Taser Quote of the Week - "...syllogism..."
Globe and Mail -
Taser's faulty syllogism goes like this: People have always died in police custody. They still die in police custody. Therefore the taser does not kill them. Does this follow? No. Yet this is what a lawyer for Taser International of Scottsdale, Ariz., argued at the inquiry before former appeal-court judge Thomas Braidwood in Vancouver this week. [
LINK]
If the discussion about tasers, "cause and effect" and rational thought is going to take center stage ["Syllogism"], the logical principle "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" needs to be invoked. It is known as "Occam's Razor" and roughly translated it says that when two or more competing explanations describe a series of connected events, the one employing the least factors is usually also the correct explanation.
ReplyDeleteBy way of example, if we encounter an individual, taser him and he dies, the simplest conclusion is "the taser killed him". Some may want to argue that a postmortem exam of the dead person revealed a heart condition, but Occam's Razor reminds us that the chance the "heart condition" killed the individual at the very same moment of the tasering is so remote, that it just muddies the logical waters and needs to be discarded.
The suggestion by Taser International's lawyer that alcoholism killed Robert Dziekanski is perhaps the most ludicrous example of trying to violate Occam's Razor.
The sequence of events in all "in custody"/"excited delirium" deaths is ALWAYS and SIMPLY this: an official applies a "method of restraint" and the subject dies. Occam's Razor points the finger of causality squarely at the "method of restraint". It leads a logical person to simply conclude that all taser deaths are Homicides.