Consider the assumptions made by your worldview | Whale’s Tales

Published 2:30 am Friday, February 27, 2026

One of the best books I have ever read, “Debate: Argumentation or Advocacy?,” I first picked up for class at the University of Washington in the fall of 1986.

That slender book taught me about the mechanics of argument, about what connects the evidence we present to the claim we intend to make. This connection, given outright or implied, is called the “warrant.”

In inductive argument, which is the way of science, it is, “observation made, data drawn, hypothesis empirically verified.”

Let me explain what I’m banging on about.

Say Jones wants to claim that all cows give milk. To support his claim, Jones presents his evidence: his actual observations of 100,000 cows that led to him conclude that cows give milk. From that sample size, his spell-bound audience may reach the conclusion that Jones is right.

We do this all the time.

Notice, however, that to reach such a conclusion, Jones must make a leap of faith beyond his sample. This leap of faith is what we call “The Assumption of Uniformity.” It tells us that if all these cows do x, we can reasonably infer that all cows do x. Yet we can never know for absolute certainty because we haven’t observed every cow. There may be outlier cows somewhere that don’t give milk.

When President Ronald Reagan argued long ago that the United States needed a strong military presence in the Philippines, the warrant was his worldview, unspoken, that communism is evil.

The lessons of that book have been on my mind lately, oddly enough because of public comments I have heard and reading about recent events in Minneapolis and in other cities.

People who take the side of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the current mess claim Alex Pretti and Renee Good and others brought death upon themselves: “Well,” say ICE supporters, “if they had just obeyed lawful orders, this would not have happened. They are responsible for their own deaths.”

The assumption here, the unspoken warrant, is their worldview that law enforcement acts lawfully, always and everywhere.

But does it? No. Most of us who have been kicking about the world for a while know that while the great majority of officers are decent, some are capable of wrongdoing. The incidents may be rare, but they are a fact of life. Crooked officers and bad actors do exist, and even well-meaning ones are human and capable of making mistakes. If they weren’t, there would be no need for law enforcement agencies to conduct internal investigations.

What’s more, the argument rests on the assumption that orders given are always lawful. Again, is law enforcement capable of issuing wrong or illegal orders? Yes. Look around. This claim does not rely on actual evidence gathered in the real world, but on assumption.

A side issue is the strange silence from the very staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment right “to keep and bear arms.” Haven’t they said repeatedly that we must have guns to provide for militia protection against a tyrannical government? Alex Pretti had a legal right to carry his weapon, which an ICE officer retrieved from his pocket. Pretti subsequently died from multiple bullet wounds to his body and head.

So, here we are at a time when honest-to-God incidents of government tyranny are staring us in the face, and too many Americans are blind to what’s going on. Not because of a lack of evidence — there is plenty of that — but because of a worldview that has projected itself onto the incidents, and, dismissing the actual evidence we gather with our eyes and ears, comes up with the same conclusion every time: law enforcement can do no wrong, never, no way no how.

That just doesn’t work for me.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.