I recently had the chance to speak to an anti-vaxxer in person. Of course, he did not identify as such: they never do. He didn’t want to be pinned down and was just asking questions about vaccine safety.
He told me that he wasn’t opposed to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States. After all, Kennedy wanted to see studies done on vaccine safety. Was I against that? Shouldn’t we know if all these vaccines are safe?
I recognized on the spot that this was a very bad argument—either born of ignorance or slyness—and came up with a name for it: the square one fallacy.
I was starting to hear this type of fallacious argument a lot. When I criticized one of the biggest podcasts in recent memory,ĚýThe Telepathy Tapes,ĚýI was contacted by a number of well-meaning parents of nonverbal autistic children who asked me a very simple question. Shouldn’t we study this? Why are scientists afraid of doing research into this? Why has this been ignored for so long?
RFK Jr. himself has invoked this argument when he has testified to his desire to move money away from research into infectious diseases and into chronic diseases, as if scientists had never thought to look into diabetes and heart disease.
The square one fallacy is arguing that we have no data to illuminate a particular question, that we’re starting from scratch, when there is an actual body of evidence that we are ignoring, either deliberately or cluelessly. It’s contending that we need to study something that has already been studied, sometimes to death.
It is related to (and might be a subset of) what we call “just asking questions” or “JAQing off,” when someone pretends to want to know more but ignores the answers to keep on badgering an expert with the same question, over and over. A person “just asking questions” doesn’t want to be pinned down to a specific position; they’re simply playing Devil’s advocate ad nauseum without contending with the answers provided.
I did an online search and the only previous use of the phrase “square one fallacy” I could find is from  by Gregory P. Magarian on the suppression of wartime political debate.
We’re about to see an awful lot of this square one fallacy, as disingenuous actors and their ignorant followers argue that we have never studied things that have a large scientific literature behind them. When used deceptively, it’s often because they don’t like what the scientific evidence has to say on this topic. It’s a way to sound reasonable and unbiased when what they really want are studies that agree with them.
We have many studies on vaccine safety. We also have a long history of research into psi phenomena, including telepathy, and we know enough to be skeptical of poorly done “studies” where trickery is allowed to influence the outcome.
We’re not starting from square one.
