How to Win Every Argument
52
Dicto simpliciter arises whenever individuals are made to conform to group patterns. If they are treated in tight classes as 'teenagers', 'Frenchmen', or 'travelling salesmen', and are assumed to bear the characteristics of those classes, no opportunity is permitted for their individual qualities to emerge. There are political ideologies which attempt to treat people in precisely this way, treating them only as members of sub-groups in society and allowing them only representation through a group whose values they may not, in fact, share.
Look, you're a civil servant. Your representatives voted for this action because they know it will be good for the civil service. It must therefore be good for you. (He only imagined those lost wages.)
In discussing people of whom we have a little knowledge, we often use dicto simpliciter in the attempt to fix onto them the attributes of the groups they belong to. Knowing only that a neighbour is civil to us and drives a better car, we try to deduce things from the fact that he is a Catholic or a squash-player. Our assumption of ancillary properties may, in fact, be correct; the mistake is to suppose that it must be: 'We all know that children are smaller than their parents. Well, now that I'm 50 and Dad is 80, I've noticed that I'm quite a bit taller. Maybe he isn't my real father.' Dicto simpliciter can be used to fit people into stereotypical moulds. Since they belong to the class of Frenchmen, balletdancers and horseriders, they must be great lovers, effeminate and bow-legged. You must appeal to generally accepted truisms in order to fill in details about individual cases which would otherwise be resisted. You should as a parent use dicto simpliciter to trick your child into doing what you want instead of what they want: