Every schoolboy knows 61
truth of what they are saying. The audience, not wishing to be
ignorant of matters so widely understood by children, are sup-
posed to keep silent about their doubts. Thus complex and
dubious assertions are passed off unquestioned.
Every schoolboy knows that the rate of gene loss from a closed repro-
ductive system is expressed by a simple and well-known formula.
(Indeed, this is the main topic of conversation over catapults and
conkers.)The tactic is fallacious. Its basic purpose is to appeal beyond the
evidence to secure acceptance. The audience is invited to assent
not from conviction but out of shame and fear of being thought
less knowledgeable than a mere child. The merits of the point are
meanwhile overlooked.
So widely used is the tactic that the hapless youth is now
encumbered with several encyclopaedias of knowledge. There is
scarcely anything which he does not know.
As my learned colleague is doubtless aware, every schoolboy knows that
it was Rex v. Swanson which established in 1749 the precedents gov-
erning the use of coaching horns on the public highway.
(And you can be sure that the same gifted, if youthful, legal scholar is
also aware of the judgment in Higgins v. Matthews 1807.)The aforementioned schoolboy has an intuitive grasp of the
obvious, and has been widely praised for this ability:
Why, it is obvious even to a mere child that interstellar dust clouds would
long ago have been excited to incandescence and be emitting black-body
radiation were it not for the expansion of the universe.