridiculed your ideas before, so I'm not going to give you a hard time about it. You cited some figures instead of slinging mud, which elevates your contribution above much of this dialog. The fact that the best citation for the theory is on Urban Dictionary doesn't mean that it's wrong, but it does make me think that it is either nonsense or there is a very unusual set of circumstances in which an important truth is hidden behind widespread delusion. There are controversial theories on Wikipedia; the bar for inclusion is pretty low. There is a deleted article with some arguments about suitability for inclusion on the Talk page. The fallacy is described as "judging groups primarily by the success or failure at those at the top rungs." Now that I read it, that doesn't seem like nonsense. Someone might argue that some petroleum-rich country is doing well because the GDP per capita is high, ignoring that most people are poor and the wealth is concentrated in the royal family. Applying this to men in the United States, we could rightly argue that it's a mistake to conclude that all men are doing well simply because men in leadership positions are doing well. The fallacy is to suppose that this tells us anything about how women are doing compared to men. Grendel makes some other interesting points about biological differences, and has elsewhere given me interesting material to think about. But the handpicked quotes from pre-1902, vague allusions to antique laws, and unsubstantiated assertions like "If 9 out of 10 nurses are women, it's not because of anti-male biases" do not deserve better than ridicule. No, nor to the related Caloric reflex test: "squirting ice cold water into the left ear," which can "provide temporary pain relief from phantom limb pains in amputees." Facts are so much more interesting than arguments!I used ridicule ... That's not the right response
Have you heard of anogsognosia?
You should further investigate the source material. The quote in question is from a piece written by Alison Beard of the Harvard Business review (even though there are two citations, the other just points to the original), where she is describing how a person from the MRA group described the "apex fallacy" to her. It's a circular way to try to legitimize that which isn't legitimate. It is true that women have done remarkably well in progressing toward parity in mid-level management positions in recent years. So there's a legit and interesting question about why they don't have many positions of real power. I'm sure there are a variety of factors that contribute, but bias is definitely one of them. Using rhetorical obfuscations to inhibit what should be a very important debate about why corporate America and government are structured the way they are does us all a giant disservice. It's very difficult to fix problems we don't understand.There is a deleted article with some arguments about suitability for inclusion on the Talk page. The fallacy is described as "judging groups primarily by the success or failure at those at the top rungs." Now that I read it, that doesn't seem like nonsense.
The background is interesting, but to me it is irrelevant to answering the question "Is the Apex Fallacy a meaningful concept that could be useful in some cases?" I think it is a fair answer to someone who says "Men are doing great, because men hold most positions of power." I don't see how it says anything about men compared to women. If you learned that the article was in error, and the concept was actually introduced by some respectable source, would that change your opinion of it? I do believe that we can make some heuristic judgments about how worthwhile it will probably be to look into what appears to be a crackpot theory by seeing where it came from and who is interested in propagating it. We just have to be careful, because heuristic judgements can be unreliable. It is an interesting subject. Why do we have women's sports? Why is there a Women's World Chess Championship? Wouldn't it be strange to have race-segregated sports, on the basis of cultural bias and discrimination preventing different races from competing on equal footing?You should further investigate the source material.
That's a completely irrelevant hypothetical, because the "apex fallacy" (which I shall continue to put in quotes due to the fact that it's not an actual fallacy) is a rhetorical argument set against data driven conclusions. It is literal nonsense. I'm racking my brain, and the only good analogy I can come up with is if I said, "Man Texas is hot." And you replied, "NO, that's the 'apex fallacy'. Only its really hot days are hot, and sometimes it's hotter in Minnesota." If you can find a better one, I'd like to hear it. Or, if there were some actual scholarship on the matter, then yes, I would take it a lot more seriously, even if I disagreed I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. Fortunately, we don't have to resort to that here. I'm not sure I get the sports analogy, unless we're relating one's business and administrative acumen to their physicality. On the subject of chess, it might just be a numbers game. That's what Yasser Seirawan suggests in this book, although it is speculation. He estimates the numbers of males and females who play chess and based on the huge number of men compared to women who play, estimates that the odds are against women for having a world class player (if we assume random chance). I'm not going to defend or rebuke that claim, because I have no idea; just putting it out there, because it's the only thing I've ever read about it. The same can't be said of women in the business world, because they occupy a proportionate number of low and middle jobs, but lack representation at the top.If you learned that the article was in error, and the concept was actually introduced by some respectable source, would that change your opinion of it?
I gave an example similar to this: "Man, it must be nice to live in Dubai! People are so rich they abandon luxury cars all over the place!" "You dunce, that's the apex fallacy. Lots of people in Dubai are poor immigrant laborers working in awful conditions." It's a kind of fallacy of composition, and it's debatable if it happens often enough that we need a special name for it. With the sports question, I am wondering about male/female differences generally. It seems obvious that men have natural advantages in power lifting, but it is much harder to tell if they have natural advantages at power lunches. Clearly women face social obstacles unrelated to their natural ability in the workplace. It's very hard to tease these factors apart. It's possible that fewer women are recognized for chess skill, and are less encouraged to perform, and discouraged by tradition. I don't know if that is enough to explain male dominance in chess. It is cool that the strongest female player never competed for the Women's World Championship: "I always say that women should have the self-confidence that they are as good as male players, but only if they are willing to work and take it seriously as much as male players." Perhaps we will see greater participation by women. I like the awkward dialog in Cryptonomicon, starting where the word "geek" appears. The highlight: "Whereas women can’t?" "I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I’m characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier." And here is an abandoned Ferrari Enzo."If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else."
I'll just leave this here. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/02/men-women-brains-wired-differentlyScientists have drawn on nearly 1,000 brain scans to confirm what many had surely concluded long ago: that stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.
No. The "apex fallacy" is better termed "evidence". Using data to construct an argument is exactly the opposite as using a dubious fallacy. And I did actually laugh when I saw that result. It was and continues to be hilarious....is there not a potential for it to be valid?