Face it. We all have some perspectives that allow us to account for the phenomena in our lives in ways that differ from those of our neighbors. “We” see the world. “They” see the world. However, we might act in unison even though we start from different assumptions and have those different perspectives. Is it possible that each of us operates under a principle that “if it works, it’s good enough for me”? But the process which allows individuals to accept erroneous explanations of phenomena is very much like putting the conclusion cart before the reasoning horse. It is also a utilitarian process in which the ends justify the means. Countries face that dilemma all the time when they work together on some issues (such as N. Korea’s nuclear weapon development) while they oppose one another on other international issues.  
 
Take explanations of eclipses for an example of “if it works” (I know; you’re asking, “Where’s this going?” Patience. Patience).
 
In 2017 eclipse fever swept across North America, and millions people went outside to watch a darkening sky. Astronomers would like to think that many—if not all—people know that the moon orbits Earth at an average distance of about 239,000 miles, and that the moon has a diameter less than the distance between New York and San Francisco. Many people probably also know that the sun is farther away than the moon, and that is why it looks about the same size, even though the sun could hold millions of moons in its interior. And many people understand that the moon’s shadow can fall on Earth just as the moon can lie in the shadow of Earth. But for the many people who don’t understand Earth-Sun-moon relationships, there are still explanations of eclipses that work, if only for them. Go back to Aelfric’s time for an example. About a millennium ago in England, someone, maybe Aelfric (955-1025) himself, wrote the following description of an eclipse of the moon:
 
         “Woruldlice uðwitan sædon, {þæt} seo sceadu astihð up oð ðæt heo becymð to þære lyfte ufeweardan, and þonne be yrnð se mona hwiltidum þonne he full byð on ðære sceade ufeweardre, and faggeteð oððe mid ealle asweartað, for þam þe he næfð þære sunnan leoht þa hwile þe he þære sceade ord ofer yrnð oð ðæt þære sunnan leoman hine eft onlihton.”*
 
Now, just in case your Anglo-Saxon is a bit rusty, suffice it to say that the author explains that the moon falls in the shadow of Earth as the Sun orbits Earth (apparently, going beneath Earth and then above it in a daily pattern). According to the thinking of the time, the shadow on the moon goes away when the Sun continues to swing around our planet to light the moon (sunnan leoman hine eft onlihton). From the assumption of a geocentric Solar System and the perspective of a medieval mind, the explanation “worked.” It worked just fine.
 
Obviously, medieval science is wrong for our times, but it had an element of modern knowledge, and an element of “truth” is usually hidden in “if it works.” Apparently, the 10-11th-century author knew that the moon reflected, rather than generated its own light and that somehow the shadow of Earth was involved in a lunar eclipse. Significantly, the medieval writer reached the same conclusion that we know as fact today: Earth can cast a shadow on the moon. If we ignore the actual details modern science has provided since the times of Copernicus and Galileo and our visits to the moon, then we can acknowledge that “if it works” can actually “work” to explain natural phenomena. But it can also give us some trouble when we use it to deal with human phenomena.
 
Let’s apply “if it works” to human affairs because you already know those Earth-Sun-moon relationships. How about an example of “if it works” causing some trouble? When the Supreme Court ruled negatively in the Dred Scott case in 1857 (three months before his “owner” freed him and his family), it seem to echo the thinking processes of the Anglo-Saxon writer. E. S. Corwin explained the Court’s decision this way:
 
         “When the student finds six judges arriving at precisely the same result by three distinct processes of reasoning, he is naturally disposed to surmise that the result may have induced the processes rather than the processes compelling the reasoning.”**
 
The decision of the Court occurred at a tumultuous time in American politics, and it was apparently influenced not by the Constitution from which reasoning should have begun as much as it was by regional conflicts about slavery and the loyalties of the justices to their respective regions of origin. The context of the Dred Scott case also included the issue of slavery in territories like Kansas and Nebraska and the legitimacy of the Missouri Compromise. The Chief Justice was a Southerner in favor of slavery, and President Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian not wanting to stir any pot of rebellion, supposedly convinced another justice to vote with the majority to avoid furthering tensions between North and South. The end was the justification; so, if the decision worked as Buchanan wanted, then it would reduce tensions in the South.
 
So, back in 1857 the Court arrived at a process that affirmed a result, very much in the manner of the Medieval mind that wrote about a lunar eclipse. Southern values could be explained at the time by Southerners; northern values, by Northerners. New territories were moons eclipsed by both. In choosing one result over the other, the Dred Scott decision cast a shadow that eclipsed the Constitution and led in part to the darkness of the Civil War. But for the Supreme Court Justices, Southerners, and President Buchanan, the tri-fold reasoning and result, however faulty, worked.
 
“If it works” is a utilitarian’s methodology. Whenever “if it works” makes little difference in the lives of others, such as in explaining how an eclipse of the moon occurs, there’s no problem. All of us probably walk around in some darkness while we believe we see the light. But putting a conclusion before reasoning in regard to human affairs can be devastating to individuals, as it was to Dred Scott. And we know that the decision stirred other tensions.
 
Our problem as an intelligent species is that we like to explain, but we often explain on the bases of faulty reasoning or information. Still, if we think “it works,” then we accept the explanation. Thus, today, we see numerous explanations for human interactions that are based on assumptions and perspectives acceptable to one group, but unacceptable to another. Both believe their explanations work.
 
Maybe we will someday as a species understand how we are influenced by a philosophy of “if it works.” It’s been hundreds of years since Copernicus and Galileo, however, and there are still people around the world who think we live on a flat world around which the sun and moon travel. If we can’t get together on an explanation as simple as the processes that make an eclipse, how are we going to agree on those processes and ways of thinking on which we differ but on which we will sometimes agree because the end appears “to work”?
 
The Anglo-Saxon quotation above begins with “Woruldlice uðwitan sædon” (“Worldly philosophers said”). All philosophers—all of us—explain the darkness that envelopes our species’ interactions in ways that work for us. And probably all of us reconcile on the grounds of an end that seems, if only temporarily, to work.
 
 
*Found in Earle, John. Anglo-Saxon Literature, New York. E. & J. B. Young & Co., 1884. p. 246.
Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17101/17101-h/17101-h.htm#pg150
** Garraty, John A. The American Nation to 1877: A History of the United States. New York. American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1966, p. 389.

Using non-sequiturs to further an argument is a common ruse, often just an un-harmful way of making a point that the listener catches. “Pass the salt, please.” Salt spills from the hand of the recipient. “See what you made me do,” the recipient says. Logically, we might say that the salt-passer was part of the circumstance, but not the direct cause, which was the clumsiness of the recipient. That one act follows another does not definitively tie the two in a cause-effect relationship. But the logical fallacy is common, and sometimes it is used even by those who should know better.
 
So, in this era of jumping to conclusions based on a series of non sequiturs, should we be surprised that even at the supposedly “highest” levels of academia such fallacies abound? Take the University of Oxford as an example of a supposed high level of academia. It’s Oxford, right? Hey, those guys and gals are really smart. It’s Oxford. Tweed and pipes and disheveled hair flopping over wire-rimmed glasses. Oxford. And that’s where we can find a report that is ostensibly about our lack of knowledge but where we can find conclusions drawn from it.
 
An online report * about our lack of information on deep-sea life posted in August, 2017, suggests that the life of the deep sea is in grave danger from human activities. Deep sea.** Just what does that mean, and how are you affecting it? Deep means really deep. If not the Mariana Trench deep, which lies farther below sea level than Mt. Everest stands above it, the deep ocean floor is still more than a couple miles (or a few km) under water. It’s the unseen area that covers more than half Earth’s surface. And there’s life down there, unknown life and a few species that people in deep-diving submarines and cameras on autonomous underwater vehicles have revealed. So, here comes the non-sequitur: The report says that although we don’t know much about the life of the deep sea because we have only 77 population genetics studies about invertebrates living there, scientists at Oxford say we are negatively impacting that population (no mention of the vertebrates). Only one study, by the way, has been conducted on species that live deeper than 5,000 meters. The report does acknowledge that “life in the depths of the ocean remains a relative mystery.”
 
So, here’s Christopher Roterman, co-author of the report: “Today humans have an unprecedented ability to effect [sic.] the lives of creatures living in one of the most remote environments on earth—the deep sea.” From this, we get the following: “The effects [Whew! Finally, the correct word—who would have tied misuse of “effect” and “affect” to someone at Oxford?] of human activity, such as pollution, destructive trawl-fishing, deep sea mining and climate change, appear to be intensifying and increasingly affecting [Correct word] populations of seafloor invertebrates.” And then this: “As ecosystem engineers, corals are biodiversity hotspots….” Wait! Corals! Deep Sea? Yes, there are cold water corals, but there’s no catalog of widespread coral reef development in the deep sea. Studies of “deep” corals have been largely limited to places like the outer continental shelf near the Farallon Islands, hardly a place comparable to the really “deep” sea environment that lies in total darkness and temperatures at and even below freezing.  
 
Main point: Apples and oranges, non-sequiturs, too. Is no place on the academic planet safe from twisted logic based on bad science and incomplete information? Do we live in a world where hypotheses about anything can be taken as realities about something? Is it possible that human activities are impacting organisms on the deep ocean floor? Yes. Do we know? No. Should we assume? Maybe. Are coral reefs being impacted currently? Yes. Do we know if human activities beyond stirring up polyp-choking and sunlight-blocking fine muds are causing a die-off? Not completely. Do we have definitive proof that the current demise of some corals is different in kind from coral die-offs over the course of hundreds of millions of years? No. Is it possible that some deep sea life is currently prospering by human activities? Yes. Seems that we are ready to find a cause where we are examining the circumstances and calling them a cause. And at Oxford! They probably have salt shakers with sea salt on the refectory tables.
 
“See what you made me do?” OR, more importantly in the context of an epidemic of online and media non sequiturs, "See what you made us believe?"
 
* http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-08-21-shocking-gaps-basic-knowledge-deep-sea-life-3
** Quick primer: Oceanographers divide the ocean into zones. Most people are probably familiar with the littoral zone because they can visit it when they go to the beach. Farther out and off large segments of continents are continental shelves with overlying neretic zone water not much more than about 200 meters or 600 feet deep. The shelves end at the shelf break, and there a steep continental slope leads through a bathyal zone to the ocean floor. Oceanographers classify the water of the “open” ocean as pelagic, with zones at increasing depths: epipelagic, the upper 200 meters, mesopelagic to about 1800 meters, bathypelagic to about 4000 meters, and the water over the ocean floor, the abyssopelagic, and down in the deep trenches, the hadal (from Hades) water zone.