Kettle logic

 ( Informal Fallacies ) 

Kettle logic () is a rhetorical device wherein one uses multiple arguments to defend a point, but the arguments are inconsistent with each other.

Jacques Derrida uses this expression in reference to the humorous "kettle story" related by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).

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Philosophy and psychoanalysis The name logique du chaudron comes from Jacques DerridaJacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998). from an example used by Sigmund Freud for the analysis of "Irma's dream" in The Interpretation of Dreams The Interpretation of Dreams, in standard edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, (trans. A. A. Brill), 4:119-20 and in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, standard edition 13:62 and 206

Freud relates the story of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition and the three arguments he offers.

1. That he had returned the kettle undamaged
2. That it was already damaged when he borrowed it
3. That he had never borrowed it in the first place

Though the three arguments are inconsistent, Freud notes that it is so much the better, as if even one is found to be true then the man must be acquitted.

The kettle "logic" of the dream-work is related to what Freud calls the embarrassment-dream of being naked, in which contradictory opposites are yoked together in the dream.Mills, Jon (2004) Rereading Freud: psychoanalysis through philosophy p.14 Freud said that in a dream, incompatible (contradictory) ideas are simultaneously admitted. Kabbalah and postmodernism: a dialogue By Sanford L. Drob p.139 and notes at p 292Elliot R. Wolfson (2007) "Oneiric Imagination and Mystical Annihilation in Habad Hasidism" in ARC, The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University 35 (2007): 131–157.Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A. A. Brill, pp.366-373 quotation:

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See also

• Dilemma
• Alternative pleading: some forms constitute legal use of kettle logic
• Argument in the alternative
• List of fallacies

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External links

• "Kettle Logic – Freud on Defensive Arguments"

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