Goines On: A fundamental flaw of logic

Click image for more vignettes

Goines was about to start reading a book he had borrowed from Duke University Library for Mrs. Goines. He knew that Apple’s iBooks probably had the book and he could download a free sample to start reading more easily on his iPad.

    Goines was amazed to find that the sample included the entire first three chapters of the book. Chapter 3 of the printed book ended on p. 30, and the last page of the electronic sample was also numbered 30. As a double check, Goines also quickly noted the book’s and the sample’s final word: they were the same. Goines valued such confirmations, because he was becoming more and more prone to error, and double checks helped him catch his mistakes.
    After reading a few pages of the sample, Goines enthusiastically recommended the book to a bibliophile friend, whom he emailed:

I think you would enjoy reading retired neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s autobiographical book, And Finally: Matters of Life and Death. You’ll like his writing style, his persona. He’s humorous, knowledgeable and, I think, wise. But don’t rush out and buy the book; you can sample the entire first three chapters free….

    Goines returned to the sample and finished reading it, and then picked up the book and turned to p. 31 to start reading Chapter 4.
    But what was this? The facing page – the final page of Chapter 3 – did not match the final sample page. Both pages were numbered 30, right enough, but the “same word” they ended with weren’t the same after all (though they did nearly rhyme): “three” in the sample, “trees” in the book:

[Sample] The hunter-gatherer Pirahã tribe in the Amazon...are quite free from the mental illnesses of western life and have no need for numbers beyond three.

[Printed book] I had no idea that would soon change forever. And I thought of the soulless, treeless Soviet suburb of Trojeschina in Kyiv where I used to stay when working with my colleague there. What must it be like to grow up without trees?

     Goines eventually puzzled out that his erroneous equating of the book’s pagination with that of the sample (whose pages contained only about half as many words as the printed book’s pages) had conditioned him to read “three” and “trees” as the same word, which misreading had in turn reinforced his mistaken assumption about the number of pages in the sample vis-à-vis the printed book.
    He relieved his embarrassment by jokingly emailing his friend: “This incident provides more evidence of a well-known Flaw of Logic: Falsehoods can confirm one another.”

Copyright © 2023 by Moristotle