114 How to Win Every Argumentsingle job is vital to our efficiency. The man we hire to scour the building
picking up used paper-clips, for example...
(And the ad nauseam cracks the minister before the minister cracks
the problem.)If you aspire to expert rank, however, study closely the form
exhibited by the minister himself at the dispatch-box:
/ responded to charges of ministerial dereliction of duty on 9 November
by saying that I had nothing to add to my statement of 4 June. I would
not care to expand on that at this time.
(Please sir, it wasn't me!)Non-anticipation
The fallacy of non-anticipation consists of supposing that
everything worth doing or saying has already been done or said.
Any new idea is rejected on the grounds that if it were any good,
it would already be part of current wisdom. Proposals are
rejected because they have not been anticipated.
If tobacco really is so harmful, how come people didn't ban it years ago?
(They didn't know. Nowadays more people live long enough to
experience the adverse effects, and we now have more techniques for
measuring such things.)The central assumption of the fallacy is unwarranted. Progress is
made on several fronts, including the scientific and the social.
New ideas are constantly being adopted, and there is no justi-
fication for supposing that our ancestors would have found them
all. The presumption that they did intrudes irrelevant material
into the argument.