I just got home from a polyclinic in the northeastern part of Singapore. I had sent my mother for her regular medical check-up. Her appointment card stated clearly she had an appointment today. When I arrived there we dutifully went to the an automatic registration machine to register our presence for the appointment. The machine announced that we didn’t have an appointment. The duty officer also said we had no appointment and we had to wait in the queue for one hour to get “an appointment”. When I asked why I had to do that, her answer was a flippant, “Oh the system has changed!”

Later at the registration counter a staff member asked me if my mother had an appointment to be at the clinic. I asked her, “When is an appointment and appointment since the machine said we didn’t while my mother’s card said we did?“

A similar thing can be seen in the Forum Page of today’s Straits Times. The Assistant Director (Media Relations, the Singapore Police Force), was replying to a query from a reader who had asked why his diploma which was not from a local polytechnic, was not accepted for his application to a position in the force while that of the five local polytechnics was accepted.

The reply from the Assistant Director was:

“The entry requirement for diploma positions in the Singapore Police Force, like the rest of the Singapore Civil Service, is a polytechnic diploma.

For the purpose of recruitment, the diploma qualifications from our local polytechnics are used as a benchmark for assessing the standard and rigour of other diploma programmes.”

The Assistant Director is clearly only engaged in bureaucratic babble. First he passes the buck and says it is standard practice in the Civil Service. Then he says that the diplomas from the local polytechnics is the benchmark to compare other diploma programmes. Has he answered the initial query?

At first glance, it is as if he has, but surely anyone can see that the initial query is about why the Singapore Police Force only used the local polytechnic diplomas as the standard? To put it in another way, the job applicant was asking why his diploma was not good enough. To answer that it is not good enough because it doesn’t meet the benchmark is certainly an example of circular reasoning.

Furthermore, to say that the five polytechnics are used as benchmarks does not explain whether that particular job applicant’s diploma has met the benchmark or otherwise. The Singapore Police Force wants us to infer from this statement that the other diplomas (and therefore the issuing institutions) are of inferior quality. They won’t say it for legal reasons perhaps. It is left to the readers to infer. So when is an answer an answer?