Quoting out of context (sometimes referred to ascontextomy orquote mining) is aninformal fallacy in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.[1] Context may be omitted intentionally or accidentally, thinking it to be non-essential. As a fallacy, quoting out of context differs fromfalse attribution, in that the out of context quote is still attributed to the correct source.
Arguments based on this fallacy typically take two forms:
As astraw man argument, it involves quoting an opponent out of context in order to misrepresent their position (typically to make it seem more simplistic or extreme) in order to make it easier to refute. It is common inpolitics.
As anappeal to authority, it involves quoting an authority on the subject out of context, in order to misrepresent that authority as supporting some position.[2]
Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their originallinguistic context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as "quoting out of context". The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original contextper se (as all quotes are), but to the quoter's decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become "context" by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice to surgical excision, journalistMilton Mayer coined the term "contextomy" to describe its use byJulius Streicher, editor of the infamousNazi broadsheetDer Stürmer inWeimar-era Germany. To arouse antisemitic sentiments among the weekly's working class Christian readership, Streicher regularly published truncated quotations from Talmudic texts that, in their shortened form, appear to advocate greed, slavery, and ritualistic murder.[3] Although rarely employed to this malicious extreme, contextomy is a common method of misrepresentation in contemporary mass media, and studies have demonstrated that the effects of this misrepresentation can linger even after the audience is exposed to the original, in context, quote.[4][5]
One of the most familiar examples of contextomy is the ubiquitous "reviewblurb" in advertising. The lure of media exposure associated with being "blurbed" by a major studio may encourage some critics to write positive reviews of mediocre movies. However, even when a review is negative overall, studios have few reservations about excerpting it in a way that misrepresents the critic's opinion.
For example, the ad copy for New Line Cinema's 1995 thrillerSe7en attributed to Owen Gleiberman, a critic forEntertainment Weekly, used the comment "a small masterpiece." Gleiberman actually gaveSe7en a B− overall and only praised the opening credits so grandiosely: "The credit sequence, with its jumpy frames and near-subliminal flashes of psychoparaphernalia, is a small masterpiece of dementia." Similarly,United Artists contextomized criticKenneth Turan's review of their flopHoodlum, including just one word from it—"irresistible"—in the film's ad copy: "EvenLaurence Fishburne's incendiary performance can't igniteHoodlum, a would-be gangster epic that generates less heat than a nickel cigar. Fishburne's 'Bumpy' is fierce, magnetic, irresistible even… But even this actor can only do so much." As a result of these abuses, some critics now deliberately avoid colorful language in their reviews.[6] In 2010, the pop culture magazineVanity Fair reported that it had been the victim of "reckless blurbing" after the television showLost had taken a review fragment of "the most confusing, asinine, ridiculous—yet somehow addictively awesome—television show of all time" and only quoted "the most addictively awesome television show of all time" in its promotional material.[7]Carl Bialik recorded an instance of an adverb being applied to a different verb in a 2007 advert forLive Free or Die Hard, where aNew York Daily News quote of "hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining" was reduced to "hysterically... entertaining".[8]
In the United States, there is no specific law against misleading movie blurbs, beyond existing regulation overfalse advertising. TheMPAA reviews advertisements for tone and content rather than the accuracy of their citations. Some studios seek approval from the original critic before running a condensed quotation.[9] TheEuropean Union'sUnfair Commercial Practices Directive prohibits contextomy, and targets companies who "falsely claim accreditation" for their products in ways that are "not being true to the terms of the [original] endorsement". It is enforced in theUnited Kingdom by theOffice of Fair Trading, and carries a maximum penalty of a £5,000 fine or two years imprisonment.[10][11]
Their [Creationists'] favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin.
Entertainment: withThe Times reporting its frequent abuse by promoters with, for example, "I couldn't help feeling that, for all the energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry, the audience had been shortchanged" being pared down to "having 'energy, razzmatazz and technical wizardry'".[16]
Travel:The Guardian ran an article in May 2013 with the subheading "Sri Lanka has the hotels, the food, the climate and the charm to offer the perfect holiday, says Ruaridh Nicoll. It's just a pity about the increasingly despotic government".[17] A highly edited version of this piece was immediately posted on the official Sri Lankan news portal under the heading "Sri Lanka has everything to offer perfect holiday" [sic].[18]
Pseudohistory: A book review inThe New York Times recountsLerone Bennett Jr.'s "distortion by omission" in citing a letter fromAbraham Lincoln as evidence that he "did not openly oppose the anti-immigrantKnow-Nothing Party" because, as Lincoln explained, "they are mostly my old political and personal friends", while omitting to mention that the remainder of the letter describes Lincoln's break with these formerWhig Party associates of his, and his anticipation of "painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them."[19]
Alternative medicine: Analysis of the evidence submitted by theBritish Homeopathic Association to the House of Commons Evidence Check on Homeopathy contains many examples of quote mining, where the conclusions of scientific papers were selectively quoted to make them appear to support the efficacy ofhomeopathic treatment. For example, one paper's conclusion was reported as "There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo" without the immediately following caveat "however, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials. Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies."[20]
^McGlone, M.S. (2005a). "Quoted out of context: Contextomy and its consequences".Journal of Communication.55 (2):330–346.doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2005.tb02675.x.
^Forrest, Barbara;Paul R. Gross (2004).Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Oxford:Oxford University Press. p. 7.ISBN0-19-515742-7. Retrieved2007-03-09.In the face of the extraordinary and often highly practical twentieth-century progress of the life sciences under the unifying concepts of evolution, [creationist] "science" consists of quote-mining—minute searching of the biological literature—including outdated literature—for minor slips and inconsistencies and for polemically promising examples of internal arguments. These internal disagreements, fundamental to the working of all natural science, are then presented dramatically to lay audiences as evidence of the fraudulence and impending collapse of "Darwinism."
The dictionary definition ofcontextomy at Wiktionary
