the exception that proves the rule
Jan. 30th, 2010 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThis phrase has caused me more trouble than any other clichéd expression.
Many people, confusing "rule" with "law", say that anything with exceptions can't be a rule; or, if they realize that "rule" can mean "something that generally prevails or obtains" (American Heritage Dictionary), still say that the idea of an exception proving it is nonsense. So they run around contorting themselves with the claim that "proves" means "tests".
Exceptions do test rules, yes, but what are the results of the test? I see three possibilities:
1) The exceptions are so numerous or so important that the "rule" does not generally prevail at all, and ought not to be considered one.
2) The exceptions are just exceptions. The rule generally prevails but can't always be relied upon.
3) The exceptions, while still being exceptions, demonstrate why the rule is valid the rest of the time. Even though they're exceptions, they paradoxically or ironically provide collateral proof that the rule (though it has exceptions) is still a real rule, and not a phantom one (see 1 above) or a hole-ridden one (see 2 above).
Number 3 is what I think is a plain, regular-meaning case of "the exception that proves the rule." I find cases of it frequently, but I have a curious trouble remembering them afterwards. Well, I just found another one, and I'm going to write about it here before I forget it.
It's in an article in The New Republic by Richard Posner, reviewing two books on the history of laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage in the U.S. At the beginning, he says the subject is now fairly moot. We wouldn't have elected the child of a mixed marriage as president if people still cared about it. (As a matter of public policy, at least; private prejudice is another matter.) Actually, I wonder if a hidden eugenic horror in many people is driving their frothing animus against the bland and instinctively moderate Obama, and what, you ask, about the uncanny parallels between objections to inter-racial marriage and objections to same-sex marriage? Be patient; Posner gets to that question on the last page.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's one line in the middle of his historical summary. During Reconstruction, he writes, these laws were as common in northern states as southern ones, but afterwards, northern states repealed them while southern ones (re)enacted them. By 1900, "all the southern and border states and all but a handful of western states had them," but "in the North, by contrast, by 1900 the only states with anti-miscegenation laws were Delaware and Indiana."
All right, let's test that against the rule that, at least by 1900, such laws were a southern (and western) phenomenon. What do the exceptions of Delaware and Indiana tell us?
Well, first, is Delaware an exception at all? Posner says the border states had the law, but "border states" normally means "states still allowing slavery that did not secede in the Civil War," i.e. Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, the loyalist parts of Virginia (that became West Virginia) ... and Delaware. James M. McPherson in his authoritative history of the war era, Battle Cry of Freedom, discusses the conflicting loyalties at play in all these places, and says that Delaware was the only one where "unionism ... was never in doubt. For all practical purposes Delaware was a free state." (p. 297) So it makes sense for Posner to exclude Delaware from that category, still more in 1900 by which time the state was more a satellite of Philadelphia than it had been forty years earlier; but at the same time, technically it's not an exception at all. It's unsurprising that, of all states Posner classes as northern, Delaware is most likely to behave like a southern state.
Something similar if weaker is true of Indiana. Southern sympathies were strong throughout the Ohio River valley, and of the states on the north bank, Indiana was the one with the least percentage of countervailing population on its Great Lakes end. It was the only northern state with a senator who was expelled for supporting the Confederacy. Today, when the political parties have switched modalities, and it's Republican strength which echoes the locales of slave-holding, Indiana is the most Republican of these states. So, again, it's unsurprising that, if there's northern states with southern political patterns, Indiana should be one.
So these exceptions are not just random exceptions that weaken the rule. They're exceptions that help confirm that the rule is actually valid the rest of the time, and is not just a coincidental pattern. They are, in short, exceptions that prove the rule.
Many people, confusing "rule" with "law", say that anything with exceptions can't be a rule; or, if they realize that "rule" can mean "something that generally prevails or obtains" (American Heritage Dictionary), still say that the idea of an exception proving it is nonsense. So they run around contorting themselves with the claim that "proves" means "tests".
Exceptions do test rules, yes, but what are the results of the test? I see three possibilities:
1) The exceptions are so numerous or so important that the "rule" does not generally prevail at all, and ought not to be considered one.
2) The exceptions are just exceptions. The rule generally prevails but can't always be relied upon.
3) The exceptions, while still being exceptions, demonstrate why the rule is valid the rest of the time. Even though they're exceptions, they paradoxically or ironically provide collateral proof that the rule (though it has exceptions) is still a real rule, and not a phantom one (see 1 above) or a hole-ridden one (see 2 above).
Number 3 is what I think is a plain, regular-meaning case of "the exception that proves the rule." I find cases of it frequently, but I have a curious trouble remembering them afterwards. Well, I just found another one, and I'm going to write about it here before I forget it.
It's in an article in The New Republic by Richard Posner, reviewing two books on the history of laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage in the U.S. At the beginning, he says the subject is now fairly moot. We wouldn't have elected the child of a mixed marriage as president if people still cared about it. (As a matter of public policy, at least; private prejudice is another matter.) Actually, I wonder if a hidden eugenic horror in many people is driving their frothing animus against the bland and instinctively moderate Obama, and what, you ask, about the uncanny parallels between objections to inter-racial marriage and objections to same-sex marriage? Be patient; Posner gets to that question on the last page.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's one line in the middle of his historical summary. During Reconstruction, he writes, these laws were as common in northern states as southern ones, but afterwards, northern states repealed them while southern ones (re)enacted them. By 1900, "all the southern and border states and all but a handful of western states had them," but "in the North, by contrast, by 1900 the only states with anti-miscegenation laws were Delaware and Indiana."
All right, let's test that against the rule that, at least by 1900, such laws were a southern (and western) phenomenon. What do the exceptions of Delaware and Indiana tell us?
Well, first, is Delaware an exception at all? Posner says the border states had the law, but "border states" normally means "states still allowing slavery that did not secede in the Civil War," i.e. Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, the loyalist parts of Virginia (that became West Virginia) ... and Delaware. James M. McPherson in his authoritative history of the war era, Battle Cry of Freedom, discusses the conflicting loyalties at play in all these places, and says that Delaware was the only one where "unionism ... was never in doubt. For all practical purposes Delaware was a free state." (p. 297) So it makes sense for Posner to exclude Delaware from that category, still more in 1900 by which time the state was more a satellite of Philadelphia than it had been forty years earlier; but at the same time, technically it's not an exception at all. It's unsurprising that, of all states Posner classes as northern, Delaware is most likely to behave like a southern state.
Something similar if weaker is true of Indiana. Southern sympathies were strong throughout the Ohio River valley, and of the states on the north bank, Indiana was the one with the least percentage of countervailing population on its Great Lakes end. It was the only northern state with a senator who was expelled for supporting the Confederacy. Today, when the political parties have switched modalities, and it's Republican strength which echoes the locales of slave-holding, Indiana is the most Republican of these states. So, again, it's unsurprising that, if there's northern states with southern political patterns, Indiana should be one.
So these exceptions are not just random exceptions that weaken the rule. They're exceptions that help confirm that the rule is actually valid the rest of the time, and is not just a coincidental pattern. They are, in short, exceptions that prove the rule.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 04:10 pm (UTC)For example, if you tell your child, "Tonight you may stay up until ten to watch the special nature program on television," by doing so you are also saying that on ordinary nights the child must be in bed before ten. If not, there would be no point in making an exception. Or, to put the matter theologically, God cannot work miracles without establishing natural laws for the miracles to transcend.
I think the Latin phrase is almost certainly the original source of the English one, and means something different from either interpretation.
(And that Latin phrase, of course, does not apply to Posner's case. No one had made a general rule for the states saying that the north would permit interracial marriage and the south would not. Each state made its own decision, until they were told they could not, by the Supreme Court. Just as, up to now, each state has made its own decision about same-sex marriage.)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 05:29 pm (UTC)Well, even the word "law" can mean two things: an ordnance established that must be followed or penalties will be enacted, and a verbal formulation of an pattern which has been observed to be universally true. Laws of physics, for instance, are not followed because objects read them in a physics textbook and decided to be lawful; they're in the physics textbooks because objects are known to follow them.
Same thing for the rules I'm talking about here. The rule is an observation of what actually happens. The question, then, is what do exceptions mean? Is the rule an unjustified overgeneralization, a justified generalization, or do the exceptions demonstrate why the generalization is true?
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 06:49 pm (UTC)And in the Roman sense, I don't think that you can say that when a state passes a law against same-sex marriage, that makes same-sex marriage legal in states that haven't done the same. At least, not in our legal system.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 12:11 am (UTC)