#quote mining

Fallacy of Quoting Out of Context

As it says on the tin, selective quote mining of words from their original context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning.

A prime example of this is the use of the following Darwin quote from Chapter 6 of On the Origin of Species:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

It sounds like he’s undermining his own work, when in fact, if you keep reading, he’s saying the exact opposite:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

What that quote excerpt is setting up is the explanation that what may seem absurd at first glance can actually be quite sensible when you stop to really examine the evidence.

The world is full of terrible movies with ellipsis-laden, glowing reviews on their posters. You might read “...a great movie...” when the original quote was “I really wish this was a great movie.” It happens all the time. 

It seems obvious that context is important. Words get their meaning from how they are used with other words, not as isolated units. Even words that everyone agrees are absolutely awful, such as n----- or c---, can be not-awful when used in a particular context by particular people. 

Unfortunately, claiming that something was taken “out of context” has become popular as a counter-argument, and it’s rarely questioned. If someone confidently avers “out of context” as a response to anything, it’s completely reasonable to ask for that missing context. If they are unable or unwilling to provide any, then you have outed them as a purveyor of nonsense.

You can have similar fun with people who claim something is “ethnic” just by asking them which ethnicity they’re referring to.

If you remove the context of a quote to line up with an ideological opinion you have, it’s called eisegesis, sometimes called “proof-texting”. If you do this repeatedly, it’s called “quote mining”, and advertises the poverty of your argument.

An example of how removing context from a quote can dramatically alter its meaning is here, where removing the last few words promoted the exact opposite of the original message. It’s so blatant that it can only have been intentional (which makes me wonder why, if the message is that everyone should learn to pronounce difficult names, they didn’t use a source that actually supported that idea, instead of hacking the context away from a source that didn’t). 

If you remove the context of a quote to line up with an ideological opinion you have, it’s called eisegesis, sometimes called “proof-texting”. 

If you do this repeatedly, it’s called “quote mining”.

A quote is never “out of context” simply because you don’t like or understand its implications. 

This quote from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species is immediately followed by this sentence:

"Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real."

If you quote something and intentionally leave out the bit that makes it sensible, or you specifically choose the bits of the quote to make it mean something completely different, it's called quote mining.