Reasoning flaws – moving the problem

In Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, he quotes the following story:

“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it’s turtles all the way down!"

This is a wonderful example of solving a problem by moving the unknowns somewhere else. Even distinguished philosophers can fall prey to this error. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that everything must have a cause, so there must be a first cause which was God. Of course, that just moves the problem, because if his first premise is correct, that everything must have a cause, then we are still left with the problem of who caused the first cause, God. In essence St. Thomas didn’t solve the problem, he just moved it.

The field of physics recently went through such an exercise with “dark matter”. The universe turns out to be expanding faster than current theory says it should. That anomaly was explained for a while by positing the existence of “dark matter” – matter whose only interaction with “normal” matter is through gravity. That solved the expansion problem by moving the unknowns to a new place – dark matter. Now we may someday find that there really is such a thing as dark matter – recent experiments suggest that such material might indeed exist - but meanwhile we have simply solved one problem by moving our ignorance to a new area.

Moving the problem is not necessarily a bad thing – that is more or less the way science progresses. Each thing we come to understand simply opens up a nest of yet more subtle unknowns to explore. But it is something to watch out for. For example, glib politicians too often try to simply move their problems elsewhere, preferably onto a presumed error by the other party. This will certainly happen more than once this election season. So watch out for people who try to tell you “it’s turtles all the way down…”