Citizenship Minister and Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Jason Kenney when
he responded in a Twitter message to a demonstration on Parliament Hill by a group
of about 200 people protesting the environmental fallout from the development of the
tar sands. He called them “extremists who want to kill the livelihood of hundreds of
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thousands of [Canadians] working in the energy sector.”29 It’s a safe bet that the protestors did not “want” to “kill the livelihoods of Canadians.” What they wanted was to
avoid the harmful climatological and other detrimental effects that this particular form
of oil extraction would likely engender. Loss of jobs might be an effect of what they
wanted, but it is unlikely that the protestors wanted this effect. Using language that
imputes such a want is rhetorically powerful in its derogatory effect but is imprecise,
misleading, and unfair.
Different verbal expressions fit into different places on a continuum between the
intention-imputing and the intention-silent or intention-disclaiming. For example,
“Karen defaulted, so that Judy lost” does not imply, although it may suggest, that
Karen intended to ensure Judy’s loss. To avoid any such suggestion, the sentence could
be written “Karen defaulted without intending that Judy should lose.” If there were
such an intention, we can make this clear by saying “Karen defaulted with the aim of
bringing about Judy’s losing, and she succeeded.” In between we have verbal expres-
sions of greater or lesser intention-imputation and with greater or lesser definiteness.
To say “Karen helped Judy lose” suggests to some extent the presence of the inten-
tion to bring about the stated consequence. The suggestion seems to me stronger
(not every reader may feel this way) when we use such verbal expressions as “brought
about” Judy’s loss or “ensured” Judy’s defeat. It seems strongest when we use a term
such as “engineered.” One hardly “engineers” a defeat without intending that result.
The exception might be of the following sort: Karen engineers a complicated course of
action for another purpose, which happens to result in Judy’s defeat, although Judy’s
defeat was no part of the plan. One might be tempted to say, misleadingly, “Karen
engineered Judy’s loss.”
Let us call verbal expressions that impute intention to a doer more definitely, or
to a higher degree, in relation to some consequence “intention-promoting.” The use
of intention-promoting words can raise the level of alleged culpability from inadver-
tence to negligence, recklessness, or maximum culpability. “A caused B’s death” is less
intention-promoting than “A killed B,” and both are less intention-promoting than “A
murdered B.”
A skilled rhetorician can make use of verbs and adverbs with the desired ambi-
guity or indefiniteness to conceal or reveal as much as she or he wants to conceal or
reveal. It is worth adding a word to make clear that intention not only as to conse-
quences but also as to circumstances may play an important part in the ambiguities
of action description.
Schopenhauer felt that each fal acy or misleading device should be given a name.
The expression “referential translucency” can serve here, but it needs explaining. Use
of this term presupposes a well-known distinction made by the late logician and phi-
losopher, W.V.O. Quine, between referential opacity and referential transparency.30
For the benefit of those with the requisite interest and patience, I will explain the
terminology; others may prefer to skip the explanation and leave the expression alone.
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Verbal expressions such as “pass by” are, in the sense to be explained, referentially transparent. You happen to pass by on the street an old school acquaintance,
Phil. He happens to have won the lottery, but you don’t know this. It would still
be true, though, that when you pass Phil by, you pass by the winner of the lottery.
The case is called “transparent” because all kinds of information about Phil can be
added to the statement about your passing Phil without it being any less true that
you passed him by. If Phil has authored a book, then it’s true that you passed by the
author of that book, even though you might not know he was an author of anything,
and so on.
Opaque contexts are different, because they are defined, for our purposes, as
involving a linkage with some person or persons’ state of mind.31 The verb “know”
obviously has such a linkage. In this case—and in all of what are called “intentional
contexts”—we find that we cannot do the same kind substitution of other descriptive
truths and still be assured of the truth of what we say. From “You know Phil,” we can-
not deduce “You know the winner of the lottery” (in the sense of “You know who won
the lottery”), even though it is true that Phil won the lottery. To take another example,
one can know that Voltaire (Arouet’s pen name) wrote Candide without knowing that
Arouet wrote Candide, so that it would be false to infer that because one knows that
Voltaire wrote Candide and because Voltaire and Arouet are the same person that it
follows, therefore, that one knows that Arouet wrote Candide.
Not all contexts are clearly referentially transparent or opaque. Some verbs are
ambiguous or indefinite as to the extent of intentionality implied. As earlier noted,
the word “help” is such a verb. When we say “Jones helped bring about the Progressive
Party’s defeat,” we may think of this either as a case where Jones acted with the intention of bringing about that defeat or as a case where Jones may have intended nothing of the kind, perhaps may have been working to avoid the defeat, but working in ways
that, as things turned out, were counterproductive. The verb “help” in this context is
what I choose to call neither clearly opaque nor clearly transparent. Extending the
metaphor of luminescence, we have our convenient term, “referential translucency,” to
signal the field exploitable for propaganda purposes in the ways described.
During the Spanish Civil War, the POUM ( Partido Obrero de Unificación
Marxista) and the Anarchists were accused by the Communists of dividing and weak-
ening the opponents of Franco. There was a case to be made that division among the
left did indeed help Franco, but it was a very different accusation, and a very damning
one, to suggest that they might have intentionally helped him. As it turns out, some
Communists apparently did make the unjust, overt accusation that the POUM was
supported by Franco and Hitler, but others played around with the ambiguities of
intention in the language they used.32
The term “referential translucency” arises in the context of some communica-
tor reporting on another person’s action or mental state with regard to some con-
sequences, circumstances, etc. In a courtroom setting, a lawyer can make use of this
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ambiguity in the form of questions so that a witness is led into the role of communicating about his or her previous acts and mental states in ways that distort the truth.
The witness will seem to be specially qualified to describe those things, but befuddle-ment about intentionality can easily lead the witness to say either something untrue
but desired by an opponent’s lawyer or something demonstrably false that can be
pointed out to discredit the testimony.
The Rhetorical Use of “or”
The word “or” provides an opportunity for suggesting certain things without actually
asserting them. This possibility occurs because of the logical rule of addition. If I say
something true, such as “Nunavut is part of Canada,” then add any other statement
to form a disjunction, the combined statement is still literally true. So, with certain
qualifications to be described, “‘Nunavut is part of Canada’ or ‘The Moon is made of
green cheese’” is literally true. Put in symbolic form, with letters representing state-
ments, if “A” is true, then “A or B” will also be true. The statement asserting “A or
B” can be defended by appealing to the truth of “A.” Meanwhile, the suggestion of
“B” is made with no risk of being proven wrong. Qualifications are needed, because
as Paul Grice has pointed out, there are tacit rules of conversational discourse that
need to be added to traditional rules of logic.33Exposure of such violations can reveal
culpable deceptions, which, in some cases, are tantamount to lying. The appropriate
place for exploring such culpability or lack of it is in the next chapter. Meanwhile, we
may note that it is often difficult or impossible to determine whether the speaker is
disingenuous or is engaged in legitimate speculation in making suggestions with the
use of “or.” My purpose here is to show that, because of the difficulty of being caught
out in an intentional deception, use of this device can be a fairly safe way of carrying
out propaganda.
For the same reason, provable examples where the word “or” was used with the
intention of creating false impressions are hard to come by; however, there are cases
where we can reasonably speculate about such a possibility. Consider a Reuters news
report published in the Ottawa Citizen in 1982. The headline read, “Soviets okayed
assassination attempt on pope: U.S. diplomat.” Former US ambassador to Poland,
Richard Davies, was quoted as saying “They [the Russians] authorized or at least did
nothing to stop an effort to assassinate him. They would like to get rid of this inconvenient priest” (italics added).34 The part of the statement that says the Russians did
nothing to stop an effort to assassinate the pope is highly plausible. It is consistent, in
fact, with their knowing nothing about the assassination attempt. Since that disjunct
is true, the disjunctive statement is also true. The reader gets the impression that there
is a good chance that the Russians authorized the assassination without the speaker
actually having made that claim. Not having made that claim, the speaker cannot be
shown to have falsely made that claim. In one sense, “or” is a precautionary device, but CHAPTER 3: PRoPAgAnDA TECHnIQUE: An AnALySIS 117
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it can be used recklessly as well. We do not know the mind of Ambassador Davies, but we do know that the headline writer wrote something that was not adequately supported by the quotation and that the phrasing of the quotation is such as to encourage
just such a misapprehension.
The defence against intentional misleading of people through the device
described is to expose what is happening. People should be accountable for what they
suggest without adequate foundation as well as for what they actually state. Grice’s
work is very valuable in this regard.
My suspicious nature has been spurred, perhaps unjustifiably, on more than one
occasion by certain commercial labels involving “or” and “and/or” (the latter mak-
ing clear that the disjunctions are inclusive, that is to say, “one or the other, or both,”
as distinct from “one, or the other, but not both”). A package says, “contains real
cream and/or milk and/or skim milk powder.” This statement is true if there is only
skim milk powder in it. Is this a gimmick to make people think the contents grander
than they in fact are? At least Canada’s marketing lawmakers have issued regulations
about the use of “and/or” in packaging. The statement “may contain sugar and/or
dextrose” indicates that, when a sweetening agent is used as an ingredient, it may be
sugar or dextrose or a mixture of each that is used, “[t]he probability being that more
sugar than dextrose will be used during the twelve months” from the time the label is
applied. Ingredients must, according to the regulation, be listed “in descending order
of the proportion in which they will be used.”35
non-VERBAL TECHnIQUES
The numbers game: Polls and Statistics
In modern times, sound policy-making must often come to grips with numbers.
The problem is to know whether numbers cited by various experts are accurate and
whether they are numbers relevant to determining policy. There is an old story about
a drunken man looking at night for a lost $20 bill under a lamppost. He explains that,
although he lost it elsewhere, he is looking in this spot because “the light is better.”
Among the many forms of propaganda in existence, there are those of the experts who
that social progress can only take place with input from their particular discipline.
The ordinary citizen would be helpless against domination by the experts were it not
for the existence of experts on different sides of various political divides. It is often
possible to enlist credible support to challenge technical opinion conscripted in the
service of a dominant class. It is also important for an alert citizenry to know of some
common pitfalls in the use of polls and statistics.
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Opinion Polls
Since the Western world presupposes that democracy is a superior system, arguments
for a given policy or measure generally gain strength if one can show that the propos-
als have the support of the people; hence, the importance in today’s world of opinion
polls. But it is easy to be fooled by opinion polls. Indeed, even the pollsters, or those
commissioning the polls, can be misled. For example, they may misjudge the latent
strength of feeling on an issue that has not been widely discussed. When something
becomes an issue and various interest groups speak out, the reaction may produce
opinion different, or more intensely felt, than what existed before the controversy.
An example of this occurred some years ago when William Davis was premier of
Ontario. Polls indicated no great objection to fully funding all years of secondary
school for the separate school (Roman Catholic) system. By the time it came to
implementation, a very strong challenge had built up, with a considerable cost to
his popularity.
Poll
s can deceive in many ways. Some deceptions relate to pol ing methodology;
others are designed to affect the people polled by implanting certain ideas in their
minds under the guise of seeking their opinions. Phoney polls of this sort have been
called “ruse polls” or “push polls” when they are designed to push voters for or against
a candidate. On June 27, 1996, the New York Times reported that a group called the
American Association of Political Consultants complained that “campaigns hire com-
panies to make thousands of calls spreading negative and sometimes false information
about an opponent while posing as pollsters.” They objected also to telephone calls
that failed to clearly and accurately identify the sponsor of the cal .36 An example of a
“push pol ” reportedly conducted by the Ontario government in 1996 was denounced
by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF). One question the
poll asked was “Since teachers have had it so good for so long, should they not be asked
to suffer a little?” The poll was conducted to determine public opinion about the deci-
sion to cut up to $1 billion out of education spending. The wording of the question
was reconstructed from teachers who had been pol ed and who cal ed the federation
to complain. OSSTF President Earl Manners was quoted as saying of the Progressive
Conservative government, “They are now engaging in a propaganda strategy to sway
public opinion regarding the actions they intend to take in the education sector.”37
Hugh Winsor pinpointed a commercial example of a “push question” in a pol . In
1997, Eurocopter Canada was trying to sell the French-made Cougar helicopter to the
Canadian military for use in Canadian search and rescue efforts. Pollster Angus Reid
added the following question to its regular October omnibus poll: “If the govern-
ment buys its competitor’s product, the Cormorant/EH101, would it be breaking the
promise it made during the 1993 election campaign?” Winsor adds, “Surprise, surprise,
71 per cent said Yes.”38
Some social activist organizations solicit opinions about matters concerning
which opinion is likely to be a foregone conclusion. Such a poll does not intend to