Informal Logic 
X.3, Fall 1988 

The Unspeakable: 
Understanding the System of Fallacy in the Media 

JOHN McMURTRY University of Guelph 

"The universal conspiracy of the silent-
assertion lie is hard at work always and 
everywhere, and always in the interest of 
a stupidity or a sham, never in the interest 
of a thing fine or respectable ... The silent 
colossal National Lie that is the support and 
confederate of all the tyrannies and shams 
and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict 
the peoples - that is the one to throw bricks 
and sermons at. But let us be judicious and 
let someone else begin." 

Mark Twain 
("My First Lie," 1898) 

At the heart of informal logic is its con-
cern to detect fallacious structures of reason-
ing in natural language discourse. The nor-
mal procedure is: where we are able to iden-
tify a flaw in premise, inference, relevance 
or the like in any route of reasoning, we 
hold that a fallacy has been committed and 
we seek to demonstrate it. Otherwise put, 
logical analysis is directed at what is argued, 
and fallacies are found in this or that par-
ticular way of arriving at a conclusion. 

This method of analysis is indispensable 
to sound logical construction of individual 
arguments, but misses the overall pattern 
of assertion and non-assertion for the par-
ticular claims within it. What has been so 
far overlooked is that reasoning can be mis-
led not only in its steps of making a case, 
but by what is ruled out from being made 
a case: not only by what is wrong within 
this or that route of assertion, but by what 
is wrong with the structure of these routes 
of assertion taken together. We have, that 
is, missed the forest for the trees, or more 
accurately, for the logical landscape within 
which the forest and trees are located. 

I will argue that there is a deeper, more 
comprehensive structure of subverting 
reason that misleads our thinking across 
propositional routes, and not through any 
fallacy of any such route. And I will show 
that this disorder obstructs and deforms our 
thinking and our reasoning by a general 
system of deception which has so far 
operated underneath the reach of our tools 
of logical detection and correction. 

The Parable of the Logical Dictator 

Consider an example. We shall call it 
the Parable of the Logical Dictator. Let us 
imagine the Logical Dictator as a sort of 
contemporary philosopher-king who 
presides over a global empire of thought. 
As such, he has monopoly control of the 
mass media of communication whereby 
claims or arguments or any other expres-
sions or sequences of meaning can be made 
public in the society over which he presides. 
Being a devotee of logical soundness in all 
areas of communications exchange, he 
prescribes a rigorous obedience of his media 
managers to warranted premises, inference-
routes and conclusions in all arguments or 
proto-arguments which occur in his socie-
ty's public communications network. 

The empire's leading logicians effective-
ly serve the regime in an advisory capaci-
ty, and a system of public censures and 
punishments over time successfully deters 
the commission of any error of consisten-
cy or fact in media reports, claims, 
analyses, editorial comments and so on. Yet 
the Logical Dictator, being a cunning 



134 John McMurtry 

dictator, ensures, without anywhere allow-
ing on pain of instant dismissal this pattern 
of proscription to be stated, that nothing 
which in any way contradicts the necessity 
or value of this rule shall be admitted into 
any media report or discussion. 

Over time, he and his advisors so fine-
tune this system of selection and exclusion 
of what can and cannot be said, that no event 
or issue is ever selected for public presen-
tation whose domain of reference is such 
that it could permit the question of the 
necessity or value of the dictator's rule to 
be relevantly raised (as distinguished from 
those questions or issues relating to this 
rule's proper protection and execution). 

In this way, the Logical Dictator suc-
cessfully abolishes critical thinking at the 
deepest level of concern, prescribes untruth 
and unreason by negation without falling 
prey to a known fallacy, and succeeds in 
instituting a logically foolproof but 
systematically misleading discourse for the 
imperium of thought which he controls. 

The Problem 

The problem is thus posed: How are we 
to expose this system of unreason? There 
is no doubt that such a structure of distor-
tion can obstruct and mislead the course of 
inquiry and understanding more deeply than 
any fallacy of argument to which we now 
direct our attention. Yet it is precisely 
because its flaw is in this way beyond the 
reach of detection within any argument that 
our current logical analysis is incapable of 
convicting its underlying system of 
deception.) 

Given that the monopoly powers of our 
Logical Dictator are, as a matter of fact, 
more or less isometric with the actual design 
of mass communications control in our 
world, the problem that confronts us here 
is by no means unreal in its bearings.2 We 
might even say the parallels of our fable and 
reality extend further. Our ascription to the 
Logical Dictator of a strict adherence to 

sound logical form is akin in principle to 
the adherence by the actual communications 
media to what is called "objectivity". In 
both cases, the transpropositional structure 
of unreason over which this rule extends re-
mains perfectly consistent with "accuracy" 
or credible premises, "consistency" or 
valid inferences, and "impartiality" or 
suspension of personal viewpoint. 

The Underlying System of Fallacy 

Let us now identify the precise 
parameters of this covert structure of 
misleading reason. We begin with the prin-
ciple which defines the underlying pattern 
of power in accordance with which it 
operates. 

Principle I: 

There is a basic social-structural fact 
(B.S.S.F.). Its defining principle, applicable 
to most or all existing social orders, is that 
large capitalist corporations or a state party 
control production and distribution of social 
goods so as to maximize private capital or 
social command owned by these capitalist 
corporations or state party. 

This principle allows for much variation 
in the degree of control it refers to, in the 
nature of production and distribution 
systems involved, in the extent of 
ownership maximization these systems 
generate, and in the consequences for 
respective social populations. We cannot 
enter here into the vast complexity of such 
variations. But we need not. For all such 
variations in basic social-structural fact are 
subsumed by the general principle we have 
specified. 

The Communist Party of the Soviet 
Union, for example, directs the production 
and distribution of social goods in the 
U.S.S.R. in a much different way than the 
Fortune 500 does in the United States. The 
one's traditional basis of power lies in 
monopoly control of state institutions, and 
the other's lies in the accumulation of 



private capital. But both systems conform 
to Principle I. On the other hand, the Pro-
phet's mullahs in Iran or the military-
bureaucratic elite of Indonesia hold and ex-
tend their more extreme systems of social 
command in different ways again-by bases 
of power that are imposed on production 
and distribution of goods from above by 
religious or military decrees. But at the level 
of logical analysis, at the highest level of 
generality, all these systems express an 
underlying, common principle as widely 
variant instances of it. These empirical 
variations we must leave to historians and 
social scientists. Their underlying princi-
ple, however, is of fundamental relevance 
to analysis of public discourse and com-
munication, for it defines the regulative 
structure of context within which public 
discourse and communication are situated. 

Our next step of analysis, then, is to for-
mulate the relationship between this struc-
ture of context and what is said and other-
wise publicly conveyed in the society whose 
communications we analyse. From a 
distance, we can make out the lines of this 
relationship more or less clearly. For ex-
ample, we can see that the control of the 
production and distribution of social goods 
by the traditional Communist Party in the 
Soviet Union or the mullah theocracy of 
Iran relates to what is publicly said in that 
society in such a way that this public com-
munication remains consistent with this con-
trol. Indeed this connection has come to be 
accepted as more or less lawlike as historical 
experience has disclosed countless cases of 
persecution or liquidation of voices in these 
societies which have opposed or con-
tradicted their context of social rule. Our 
problem as logicians has been that we have 
not understood this relationship between 
context of power and public communica-
tion in principle, in terms of a generalizable 
rule of determination obtaining across 
discourse boundaries and differences. We 
have been inclined rather to remain confined 
within our own culture for the arguments 
and proto-arguments we diagnose, and to 

The Unspeakable 135 

assume that because no such social control 
exists here to fence in and to deform public 
discourse, we may analyze for disorders or 
reasoning with no such basic contextual 
bearings. This near-sightedness has caus-
ed us, since Aristotle, to search only for 
those disorders of reasoning that occur 
within argument sequences, and not to con-
sider the logical disorders that may occur 
from reasoning's subjection to what is out-
side of it, its context of social regime. We 
readily acknowledge the repression and 
distortion of thought and reason by such 
determination in alien cultures, but have not 
achieved the plane of abstraction that is 
required to treat this problem as a general 
one, and to excavate its deep structure of 
deception. We have in this way missed a 
fundamental system of unreason that 
misleads us underneath individual error and 
ruse at the intersubjective and cultural 
level. 

To define the linkage principle between 
structure of social rule and public com-
munication in such a way as to maintain a 
sufficiently high level of abstraction that all 
particular empirical variations are subsumed 
by it, is not a task to which either social 
scientists or logicians of natural language 
have bent themselves. The former have 
been confined to empirical description and 
analysis of geographically or temporally 
bound contexts; while the latter have 
restricted their analysis to what is asserted, 
independent of the social context within 
which assertions occur. Even where the 
relationship between public communication 
and its contextualizing relations of power 
has been studied in detail for its distortive 
effects, most notably by Noam Chomsky, 
its underlying general principles and rules 
have not been investigated in a systematic 
way.3 The relationship remains obscured by 
its particular cultural manifestations or, at 
the other extreme, is not considered at all. 
Nevertheless, the missing prime principle 
from which a general system of fallacy is 
generated can be formally defined as 
follows: 



136 John McMurtry 

Principle II: 

Corresponding to the basic social-
structural fact as defined by Principle I, is 
a range of possibility of what can be said 
in the mass media of the society in ques-
tion. This range of possibility is defined, 
in turn, as whatever does not contradict the 
necessity or value of this basic social-
structural fact. 

The range of possibility of what can be 
said in the mass media, that is, extends on-
ly so far as its formulations are consistent 
with accepting the B. S. S. F. of the society 
concerned as necessary and preferable to 
others. Conversely, where such formula-
tions are not consistent with acceptance of 
the B.S.S.F., they are ruled out. 

It follows from Principle II, then, that 
any evidence, issue or argument that would 
expose the replaceable inefficiency, the 
moral fraudulence, the historical inadequacy 
or the civic underdevelopment of a socie-
ty's major capital owners, state-party 
nomenklatura, theocractic rulers, or 
whatever, will be ruled or selected out of 
that society's media discourse. There will 
be degrees of exclusion here, from a priori 
unspeakable to marginalized exception. And 
there will be various methods of excom-
munication, from non-publication of the text 
itself to physical assassination of its author. 4 
Whatever the degree and method of exclu-
sion, however, the range of what can be 
socially said, and thus asserted or reason-
ed, is limited by the conditions of the regime 
within which it arises in such a way as to 
rule out whatever does not conform to these 
conditions: however substantiated, 
reasonable, or logically plausible such pro-
scribed positions might be. 

This principle of exclusion that deter-
mines what can and cannot be asserted and 
reasoned in public-which thus identifies 
what prohibits all statements which do not 
conform to these a priori limits-is testable. 
As we shall soon illustrate, its operation is 
systematically confirmed by the evidence 
of mass media productions across the world. 

The preclusion of reason the principle iden-
tifies includes, most importantly, this prin-
ciple itself 

We have now the existential ground, a 
more or less universal social-structural fact 
admitting of variations within its unifying 
pattern. We have, as well, the existential 
consequent of this ground, a specifiable 
range of public discourse possibility, within 
which reasoning must remain confined to 
qualify as a candidate for public com-
munication. We have, finally, the entail-
ment of this consequent, that any step of 
reason which is not consistent with the prin-
ciple defining this range will be ruled or 
selected out of public discourse. 5 

The ways in which Principle II is instan-
tiated in different contexts of social power 
is, as with Principle I, an empirical issue. 
The mullahs of Iran may pronounce a 
sentence of death on the speaker of the 
unspeakable, in accordance with how deep-
ly his thoughts have contradicted the 
necessity or value of their social rule (e.g., 
by representing the divine ground of their 
legitimacy as the contrivances of a fallible 
man). The members of the Politbureau of 
the U.S.S.R. may direct that a person be 
demoted or exiled for challenging the right 
of the Communist Party leadership to deter-
mine the future of the nation. The military 
bureaucratic elite of Indonesia may decree 
life-incarceration or death for persons who 
assert the state ideology of Pancasila is a 
pretext for the self-enriching power of this 
same military-bureaucratic elite. And so on. 
But because such practices of state in-
terference with free speech do not normal-
ly occur in advanced Western societies, we 
may be misled into supposing that the prin-
ciple of exclusion in question is therefore 
not generalizable across the boundaries of 
public communication and thought. 

This conclusion does not follow. Prin-
ciple II allows for very different modes of 
its realization. A succession of "gates" or 
"filters" in the many-staged process of 
mass-media production in the Western 
world can limit in a more sophisticated way 



the range of what is publicly said without 
any such state intervention involved: 
through the hiring, transfer or firing of those 
who edit, those who report and those who 
state arguments at all levels of the com-
munications enterprise; through the selec-
tion of which issues and events to cover and 
which not to cover; through the assignment 
of time and staff to produce representations 
of what is selected for report; through the 
choice of what articles, sentences and words 
are to be published from the copy that 
comes in; through the prominence, place-
ment, headlines and pictures that accom-
pany what is produced; and through-most 
importantly-what is reproduced over time 
in this many-phased process of selection and 
exclusion. 

This system of mediations merely ex-
tends the operation defined by Principle II 
through a succession of constituent steps, 
rather than concentrating it in a single in-
tervention by the state. In this way, it may 
be a more effective because less visible 
system of thought control. Because, 
however, our acculturation by the very mass 
media this system mediates may make us 
peculiarly unwilling to accept their confor-
mity to Principle II in the face of our sense 
of variety of viewpoint, pluralist politics, 
consumer sovereignty, freedom to read and 
watch what we wish, and so forth, we need 
to appeal to some rational test of this prin-
ciple to ensure we are not merely misled 
by a conditioned dogma. 

Hypothetical deduction can provide us 
with this very test. Principle II requires us 
to deduce from any culture's basic social-
structural fact that: whatever contradicts the 
necessity or value of the principle defining 
this fact, will be ruled out from reproduc-
tion in this culture's mass media. All that 
is required to disprove the claim of Princi-
ple II, then, are assertions of fact, opinion 
or value reproduced in the mass media of 
a society which do in fact contradict the 
necessity or value of its system of social 
rule. Principle II, for example, would be 
falsified if reasoned arguments against 

The Unspeakable 137 

unearned income or the control of the 
economy by private capital were reproduced 
in the Western mass media. 

On the other hand, what is required to 
confirm the claim of Principle II is a con-
sistent record of such facts, values or opi-
nions being never or almost never reproduc-
ed in the mass media, however adequately 
they may qualify for such public presenta-
tion by the normal criteria of interest-value, 
transparency and factural warrant. 

We may formalize the conditions for 
confirmation or disconfirmation of Princi-
ple II as follows: 

(1) A set of qualifying arguments, 
positions or facts, a ... n, contradict the 
necessity or value of the B.S.S.F. of 
a society, S. 

(2) Arguments, positions or facts, 
a ... n, are reproduced in some or all 
of the mass-media of society, S. 

Conclusion: Principle II is 
disconfirmed. 

or 

(3) Arguments, posItIons or facts, 
a ... n, are never or almost never 
reproduced in any of the mass media 
of society, S. 

Conclusion: Principle II is confirmed. 

Let us now consider a set of examples 
to stand in for arguments, positions or facts, 
a ... n. If any or all satisfy condition (2), 
Principle II is rejected. If any or all satisfy 
condition (3), Principle II is accepted, un-
til disconfirming evidence is produced. An 
extensive set of examples is now provided 
to ensure rigorous test of the Principle. 

Thirty Examples of the 
Unspeakable in the Mass Media 
of the English-Speaking World 

1. Taking more out than you put in as 
a regular practise-as in money profits-is 
morally wrong. 



138 John McMurtry 

2. The capitalist workplace is 
anti-democratic. 

3. General Motors, Dupont, IT&T, 
Standard Oil and Ford Corporations all pro-
duced military supplies for the Nazi armed 
forces during World War II while the 
United States was at war with Germany. 

4. Unearned wealth should be abolish-
ed as a matter of just public policy. 

5. The government needs to regulate the 
investment of Canadian/U. S. capital abroad 
to societies with poor human rights and en-
vironmental standards, so as to protect these 
standards in both North America and the 
developing world. 

6. The free market means that those 
without money to buy what they need do 
not have the right to live. 

7. The major player in the international 
drug trade since the Second World War, us-
ing drug enforcement laws to maintain its 
monopoly, has been the United States 
government to finance internationally illegal 
foreign interventions. 

8. Over 70 % of eligible U. S. and British 
voters did not vote for Reagan or Thatcher 
"landslides' , . 

9. The arms race and international wars 
are very profitable for most multinational 
corporations. 

10. The long-term pattern of U.S. and 
Canadian foreign policy in the non-white 
world has been alliances with fascist-type 
governments rather than their opponents. 

11. The "free world" is not truly free 
because its citizens do not have the effec-
tive right to criticize the capitalist system. 

12. The history of Western civilization 
is largely a history of genocide against non-
white peoples and cultures. 

13. The greatest danger to Canada's 
freedom and security comes from the United 
States. 

14. There is no correlation between peo-
ple's wealth and their merit. 

15. In many cases, social ownership of 
major industries is sound social policy. 

16. The very rich ought not to be 
admired, but rather condemned for 

their acquisitive self-interest at others' 
expense. 

17. A small minority's monopoly 
ownership of society's means of production 
is an issue that needs to be carefully 
examined. 

18. Pollution/poverty are specially ad-
vantageous to the major shareholders of 
private enterprise. 

19. Our major social problems are caus-
ed by the profit imperative overriding all 
other values. 

20. The belief that God sanctions our 
social order or our state at war is a 
superstition. 

21. There may be better alternatives 
for long-term sexual union than the private 
property structure of state-regulated 
marriage. 

22. The Soviet Union pays signifi-
cantly more than the world-price for 
imports from the countries of East Europe, 
and charges significantly less for its 
exports. 

23. Socialist revolution has been by and 
large beneficial for the living standards of 
most citizens in societies where it has 
occurred. 

24. Over 90% of Canadian citizens are 
not capitalists but members of the working 
class who depend for their living on wages 
or salaries. 

25. Unions have historically led the 
struggle for improvements in health care, 
working conditions and social security for 
the population as a whole. 

26. The business community has ex-
cessive political and economic power in our 
society. 

27. Our schools do not train the young 
to think critically, but to obey corporate or 
office authority without question. 

28. The President and his leading ad-
visors are provable war criminals. 

29. Christianity calls for the redistribu-
tion of wealth. 

30. The mass media are essentially a 
joint-stock company of profit and advertis-
ing for major private corporations. 6 



Discussion 

These lines of reasoning all directly or 
indirectly contradict the value or necessity 
of our society's basic social-structural fact. 
According to Principle II, then, all will be 
ruled out from public reproduction. Note 
that it is not a question of this a priori ex-
clusion being rationally warranted. Good 
evidence or reason can be given to support 
all of these assertions, and none commits 
an evident error of logic or fact. What is 
so interesting here is that the exclusion of 
such positions from public discourse does 
not depend at all on criteria of truth or falsi-
ty. They are unspeakable not because they 
are unreasonable, but because they in one 
way or other contradict justification of the 
structure of social rule by which they are 
surrounded. 

That these statements might all be 
perfectly true, will not, therefore, save them 
from social excommunication; nor that they 
are perfectly true and of great social con-
sequence as well. Indeed, one might say that 
the more warranted and momentous the 
meanings they bear are, the more totally 
unspeakable they become. (This point will 
be taken up under Principle III.) 

The crux of the issue here is that in-
dependent of their claim to truth, and by 
means other than is detectable by recognized 
principles of logic, entire realms of 
discourse are without rational or empirical 
ground disqualified from candidacy for 
public assertion. 

A very great deal of what might be 
reasoned, agreed with or said is involved 
here. Most of these unspeakables are in 
some way generic, and admit of countless 
particular variations on them. For example, 
a particular variation on number (1) would 
be that "It is unfair that Canadian corpora-
tions increased their profits in 1987 by 20 
times more than wage-earners increased 
their wages"; or, more specifically still, 
"Bell Canada should not be allowed to 
penalize its employees for its previous year 
of the highest profits and revenues in 

The Unspeakable 139 

Canada, with a contract that provides for 
the elimination of thousands of union 
jobs" . 7 Both this generic statement and the 
innumerable possible particular variations 
of it will be blocked from social reproduc-
tion, however true or well reasoned they 
may be. This is the consequence of the il-
licit a priori identified by Principle II, and 
applies as well to all of the examples given 
above. Nonetheless, these positions are still 
not exhaustive of the kinds of assertion that 
are ruled out from public statement by the 
operation of this principle of unreason. 
Apart from the comparable sets of such 
positions which are unspeakable in the 
public domains of other kinds of social 
regime (e.g., anti-Party statements in state-
socialist societies, skepticism of Allah's rule 
in Islamic societies), there are many kinds 
of position within our own social com-
munication systems which are so proscrib-
ed, but not identified by our list or its varia-
tions: for example, "The solution to wife 
or child abuse is to restructure the family", 
or "Some illegal substances can be good 
for your development", or "Israel does not 
recognize the right of Palestine to exist" . 
The possibilities here can be generated by 
the critical imagination without any limit but 
what is and is not compatible with the 
B.S.S.F. We are dealing, in other words, 
with whole worlds of meaning and position 
which are precluded from communication, 
not only without rational ground, but 
without the logical space of public medium 
to identify this rule of their exclusion. 

There is not only a first-order rule 
against their social assertion, but a second-
order rule against recognizing there is a rule 
against their social assertion. 

None of these positions or their varia-
tions, however, can be emancipated in the 
normal philosophical way by identifying 
some mistaken argument against them. Nor 
is any method of detection and correction 
given by contemporary philosophical 
theories such as those of Jurgen Habermas 
or Richard Rorty which appeal to norms of 
rationality inherent in discourse or conver-



140 John McMurtry 

sation. Rather, what is involved is a much 
deeper obstruction to the process of reason-
ing; whether any will be permitted public 
statement prior to any argument arising. 8 
That these unspeakables may together ap-
pear as systematically slanted as the range 
of discourse from which they are exclud-
ed, is only a complementary indicator of the 
problem we are examining. 

If we detach from our location within 
a contemporary social order and view the 
problem from afar, we can see the same 
transpropositional structure of fallacy at 
work in the past. In classical Greek culture, 
for example, the field of discourse at the 
very highest levels of reasoning was 
deformed by the same hidden a priori of 
unreason. It excluded as unspeakable, that 
is, lines of thought and reasoning which we 
would now regard as eminently reasonable: 
for example, assertions and arguments 
against human slavery, and evidence that 
would support this or any other analogously 
critical position. The same sort of deep-
structured distortion of the field of reason-
ing occurs in feudal societies: for example, 
exclusion of any evidence, claims or 
arguments in criticism of feudal bondage, 
the existence or goodness of God, the ab-
solutist rights of rulers, and so on. 9 Any 
argument or step of argument that would 
in any way contradict the acceptance of 
these basic forms of social life was simply 
and with no rational warrant ruled out of 
candidacy in the public realm. Because such 
infrastructural proscription then, as now, 
blocks and misleads the reasoning process 
at the most fundamental levels, it is cor-
respondingly deserving of logical excava-
tion and targeting. It undermines the reason-
ing enterprise at its foundations. 

First Conclusion 

Insofar as proper reasoning entails (1) 
openness to evidence and issues for argu-
ment without external constraint on what 
evidence and issues for argument are rais-

ed and (2) examination of presuppositions 
and cunclusiuns rather than mere adherence 
to them without rational warrant, the structure 
of determination identified by Principles I and 
II violates the nature of proper reasoning. 

The derangement of reason implied by 
this structure of determination is not a fault 
of anyone step or route of reasoning, as 
we have seen. No error of premise, of in-
ference, of conclusion of any argument or 
case is required for this disorder to be in 
place. It waylays reason on a deeper level, 
at the level of an underlying structure of par-
ticular arguments and cases taken together 
which may all in themselves be valid and 
sound, but nonetheless misdirected and 
misleading in virtue of this structure deter-
mining them. In other words, the fallacy 
here is a defect in the form of a field of 
reasoning, not of any argument or argument 
step within it. 

This field of reasoning may include an 
infinitude of particular arguments or argu-
ment steps which are, distributively analys-
ed, without fallacy. Yet notwithstanding 
such possibility of atomic soundness, the 
discourse affected by this underlying struc-
ture of determination is radically deform-
ed, and more and more misleadingly so as 
it operates underneath the reach of detec-
tion. It is a deep-structural fallacy set into 
the frame of discourse itself and constitutes 
thereby the most systemically distorting 
bonds of illusion against which critical 
thinking has to contend. 

Principle III 

We now propose a third principle which 
extends our understanding of this covert 
structure of the communications field 
fallacy. 

Exclusion of a statement or set of 
statements from the range of what can be 
said in the public realm occurs in propor-
tion to its contradiction to acceptance of the 
basic social-structural fact as necessary and 
good. 



r 
1-

This principle allows for variation and 
complexity in what can and cannot be said 
in public discourse. It covers those myriad 
possibilities of nuance, emphasis, co-optive 
reformulation, selective deletion, marginal 
occurrence and so on which so abound in 
natural language phenomena. We can in ac-
cordance with this principle make further 
distinctions within what is pre-empted from 
the permissible range, and thus more ex-
actly understand the margins of both what 
is excluded and included in the scope of the 
speakable. 

These distinctions are open to alternative 
or elaboration. Proposed here is a 
simplified, graduated categorization: 

1) ruled out as a priori unspeakable ego 
(1), (2), (4), (S), (6), (11), (12), (16), 
(18), (19), (20), (26), (28), (30) above. 

2) omitted ego (S), (6), (8), (9), (13), 
(17), (24). 

3) selected out ego (3), (10), (IS), (22), 
(23), (2S). 

4) marginalized ego (7), (14), (20), (21), 
(27), (29). 

Defining principles of these proposed 
distinctions can be elucidated beyond what 
is afforded by the ad hoc examples given 
in illustration. 

Discourse is ruled out as a priori 
unspeakable: insofar as it is in principle in-
consistent to accept both its content and the 
necessity and value of the B.S.S.F. 

It is omitted: insofar as its content ex-
poses a discreditable property of the 
B.S.S.F., but is not in principle incompati-
ble with the acceptance of the value and 
necessity of the B.S.S.F. 

It is selected out: insofar as its substan-
tial or frequent re-iteration in the media 
would challenge acceptance of the B.S.S.F., 
but not its passing appearance. 

It is marginalized: insofar as its ap-
pearance at the margin of public discourse 
does not contradict, but justifies the 
B.S.S.F. as tolerant of critical positions. 

The same type of position or argument 
could, through time, move from being rul-
ed out as a priori unspeakable to being 

The Unspeakable 141 

merely omitted or marginalized, in accor-
dance with how it is modified to accord with 
the B.S.S.F. or, conversely, how the 
B.S.S.F. is modified to accommodate it. 
Pope John Paul II's declaration of "the 
priority of labour over profits" in his 1981 
encyclical Laborem Exercens, for example, 
modifies a formerly unspeakable position 
in the media to an omitted one. On the other 
hand, the espousal of women's right to 
choose abortion moves from being 
straightforwardly unspeakable 2S years ago 
to marginalized and struggling inwards as 
the B.S.S.F. itself modifies towards increas-
ing participation by women in it as indepen-
dent agents. These are explanation sketches 
of the lines of analysis that can be follow-
ed in understanding the variety-admitting 
relationship between determining basic 
social-structural facts and public argument 
possibilities. Because this relationship is, 
however, always contra-rational for the 
reasons elucidated on page 140, such varia-
tion in what can and cannot be supposed, 
inferred and argued does not mitigate the 
hold of this underlying structure of 
unreason, but only masks it in the play of 
diversity. This play of diversity is essen-
tial to the appearance of "pluralism" in a 
society when its communication field is in 
fact systematically intolerant of basic alter-
natives or criticisms. 

The Speakable: Operations within 
the Range of Public Discourse 

Just as there are operations to exclude 
from the range of what can be said in the 
public media, so there are complementary 
operations of selection and exclusion within 
this range. Again, the existential ground of 
these operations is the basic social-structural 
fact as defined under Principle I, and the 
form of its determination is as defined by 
Principles II and III. 

But Principles I, II and III do not yet 
tell us what will be selected for production 
in the public realm among the countless 
viable possibilities that do not contradict 



142 John McMurtry 

acceptance of the B.S.S.F. We require a 
principle of selection within this permissi-
ble range to complete our general 
framework of analysis. 

It can be defined as follows: 

Principle IV 

What validates the basic social-structural 
fact as necessary or moral, and invalidates 
opposition to it as impractical or immoral, 
qualifies for selection for mass media 
production. 

Here again, such a principle of selec-
tion violates the nature of reasoning by the 
closure to evidence and issues it entails, and 
by the unwarranted acceptance of deep 
presuppositions it systematically reinforces. 
But it differs from the disorder identified 
by Principles II and III in bearing a positive 
bias of selection rather than a negative bias 
of exclusion. It is not so destructive of 
reason's proper course as is the derange-
ment described by Principles II and III -
which block and silence entire domains of 
inquiry - but operates rather to select for 
reproduction what is most favourable to ac-
ceptance of the B.S.S.F. in what is left over 
for assertion and argument. 

That is, within the range of what can be 
publicly said, there is a bias towards what 
validates the B.S.S.F. and/or invalidates op-
position to the B.S.S.F. which rules against 
the middle ground of what does neither. 
Principle IV identifies this systematic slant. 
For example, the publicly speakable might 
be quite neutral in content without either 
contradicting or promoting the B.S.S.F., or 
detached from all such concerns, or in some 
other way permissibly non-contradictory in 
its bearing. But in fact, it is proposed by 
Principle IV, what is stated and reproduc-
ed within the range of the publicly speakable 
tends to be either a direct or indirect 
justification of the necessity or value of the 
B.S.S.F., or a direct or indirect condem-
nation of what opposes this B.S.S.F. 

As with the operations of determination 

identified above, there are countless 
possibilities of illustration here, and there 
are different sorts of classification into type 
by means of which we can organize these 
instantiations of Principle IV into subset 
classification. 

Let us consider the schema of distinc-
tion in terms of the following order: 

(1) selection of assumptions, 
(2) selection of events and issues and 
(3) selection of descriptive predicates. 

At all three levels of selection, the prin-
ciple for selection is: to favour what 
validates the existing B.S.S.F. as 
necessary/good, and what invalidates op-
position to the existing B.S.S.F. as 
impractical/bad. 

Selected Assumptions 

Reasoning and assertion are normally 
conducted on an unstated basis of implicit 
assumptions. These assumptions are typical-
ly not raised as a step of the argument in-
sofar as they are already acceptable to the 
audience in question. They are simply 
presupposed. What Principle IV states is 
that there is a structural bias in public 
discourse towards such assumptions which 
conform to this principle, and not other, 
more rationally acceptable assumptions 
which do not. 

For example, in discussing or reporting 
an earthquake in Guatemala, a published ac-
count in the North American media would 
repose on a great variety of contextually ac-
ceptable assumptions - about cause and ef-
fect, geographical plate shifting, 
photographic fidelity, the organic structure 
and needs of humans, the intersubjective ef-
ficacy of language, and so on. But if it 
comes to a choice, implicit or explicit, bet-
ween acceptable assumptions, none of 
which contradicts acceptance of the 
B.S.S.F., the ones which will be favoured 
will be those that comply with Principle IV 
and not others equally or more plausible. 



To pursue the example, there may be 
conflict between army and peasant guerrilla 
forces at the site of this Guatemala earth-
quake, and the acceptable background 
assumptions to account for this complica-
tion could be that the guerrillas are moved 
by regional impoverishment and the need 
to replace an idiocyncratically brutal 
military dictatorship repressing them, or 
that they are moved by external communist 
intervention and a Marxist-Leninist design 
to overthrow capitalism. Further 
background assumptions might be that U.S. 
assistance is just normal ideological grand-
standing or the expression of a basically 
generous American social order. Principle 
IV holds that in both cases the latter kind 
of background assumptions and not the 
former will be favoured for selection within 
the range of what does not contradict the 
B.S.S.F. 

More basically still, the peasant upris-
ing could be understood from the 
background assumption that once fun-
damental human needs reach a certain 
threshhold of deprivation, people revolt; or 
it could be understood from the background 
assumption that overlooks human needs in 
favour of moralizing qualms about those 
who revolt. Principle IV holds again that 
it is the latter background assumption that 
will be selected as the public standpoint 
from which to ascribe and reason, and not 
the former: because the latter tends by 
analogue to both justify the B.S.S.F. and 
condemn opposition to it, whereas the 
former leaves such matters open to further 
judgement and inference. 

Selection of Events and Issues 

As with background assumptions, so 
with events and issues themselves, what is 
selected for public reproduction is selected 
from a great range of possibility. There are 
a limitless number of events and issues at 
any given time which qualify for public 
speakability by not contradicting acceptance 

The Unspeakable 143 

of the B.S.S.F. within whose determining 
confines they arise. Here too, however, 
Principle IV states that from among these 
countless possibilities, those will be 
favoured that justify conformity and/or con-
demn non-conformity to this B.S.S.F.: for 
example, the exploits and contributions of 
B.S.S.F. leaders hips and beneficiaries, and 
the wrongs and defects of B. S. S. F. victims 
and opponents. to Principle IV holds, that 
is, that these kinds of events and issues will 
be normally selected for public presentation 
and discussion rather than those within the 
permissible range which would provide a 
balanced' 'mix", or events and issues which 
have no such political implications or 
bearings. 

It might be objected that the mass media 
in fact prominently report and discuss events 
and issues of the latter, "neutral" sort: 
human disasters, accidents, happenings, 
problems and so on with no political 
import to them. Such a view misses 
the underlying structure of selection 
whose operation precisely depoliticizes 
these sites of debate in accordance with 
Principle IV. 

Consider, for example, the Guatemala 
earthquake referred to above, which can be 
seen as a paradigmatic occurrence in the 
developing world from neighbouring 
El Salvador to the Philippines. It is 
incontrovertibly the case that such earth-
quakes cause the human deaths they do 
because the dwelling-constructions within 
which those killed live, and not those much 
wealthier, are too fragile from the poverty 
of their inhabitants to withstand these 
earth-structure shifts. To select against 
report and discussion of this fact conforms 
to Principle IV: both because it excludes 
from attention a fact that might constitute 
grounds for criticism of the B.S.S.F. ofthat 
society and, by analogue, of the larger 
economic order of which it is a part; and 
because, thus "neutralized" of such 
political content, the earthquake disaster can 
become an occasion for affirmation of the 
B.S.S.F. by highly publicized steps of 



144 John McMurtry 

official relief extended to its victims. In this 
way, what appears to be an exception to the 
operation of Principle IV turns out, on 
closer examination, to be in confirmation 
of it. 

Again, very much could be said here in 
further illustration and development of Prin-
ciple IV's operation. We will restrict 
ourselves to three typical patterns that 
manifest it. First of all, less consequential 
harms, for example, of embryos by abor-
tion, are selected for media debate rather 
than much more consequential related 
harms, for example, the massive starvation 
and deprivation of children. 

Secondly, the issue of individual per-
sonalities in social and political movements 
or, on the other side, social and political 
problems, is selected for public exposure 
rather than these movements and problems 
themselves: for example, leader "images" 
or idiocyncrasies rather than policy posi-
tions or statements, and Watergate or Con-
tragate exposes of individuals rather than 
of underlying systemic crimes these in-
dividuals manifest. 

Thirdly and perhaps most significantly 
in prescribing the agenda of debate in con-
formity to Principle IV, advocacy of 
relatively right or extreme-right positions 
on the political spectrum is selected for 
repeated report and description, whereas ad-
vocacy of relatively left or extreme-left 
positions is seldom reported or described 
(eg. cold warriors, neoconservatives, 
evangelical bigots, anti-Semites, racists and 
so on rather than radical disarmament ad-
vocates, democratic and religious socialists, 
Marxists, third-world revolutionaries and 
so on). 

This weighting of the range may be the 
most importantly distortive operation of the 
entire system of fallacy we are examining 
because it continuously generates a spurious 
"middle ground" or "centre" upon which 
other operations depend for their consen-
sual appeal. That is to say, the range of posi-
tions which is publicly visible shifts as a 
whole towards positions which are in-

tolerant of what criticizes the society's 
established order. Report of attacks against 
such positions from "extremists" as well 
as "moderates" is thus made to appear as 
"balanced", as even-handedly presenting 
"both sides of the story." 

Descriptive Predicates 

Principle IV also applies to the language 
in terms of which the agents and positions 
of those events and issues that are selected 
for public communication are, in turn, 
described. That is, according to Principle 
IV, validating predicates will be used in 
description of agents and positions that are 
pro-B.S.S.F. in disposition; and in-
validating predicates will be used in descrip-
tion of agents and positions that are anti-
B.S.S.F. in disposition. For example, the 
same kind of government action, say, police 
crackdown on demonstrating workers or 
students, will be described as "tough", 
"no-nonsense", "firm" or the like, on the 
one hand, or "violent", "brutal", 
"repressive" or the like, on the other, 
depending on whether the action in ques-
tion is by a state that is supportive of, or 
hostile to, the contextualizing B.S.S.F. 
Favourable and unfavourable predication, 
that is, will not be determined by a factual 
difference in the actual behaviour involv-
ed. It will be prejudicially determined in ac-
cordance with whether it confirms the 
B.S.S.F. as necessary and good, or 
discredits opposition to it as unworkable or 
wrong. 

Just as with selective assumptions, 
events and issues, an immense variety of 
possibilities remains consistent with the 
operation of Principle IV . We will here 
identify only some standard examples. In 
each case, the first term of the predicate op-
position has as its referent what is pro-
B.S.S.F. in disposition, and the second term 
has as its referent what is anti-B.S.S.F. in 
disposition. In all cases, the individually ac-
ceptable use of these descriptive predicates 



varies in accordance with the systemic bias 
defined by Principle IV, and not in accor-
dance with reason or factual warrant: 

"freedom fighter" vs. "terrorist" 
"stable" vs. "dictatorial" 
"enthusiastic" vs. "well orchestrated" 
"austere" vs. "draconian" 
"ally" vs. "satellite" 
"patriot" vs. "fanatic" 
"offer" vs. "demand" 
"commentary" vs. "propaganda" 
"leader" vs. "boss" 
"courageous" vs. "extremist" 
"protecting national interests" 

vs. "expansionist" 
"realistic" vs. "unscrupulous" 

Conclusion 

The structure of the communications 
field fallacy consists in four underlying prin-
ciples of determination, each with its own 
differentiated operations. The reason that 
this system of distortion has remained un-
marked by logical analysis is that its 
disorder is not detectable in any argument 
or argument step, but only in the pattern 
of these across an overall field of public 
discourse. 

Since this system most consistently 
misleads thought and reason in the realm 
of mass communications, this realm has 
been the general focus of our analysis here. 
But because the frame of reference constant-
ly reproduced in the public media is, over 
time and without critical alternative, ap-
propriated by people as their own, if only 
by osmosis and repetition, we need to con-
sider this structure of deception as reaching 
beyond the media into other realms of com-
munication as well-as an acculturated 
frame of reference borne by individuals 
themselves at all levels of communication, 
including the academic. It confronts us with 
a possibly universal system of dupery by 
which reason and thought are misled with 
no clear boundary of cultural location. 

The Unspeakable 145 

Although our examples have specifically il-
lustrated this system's operations in English-
speaking society's mass communications 
print network, it would be quite mistaken 
to restrict its determination to this domain 
or this civilization. 

To go one step further, we need not limit 
the operation of this deep structure of decep-
tion to even the realm of verbal assertion 
and reasoning as a whole. Signs and expres-
sions of all sorts may also be so determin-
ed in what is excluded and what is selected 
for communication. The frequency or 
absence of pictures reproduced across a 
culture, for example, and their role in 
validating or invalidating their referents, ad-
mit of analysis in terms of the same prin-
ciples we have identified above. We may 
be confronting here, in other words, the 
basic structure of a general grammar of 
deception whose determination of what is 
and is not socially reproduced operates 
across sign and communication systems. II 

If the system has then no boundaries to 
its determination, yet its recognition is ruled 
out by its very operations, are we condemn-
ed to an iron cage of signification with no 
hope for emancipation from its hold? It is 
here that the foundations of reason and the 
academy that sustains them may have 
become sufficiently autonomous within our 
culture to allow the detection of our bars. 

Once recognized, these bars are not easi-
ly maintained. The gates to the movement 
of ideas are obliged to open in proportion 
to public recognition of their obstruction, 
lest the claim of "freedom of the press" 
lose its public credibility. The contradiction 
between what is said to be and what is, be-
tween basic social value and social-
structural impediment, between the nature 
of thought and what constrains it, this multi-
ple contradiction at the very axes of our 
shared being is a dialectic that dissolves the 
forms of its containment the more they are 
understood. The first and major step in the 
release of public consciousness from the 
distorting bounds of its control is to 
recognize that they exist. 



146 John McMurtry 

Summary Figure 

BASIC SOCIAL STRUCTURAL FACT 
(B.S.S.F.) 

Principle I: Large capitalist corporations 
or a state party control production and 
distribution of social goods so as to max-
imize capital/social command owned by 
corporations/party 

determines 

Range of Possibility of What Can Be Said 
in the Mass Media 

Principle II: Nothing appears in a society's 
mass media which contradicts the 
necessity or value of B.S.S.F. 

OPERA TIONS OF EXCLUSION 
FROM THE RANGE 

Principle III: Degree of Exclusion is in pro-
portion to contradiction of B.S.S.F. 

Operations: 1. Ruled out as a priori 
unspeakable 

2. Omitted 
3. Selected Out 
4. Marginalized 

OPERA TIONS OF SELECTION 
WITHIN THE RANGE 

Principle IV: Select what validates B.S.S.F. 
as necessary/moral and what invalidates 
opposition to B.S.S.F. as impractical/ 
immoral 

Operations: 1. Selection of presuppositions 
2. Selection of events/issues 
3. Selection of descriptive 

predicates 

ACTUAL PUBLIC DISCOURSE 

Implicit and explicit propositions, 
arguments and signals ranging from op-
timally functional justifications ofB.S.S.F. 
to verbal or non-verbal expressions that 
never overtly challenge B.S.S.F. 

Notes 

*This paper was originally prepared for 
presentation to the Association for Informal 
Logic and Critical Thinking, Canadian 
Philosophical Association Annual Meeting, 
Windsor, May, 1988. I am especially in-
debted to the Editors of Informal Logic, An-
thony Blair and Ralph Johnson, for their 
support and suggestions, to David Hitch-
cock for his valuable bibliographical 
assistance, to Howard Kahane for the 
reference to Mark Twain, to G.A. Cohen 
for his criticisms, and to Noam Chomsky, 
Jim Christoff, Homer Hogan, Alex 
Michalos, Bertell Oilman, Howard 
Woodhouse and Barrie Zwicker for their 
very supportive interest during various 
stages of this paper's construction. 

1 Richard Paul has argued that ego- and 
ethno-centric worldviews can fix people 
to a dogmatic, undialectical perspective 
which may actually use logical techni-
ques to buttress itself against critical 
reflection. (See Richard Paul, "Teaching 
Critical Thinking in the 'Strong' Sense: 
A Focus on Self-Deception, World-
Views and Dialectical Mode of Analysis. 
Informal Logic Newsletter, May 1982 
(Vol. IV, No.2) pp. 2-7 and "Program-
matic Approaches to the Teaching of 
Thinking Skills" in Teaching Thinking 
Skills: Theory and Practice, ed. Joan 
Boy koff Baron and Robert J. Sternberg 
(New York: W.H. Freeman and Co.) 
1987, pp. 127-145. According to Paul 
and to Bertell Oilman in unpublished 
manuscript, "The Meaning of Dialec-
tic", the problem here is insoluble by 
logical analysis, and can only be cor-
rected by education in dialectical method. 

2 That the mass media of the contemporary 
world are under the monopoly ownership 
control of a very small fraction of the 
world's popUlation is indicated by the 
following figures. Four new agencies, 
Reuters, France Presse (AFB), 
Associated Press (A.P.) and United Press 



International (UPI) "provide 90 % of the 
entire foreign news output of the world's 
newspapers and radio and television sta-
tions" (cited in Rowland Lorimer and 
Joan McNulty, Mass Communication in 
Canada (Toronto: McClelland and 
Stewart), 1987, p. 232). The authors also 
point out that two-thirds of the school text 
market in North America is controlled 
by eight multinationals (Ibid, p. 108). 
Twenty-seven corporations control most 
of the American mass-media, according 
to the recently revised edition of Ben 
Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly (New 
York: Beaverbrooks, 1987), a figure that 
has dropped by almost 50 % from the 
1983 first edition. "Ten business and 
financial corporations control the three 
major television and radio networks 
(NBC, CBS, ABC), 34 subsidiary televi-
sion stations, 201 cable T.V. stations, 62 
radio stations, 20 record companies, 59 
magazines including Time and 
Newsweek, 58 newspapers including 
The New York Times, the Washington 
Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los 
Angeles Times, 41 book publishers and 
Twentieth Century Fox" (Michael 
Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics 
of the Mass Media (New York): St. Mar-
tin's Press, 1986, p. 27). Parenti also 
points out that "a 1975 Senate in-
telligence committee found that the 
C.I.A. owned outright 'more than 200 
wire services, newspapers, magazines 
and book publishing complexes' and sub-
sidized many more", an ownership to 
which he proceeds to show 50 further 
media outlets and over 12 book 
publishing houses have since been 
discovered (Ibid, p. 233). According to 
Canada's Royal Commission on 
Newspapers (Minister of Supply and Ser-
vices Canada, 1981), p. 1: "Three chains 
control nine-tenths of French-language 
daily newspaper circulation. Three other 
chains control two-thirds of English-
language circulation ... under concen-
trated [ chain] ownership, three-quarters 

The Unspeakable 147 

of the total. In seven provinces ... two-
thirds or more of provincial circulation 
is controlled by a single chain". 

This overall system of monopoly is 
made internally consistent by the com-
mon interests of its chain owners and 
corporate sponsors, and by correspon-
ding unstated editorial policy to keep 
news reports consistent with each other. 
In the words of Peter Raymont' s 
documentary of the news production pro-
cess at ABC National News headquarters 
in New York, The World is Watching 
(Toronto Investigative Productions, 
1988): "Above all, reporters must match 
what their rivals file from the field. Any 
variation makes editors nervous. So 
although the news business is driven by 
competition, everyone's story looks and 
sounds the same." 

3 Noam Chomsky has documented the 
details of the distortion of public 
discourse by its context of power more 
thoroughly than perhaps anyone in the 
twentieth century, especially in a series 
of volumes published almost entirely by 
a small Montreal press: (with Edward S. 
Herman) The Political Economy of 
Human Rights Volumes I and II (Mon-
treal: Black Rose Books, 1979), Turn-
ing the Tide (Black Rose Books, 1986), 
On Power and Ideology, (Black Rose 
Books, 1987), Pirates and Emperors 
(Black Rose Books, 1987), and (with Ed-
ward S. Herman) Manufacturing Con-
sent: The Political Economy of the Mass 
Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 
Chomsky's overwhelming empirical 
case, however, is confined to public 
discourse within the United States, and 
to the topic of U . S. and Israeli foreign 
policy. Because of these regional and 
topical restrictions of his inquiry, and 
because his analysis is of facts and 
statements in these specific contexts 
rather than of the system of rules or prin-
ciples underlying public communications 
as a whole across cultural boundaries, 
his inquiry does not achieve that level of 



148 John McMurtry 

abstraction and universality sought by 
philosophy and logic. It does, however, 
provide encyclopaedic confirmation of 
this system as it is formally defined in 
this paper. 

4 For thorough documentation of the U.S. 
Federal Bureau of Investigation's 
monitoring and often black-listing of 
most of the great American writers of the 
twentieth century for their suspected ad-
vocacy of "subversive" positions, see 
Herbert V. Mitgang, Dangerous 
Dossiers (New York: Donald I. Fine, 
1988). The more extreme method of kill-
ing those who speak the unspeakable is 
also widespread. It not only includes the 
recent widely publicized case of the 
Ayatollah Khomenei's order of execu-
tion of writer Salmon Rushdie but the 
thousands of deaths reported annually by 
Amnesty International for no apparent 
offense but non-violent expression of a 
social or political opinion. In the extremi-
ty of means for enforcing the 
unspeakable may be the inverse measure 
of a culture's advancement towards 
humanity. But by whatever method the 
limits of public communication are held 
to conformity to Principle II, such limits 
are contrary to reason. This is worth em-
phasizing because we may be otherwise 
inclined to overlook these barriers to 
reason merely because their imposition 
is not by directly violent means. 

5 Anthony Blair has suggested that the pro-
blem of exclusion here might be conceiv-
ed as a violation of the requirement of 
sufficient evidence. The reason that the 
principle of sufficient evidence does not 
apply here, however, is that it means on-
ly that the evidence given for any conclu-
sion is adequate to justify the inferences 
from it. (See, for example, Ralph 
Johnson and Anthony Blair, Logical Self-
Defense (Toronto: McGraw-Hill-
Ryerson, 1983), pp. XVI, 34,41-46, and 
195). The fallacy of the unspeakable, on 
the other hand, is not a matter of 

evidence or premises being insufficient 
to justify the conclusions drawn from 
them, nor indeed a matter of any fallacy 
of a line of argument at all. It is a ques-
tion of excluding positions from being 
presented or argued in the first place: a 
fallacious pattern of what is not said in 
an overall field of discourse, rather than 
an error in the relationship between 
premises and inferences of what is said. 

6 These statements represent a mixture of 
assertions of fact, analysis and value. 
This is to show that the realm of the 
unspeakable embraces a full range of 
logical modes. Questions may arise as 
to the empirical warrant for numbers 3 
and 7 in particular. The facts to support 
these claims, if not these claims 
themselves, are available in Charles 
Higham, Trading with the Enemy (New 
York: Dell, 1983), Alfred McCoy, The 
Policies of Heroin in South-East Asia 
(New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 
and Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of 
Patriots (New York: Simon and Shuster, 
1987). Interestingly, the very newswor-
thy content of this evidence remained 
unspeakable in the major newsprint, 
magazine, radio and television media 
during the 1988 U. S. Presidential elec-
tions, though one might have expected 
the politics of democratic opposition to 
bring to light facts whose disclosure 
would strongly favour the losing can-
didate. In such cases, we can see how 
the lines of the unspeakable run beneath 
the lines of political parties and electoral 
contest itself. 

The unspeakability of position 28, a 
similarly controversial claim of fact, was 
recently confirmed by the media's 
blackout of the International War Crimes 
and Crimes Against Humanity Tribunal 
held in Toronto prior to the World 
Economic Summit in July 1988. At the 
Tribunal, over 50 witnesses gave 
eyewitness and expert testimony under 
oath and through examination by legal 
counsel to the perpetration of these 



crimes as these are defined by interna-
tional law and the Criminal Code of 
Canada, much of the evidence im-
plicating President Ronald Reagan of the 
United States and Prime Minister 
Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain of 
war crimes and crimes against humani-
ty. These crimes, as defined by the 
Criminal Code of Canada, (Section 6, 
1.96) include "murder, extermination, 
enslavement, deportation, persecution or 
any other inhumane act that is commit-
ted against any civilian population." 
Although the witnesses included former 
cabinet-level government officials, two 
high-ranking ex C.I.A. agents, interna-
tionally recognized legal scholars and 
scientists, many direct victims of torture 
and family-member assassinations, trade 
unionists and civil rights activists from 
4 continents as well as missionary clergy 
of the major Christian churches, no 
report of the evidence indicating war 
crimes was published by any of the in-
vited major newspaper, magazine, televi-
sion or radio stations. 

7 The precise figures for average profit and 
average wage rises during 1987 are 
52.2 % for the top 1000 Canadian cor-
porations, and 2.7% for Canadian wage-
earners. (Report on Business Magazine, 
July 1988, pp. 90-1). The Bell Canada 
profit and revenue rankings are provid-
ed in the same annual report. 

8 In his paper presented to the Association 
for Informal Logic Critical Thinking, 
Windsor, 1988, entitled "On Defining 
Critical Thinking: A Pragmatic Con-
tribution", Ralph H. Johnson proposes 
that the "acid test of whether someone 
is a critical thinker is how the individual 
conducts himself when challenged". He 
further suggests that failure of this test 
is indicated by one who "refuse(s) to ad-
mit the possibility of a challenge", 
"simply ignore(s) the challenge", or 
"cling(s) tenaciously to the belief" (pp. 
9-10). Johnson's indicators point out just 

The Unspeakable 149 

how serious the blockage to critical 
thinking is in the media of public com-
munication, where the challenge is, by 
the operations of exclusion defined, not 
permitted to arise in the first place. In 
accord with established thinking on the 
subject, however, Johnson's indicators 
are applied only to particular bearers of 
reason's obstruction, not the much more 
pervasive disorder of such obstruction in 
a social system of communication itself. 

Jurgen Habermas in his monumen-
tal study, The Theory of Communicative 
Action, Volume II, trans. Thomas 
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 
p. 346 does acknowledge the depth of 
this structural deformation of discourse, 
but only en passant: "The political 
system produces mass loyalty in both a 
positive and a selective manner: positive-
ly through the prospect of making good 
on social-welfare measures, selectively 
through excluding themes and contribu-
tions from public discussion. This can 
be accomplished through a sociostruc-
tural filtering of access to the political 
public sphere, through a bureaucratic 
deformation of the structures of public 
communication, or through manipulative 
control of the flow of communication." 
Habermas does not pursue this line of 
analysis in the remainder of his 900-page 
study. 

9 These epochal blocks to philosophical 
debate are explored in my "Philosophical 
Method and the Rise of Social 
Philosophy" Eidos, December 1981 
(Vol. II, No. II), pp. 139-76. Their con-
tinuing determination of curricula in the 
present educational system is analysed 
in "The History of Inquiry and Social 
Reproduction: Educating for Critical 
Thought", Interchange, Volume 19, 
Number 1, 1988, pp. 31-46. 

10 For the way in which perceived op-
ponents of the B.S.S.F. are continuous-
ly diverted to for irrelevant attack in 
fallacious moves within the permissible 



150 John McMurtry 

range of discourse, see my "Argumen-
tum Ad Adversarium" , Informal Logic 
Winter 1986 (Vol. VIII, No.1), pp. 
27-36. 

11 Because pictures are typically the most 
prominent vehicles of communication in 
contemporary culture, it may well be that 
their selection and exclusion is more im-
portant in the mass media than what is 
conveyed by natural language itself. This 
centrality of the visual in message 
transference is generally overlooked by 
informal logic and contemporary 
philosophies of communication. The 
structure of fallacy identified in this 
analysis, however, applies to the pictorial 
as well as the verbal in the communica-
tions field. Indeed its application here 
may be more revealing. Determination 
of what is and is not reproduced as visual 
representation in a culture has been less 
subject to critical scrutiny than what is 
reproduced as print. Journalists, for ex-
ample, normally have no say in or 

knowledge of what pictures (or 
headlines) will accompany their copy. 
This is decided externally and the pro-
ducts of these decisions are generally not 
analysed for patterns of misrepresenta-
tion. Yet as the saying goes, "Who con-
trols the pictures controls the show." 
Consider, for example, the comparative 
frequency, size, placement and 
favorability of pictures which are 
reproduced over time in the major North 
American and British media of can-
didates from the right and from the left 
of the political spectrum. Though our 
analysis here has attended to the standard 
conceptual object in laying bare the struc-
ture of the communications field fallacy, 
this structure of deception more covert-
ly determines the visual contents of the 
media as well. 

Dr. John McMurtry, Department of 
Philosophy, University of Guelph , Guelph, 
Ontario, Canada NIG 2WI 0