Q, thus P

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has been all over the dubious story of the Killian memos. Fake? Real? One thing's for sure: Glenn has an unhealthy interest, and the blog entries keep coming like a diarrhea attack. (Like diarrhea, something at Instapundit smells fishy.)

Glenn explains that the age of logic is over:

That's because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks.

This Crooked Timber post asks an important question:

While on our pedantry high horses, this passage from the Washington Post

“I am personally 100 percent sure that they are fake,” said Joseph M. Newcomer, author of several books on Windows programming, who worked on electronic typesetting techniques in the early 1970s. Newcomer said he had produced virtually exact replicas of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word formatting and the Times New Roman font.

Now what exactly is the argument here? I think it’s of the following form.

If the memos were produced on Microsoft Word, they’d look exactly like this.
The memos look exactly like this.
So the memos were produced on Microsoft Word.

Nevermind that the first premise is probably false, because the distinction between exactly and virtually is pretty darn important here. The argument is the kind of howler that we fail freshman logic students for committing. It even has a fancy name: affirming the consequent.

So until we can stop demonizing Dan Rather and find a real typography authority, the right-wing blogosphere might want to take it down a notch. And check your logic.

And shame on Brad DeLong for being so easily swayed.