Public PhilosophyThe Buzz Aldrin Fallacy

The Buzz Aldrin Fallacy

During my time as a Philosophy PhD student at Purdue, Buzz Aldrin came and gave a talk on Purdue’s campus. I thought going to a talk given by the second person to walk on the moon sounded like a pretty cool idea, so I went.

I later learned from some friends working in physics and engineering that there is a saying that while you couldn’t get Neil Armstrong to show up at a press event, you can’t keep Buzz Aldrin away. And after hearing Aldrin speak, I understood why. The man was not afraid to praise his own accomplishments. And fair enough. If I was on the first mission to the moon, I might be tempted to praise my own accomplishments too.

However, I found one comment he made particularly irksome. In self-praise, Aldrin made a comment along the following lines: “When President Kennedy wanted to get to the moon, he didn’t invite poets and philosophers to the White House, he called upon scientists and engineers. That’s how you get stuff done.”

My initial thought was that obviously Kennedy didn’t invite poets and philosophers to the White House to discuss organizing new space missions. To do so would have been foolish, and Kennedy was no fool.

But saying that it would be foolish to have philosophers and poets enlisted to run a space mission isn’t to say anything negative about philosophers or poets. Running space travel missions is not the sort of thing that philosophers and poets are trained to do. Nor is it the thing that most of us in those fields strongly want to be doing. If someone wants to get involved with a space mission, they sign up for a degree in engineering, physics, or some other field where the skills gained can contribute to space travel. Normally choosing to invest in the pursuit of poetry and philosophy, at least at the level of vocation, signals a choice primarily to pursue ends other than space travel.

Perhaps all Aldrin meant by the comment was that Kennedy chose to work with people from the proper fields in expanding the scope of NASA. But that’s a rather vapid thing to say. It seemed to me that the rather obvious subtext of Aldrin’s comment was that those trained in STEM fields are more valuable than poets and philosophers because those working in STEM accomplish things like getting to the moon, while philosophers and poets do not.

Aldrin’s claim implicitly represents a fallacy found far too often in public discourse. This fallacy is offered not only by many working in STEM but also by those working in arenas like politics and business. It seems worthwhile to give this fallacy a name and to lay out what the fallacy is.

Thus, I present you with the Buzz Aldrin fallacy, which goes as follows.

Pursuit x does not contribute to goal y [or set of goals Y].

Therefore, pursuit x is not valuable.

The problem with such arguments is that they have an undefended implicit premise: namely, only pursuits that contributes to goal/end y (or to any of the goals/ends contained within a set Y) are valuable.

Poetry and philosophy are not well-suited to getting people onto the moon. (At least not directly. It seems that poetry and philosophy can be rather useful in inspiring people to try to get to the moon.) But poetry and philosophy are not designed to meet the end of getting people to the moon. Rather, they serve other useful and pleasurable functions.

The Buzz Aldrin fallacy is not limited to slights against philosophy (as is evidenced by Aldrin’s sideswiping of poets and philosophers in the same breath.) However, philosophy is certainly no stranger to the Buzz Aldrin fallacy, as evidenced by Lawrence Krauss’ attacks on philosophy after his philosophical book was challenged by philosophers and similar sorts of dismissals of philosophy from public champions of science like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye.

Thankfully, philosophers can relish in the fact that we’re in a particularly good position to respond to the Buzz Aldrin fallacy when it’s levied against us. This is because if you can get the person who has delivered the Buzz Aldrin fallacy to explain why they find the particular goal or end they’ve cited as valuable, worthwhile, etc., you have gotten them to start doing philosophy (and to be doing it somewhat poorly more often than not).

But while the “gotcha” moment of showing others how quickly thinking can turn philosophical can be fun, there is also merit in more substantively challenging those who buy into certain formulations of the Buzz Aldrin fallacy. For example, Senator Marco Rubio’s rather infamous claim in 2015 that “we need more welders and less philosophers” seems to have been resting implicitly on a kind of Buzz Aldrin fallacy about the value of the tangible products welders create versus the abstract thinking of philosophers that was not considered a valuable pursuit.

Apparently, someone took the time to challenge Rubio to spend some time reading philosophy, and it seem to have led to a change of heart. In 2018, Rubio posted on Twitter:

I made fun of philosophy 3 years ago but then I was challenged to study it, so I started reading the stoics. I’ve changed my view on philosophy. But not on welders. We need both! Vocational training for workers & philosophers to make sense of the world.

The Buzz Aldrin fallacy by the very nature of its form recognizes a limited set of pursuits as valuable. “We need both!” is an exclamation of the widening perspective on which pursuits are valuable.

The happy outcome of Rubio’s expanded worldview, with its place for both welders and philosophers, suggests that perspectives relying on Buzz Aldrin fallacies can, at least sometimes, change. In Rubio’s case, the change came from someone challenging him to read philosophy.

For those of us interested in pushing back against Buzz Aldrin fallacies and the underlying view that there is a limited range of valuable enterprises, perhaps we ought to challenge ourselves to take actions that might help other to expand others’ purviews. Give a Buzz Aldrin skeptic a beloved philosophical work that you think they might also enjoy. Email a friend a link to a public philosophy editorial that addresses a topic near and dear to their heart. Or share with someone how your thought on a topic you both consider important has been shaped by reading philosophy or by philosophical thinking.

That we’ve sent people to walk on the moon is very cool. But going to the moon hasn’t given us much guidance as to how to live well here on earth, while philosophy and poetry have. And that’s okay. Space travel is still valuable. It’s just not all encompassing. The same is true of things like philosophy and poetry. And I for one am glad to be part of the world where that’s so.

Mark Satta

Mark Satta holds a PhD in Philosophy from Purdue University and recently graduated with his JD from Harvard Law School. He is currently preparing to take the New York bar exam.

10 COMMENTS

  1. Dr. Satta, while I agree with the premise of your argument, I feel that you are putting quite a bit on Buzz Aldrin by naming it for him. Had you asked Mr. Aldrin if he indeed meant to imply that a philosopher or poet would have no value to the mission at all, and he confirmed that, you’d be in a better position. Perhaps he would, like Marco Rubio, change his statement to sound more inclusive. I also wonder if your last paragraph relates to his comments about getting the engineering job “done”. It doesn’t make a value claim about poetry or philosophy outside of the engineering task they had at hand. I am an engineer, not a philosopher, but this piece read to me like it should be assumed that these paraphrased comments give us knowledge of one man’s beliefs. It sounded as though you had other scientists and engineers who are currently publishing in the public sphere that made these types of comments. If they have sustained their positions, perhaps their names are more appropriate for your fallacy?

    • Hi David (if I may; and please feel free to call me Mark)—thanks for sharing these thoughts. You’re right that there are other scientists and engineers making comments that I would consider instances of the “Buzz Aldrin fallacy” whom I could have used instead to label this fallacy. The label I chose reflects the contingent fact that I happened to have encountered a striking instance of the fallacy while listening to Mr. Aldrin. In choosing the label for the fallacy, I tried to follow the valuable heuristic of “punching up” (if this post counts as a virtual “punch” at all). Buzz Aldrin is a confident and successful man who has never appeared afraid of the limelight, and I think he’s an appropriate public figure for this fallacy to be labeled after. And you’re certainly correct that I likely could have learned more about Mr. Aldrin’s views on poets and philosophers if I had been able to ask him about his views, but I think the context of his claim allows for some reasonable inferences to be made in attributing the fallacy to him on the occasion of the talk.

    • Knowing that Dr. Aldrin’s ShareSpace Foundation, for example, works to integrate Arts into STEM (STEAM), it does indeed seem to be an unjustified assumption that he would imply poets and philosophers would have no value on missions.

      • Hi Catherine, I think it’s too strong a claim to say that the ShareSpace Foundation’s promotion of STEAM makes the most straightforward interpretation of Dr. Aldrin’s claims unjustified. But I agree with the more limited claim that ShareSpace’s promotion of STEAM can reasonably be seen as (defeasible) evidence–especially for someone not at the talk–against my interpretation of Aldrin’s statements.

        However, the views promoted by our organizations can differ significantly from our privately held views. Aldrin’s 2013 Purdue speech is not available in its entirety, but as luck would have it, a clip of him discussing STEAM is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wn-M91OC_w

        At around the 1 min mark, Aldrin states that “Good education is the key. This is why everyone stresses the importance of S-T-E-M, STEM. Science, technology, engineering, and math.” After a pause and a bit of a curl of the lip, Aldrin adds the comment “Some of us folks through an A in there and make it STEAM, just to get the politics of the artistic people behind.”

        This additional claim is, of course, itself open to multiple interpretations, but within the context of the larger talk, it seems clear to me the best interpretation is to take Aldrin at face value and read this comment as close to doubling down on the fallacy committed earlier in the talk. But without this additional context, I get where you were coming from with your suggestion.

  2. Philosophy decides what is to be done. Science determines how to do it. Philosophy is direction. Science is distance. Philosophy is the cause and science the effect but materialism reverses that order with the result that the blind lead the blind. Distance is achieved without direction and, in that circumstance, vanity rules.

  3. Philosophy is the consideration of human existences and experiences. While science is something that believes in proofs and evidences. Both are equally important. The beauty of a language lies in its literature. The means through which we can communicate the ideas of the science becomes a means and thus no one is undervalued. At times connecting and talking to the person about his ideas can clear misunderstandings and a link to connect to him is here:https://www.xpert.chat/cr/buzz-aldrin?ref=p354z

  4. As an English major who eventually turned to engineering, I have been guilty of over-critiquing various humanities. I am definitely more tolerant of stupid science projects than stupid humanities projects. But I had a meeting one day with my small team ( software) of young engineers. I made a cliched reference to Through the Looking Glass and got blank looks, though my best engineer was also a philosophy major. I was a bit shocked. However, STEM majors at the big research universities do not get to take humanities courses by and large, so I shouldn’t be surprised that they lack historical/philosophical background. But… Lewis Carroll? Recent political events have highlighted the fact that we don’t teach WW2 history and after in high schools. Did my engineers have a clue about fascism and the cold war? I never found out because we were too busy with the endless cascade of incoming work. OTOH how many humanities students can explain how their car/smartphone/toaster works, what material science is up to, or the mechanism of climate change?

    If I were in charge of curriculum, I would ask that philosophy, classics, and coding be used to teach people to think. Coding, while highly abstract, also has advantages of testability, demonstration, and communication – in other words a bullshit meter. It appears to me that all three disciplines have unlimited depth to the puzzles that are present.

  5. You aren’t alone, as the great Carl Sagan, in his brilliant novel, ‘Contact’ has his main character, a hardened scientist, on being presented with the beauty of the universe whisper, “they should have sent a poet”.

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