I recently had the chance to speak to an anti-vaxxer in person. Of course, he did not identify as such: they never do. He didn鈥檛 want to be pinned down and was just asking questions about vaccine safety.
He told me that he wasn鈥檛 opposed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States. After all, Kennedy wanted to see studies done on vaccine safety. Was I against that? Shouldn鈥檛 we know if all these vaccines are safe?
I recognized on the spot that this was a very bad argument鈥攅ither born of ignorance or slyness鈥攁nd came up with a name for it: the square one fallacy.
I was starting to hear this type of fallacious argument a lot. When I criticized one of the biggest podcasts in recent memory,听The Telepathy Tapes,听I was contacted by a number of well-meaning parents of nonverbal autistic children who asked me a very simple question. Shouldn鈥檛 we study this? Why are scientists afraid of doing research into this? Why has this been ignored for so long?
RFK Jr. himself has invoked this argument when he has testified to his desire to move money away from research into infectious diseases and into chronic diseases, as if scientists had never thought to look into diabetes and heart disease.
The square one fallacy is arguing that we have no data to illuminate a particular question, that we鈥檙e starting from scratch, when there is an actual body of evidence that we are ignoring, either deliberately or cluelessly. It鈥檚 contending that we need to study something that has already been studied, sometimes to death.
It is related to (and might be a subset of) what we call 鈥渏ust asking questions鈥� or 鈥淛AQing off,鈥� when someone pretends to want to know more but ignores the answers to keep on badgering an expert with the same question, over and over. A person 鈥渏ust asking questions鈥� doesn鈥檛 want to be pinned down to a specific position; they鈥檙e simply playing Devil鈥檚 advocate聽ad nauseum聽without contending with the answers provided.
I did an online search and the only previous use of the phrase 鈥渟quare one fallacy鈥� I could find is from聽聽by Gregory P. Magarian on the suppression of wartime political debate.
We鈥檙e about to see an awful lot of this square one fallacy, as disingenuous actors and their ignorant followers argue that we have never studied things that have a large scientific literature behind them. When used deceptively, it鈥檚 often because they don鈥檛 like what the scientific evidence has to say on this topic. It鈥檚 a way to sound reasonable and unbiased when what they really want are studies that聽agree聽with them.
We have many studies on vaccine safety. We also have a long history of research into psi phenomena, including telepathy, and we know enough to be skeptical of poorly done 鈥渟tudies鈥� where trickery is allowed to influence the outcome.
We鈥檙e not starting from square one.
