When we exaggerate in order to make a joke, though, we do not use the fallacy because we do not intend to be taken literally. The problem is that the items in the analogy are too dissimilar. When reasoning by analogy, the fallacy occurs when the analogy is irrelevant or very weak or when there is a more relevant disanalogy. See also Faulty Comparison. The book Investing for Dummies really helped me understand my finances better. The book Chess for Dummies was written by the same author, was published by the same press, and costs about the same amount.
So, this chess book would probably help me understand my finances, too. A specific form of the False Equivalence Fallacy that occurs in the context of news reporting, in which the reporter misleads the audience by suggesting the evidence on two sides of an issue is equally balanced, when the reporter knows that one of the two sides is an extreme outlier.
Councilwoman Miranda Gonzales spoke in favor of dismantling the old mansion saying its land is needed for an expansion of the water treatment facility. Both sides seemed quite fervent in promoting their position. Improperly concluding that one thing is a cause of another. My psychic adviser says to expect bad things when Mars is aligned with Jupiter. Tomorrow Mars will be aligned with Jupiter. So, if a dog were to bite me tomorrow, it would be because of the alignment of Mars with Jupiter.
A reasoner who unfairly presents too few choices and then implies that a choice must be made among this short menu of choices is using the False Dilemma Fallacy, as does the person who accepts this faulty reasoning.
The pollster is committing the fallacy by limiting you to only those choices. Think of the unpleasant choices as being the horns of a bull that is charging toward you. A form of the Fallacy of Suppressed Evidence. The article suppresses the evidence that geologists who are the relevant experts on this issue have reached a consensus that the Earth is billions of years old.
This is the fallacy of offering a bizarre far-fetched hypothesis as the correct explanation without first ruling out more mundane explanations. Look at that mutilated cow in the field, and see that flattened grass. Aliens must have landed in a flying saucer and savaged the cow to learn more about the beings on our planet. If you try to make a point about something by comparison, and if you do so by comparing it with the wrong thing, then your reasoning uses the Fallacy of Faulty Comparison or the Fallacy of Q uestionable Analogy.
We gave half the members of the hiking club Durell hiking boots and the other half good-quality tennis shoes. After three months of hiking, you can see for yourself that Durell lasted longer. You, too, should use Durell when you need hiking boots. A fallacy produced by some error in the process of generalizing. See Hasty Generalization or Unrepresentative Generalization for examples. An irrelevant appeal to the motives of the arguer, and supposing that this revelation of their motives will thereby undermine their reasoning.
A kind of Ad Hominem Fallacy. Formal fallacies are all the cases or kinds of reasoning that fail to be deductively valid. Formal fallacies are also called Logical Fallacies or Invalidities. That is, they are deductively invalid arguments that are too often believed to be deductively valid. This might at first seem to be a good argument, but actually it is fallacious because it has the same logical form as the following more obviously invalid argument:.
Nearly all the infinity of types of invalid inferences have no specific fallacy names. The Fallacy of Four Terms quaternio terminorum occurs when four rather than three categorical terms are used in a standard-form syllogism. Without an equivocation, the four term fallacy is trivially invalid. This fallacy occurs when the gambler falsely assumes that the history of outcomes will affect future outcomes. I know this is a fair coin, but it has come up heads five times in a row now, so tails is due on the next toss.
The fallacious move was to conclude that the probability of the next toss coming up tails must be more than a half. A critic uses the Genetic Fallacy if the critic attempts to discredit or support a claim or an argument because of its origin genesis when such an appeal to origins is irrelevant. Fortune cookies are not reliable sources of information about what gift to buy, but the reasons the person is willing to give are likely to be quite relevant and should be listened to.
The speaker is committing the Genetic Fallacy by paying too much attention to the genesis of the idea rather than to the reasons offered for it.
Because appeals to origins are sometimes relevant and sometimes irrelevant and sometimes on the borderline, in those latter cases it can be very difficult to decide whether the fallacy has been committed. Guilt by Association is a version of the Ad Hominem Fallacy in which a person is said to be guilty of error because of the group he or she associates with. Secretary of State Dean Acheson is too soft on communism, as you can see by his inviting so many fuzzy-headed liberals to his White House cocktail parties.
This sort of reasoning is an example of McCarthyism, the technique of smearing liberal Democrats that was so effectively used by the late Senator Joe McCarthy in the early s. A Hasty Generalization is a Fallacy of J umping to Conclusions in which the conclusion is a generalization.
See also Biased Statistics. So, all people I will meet in Nicaragua will be nice to me. In any Hasty Generalization the key error is to overestimate the strength of an argument that is based on too small a sample for the implied confidence level or error margin. You are hedging if you refine your claim simply to avoid counterevidence and then act as if your revised claim is the same as the original. You do not use the fallacy if you explicitly accept the counterevidence, admit that your original claim is incorrect, and then revise it so that it avoids that counterevidence.
This is an error in reasoning due to confusing the knowing of a thing with the knowing of it under all its various names or descriptions. You claim to know Socrates, but you must be lying. The Fallacy of Hyperbolic Discounting occurs when someone too heavily weighs the importance of a present reward over a significantly greater reward in the near future, but only slightly differs in their valuations of those two rewards if they are to be received in the far future.
The error of inappropriately treating an abstract term as if it were a concrete one. In a poem, it is appropriate and very common to reify nature, hope, fear, forgetfulness, and so forth, that is, to treat them as if they were objects or beings with intentions.
In any scientific claim, it is inappropriate. This occurs when an arguer presupposes some aspect of their own ideology that they are unable to defend. Senator, if you pass that bill to relax restrictions on gun ownership and allow people to carry concealed handguns, then you are putting your own voters at risk. The arguer is presupposing a liberal ideology which implies that permitting private citizens to carry concealed handguns increases crime and decreases safety.
If the arguer is unable to defend this presumption, then the fallacy is committed regardless of whether the presumption is defensible. See Irrelevant Conclusion. Also called missing the point. The fallacy occurs when we accept an inconsistent set of claims, that is, when we accept a claim that logically conflicts with other claims we hold.
Most professional basketball players are tall, so most tall people are professional basketball players. A pollster interviews ten London voters in one building about which candidate for mayor they support, and upon finding that Churchill receives support from six of the ten, declares that Churchill has the majority support of London voters. This fallacy is a form of the Fallacy of Jumping to Conclusions.
The mistake of treating different descriptions or names of the same object as equivalent even in those contexts in which the differences between them matter. In these contexts, replacing a description with another that refers to the same object is not valid and may turn a true sentence into a false one.
Michelle said she wants to meet her new neighbor Stalnaker tonight. Michelle said no such thing. The faulty reasoner illegitimately assumed that what is true of a person under one description will remain true when said of that person under a second description even in this context of indirect quotation. Extensional contexts are those in which it is legitimate to substitute equals for equals with no worry.
But any context in which this substitution of co-referring terms is illegitimate is called an intensional context. Intensional contexts are produced by quotation, modality, and intentionality propositional attitudes. An invalid inference. An argument can be assessed by deductive standards to see if the conclusion would have to be true if the premises were to be true.
If the argument cannot meet this standard, it is invalid. An argument is invalid only if it is not an instance of any valid argument form. The Fallacy of Invalid Reasoning is a formal fallacy. Therefore, there are no clouds in the sky. This invalid argument is an instance of Denying the Antecedent. Any invalid inference that is also inductively very weak is a Non Sequitur. The testimony of Thompson may be relevant to a request for leniency, but it is irrelevant to any claim about the defendant not being near the murder scene.
This fallacy is a kind of Non Sequitur in which the premises are wholly irrelevant to drawing the conclusion. The Is-Ought Fallacy occurs when a conclusion expressing what ought to be so is inferred from premises expressing only what is so, in which it is supposed that no implicit or explicit ought-premises are need. There is controversy in the philosophical literature regarding whether this type of inference is always fallacious.
This argument would not use the fallacy if there were an implicit premise indicating that he is a person and that persons should not torture other beings. Hold on. And, if you stop to think about it, there may be other factors you should consider before making the purchase, such as size, appearance, and gas usage. The Fallacy of Lack of Proportion occurs either by exaggerating or downplaying or simply not noticing a point that is a crucial step in a piece of reasoning. You exaggerate when you make a mountain out of a molehill.
You downplay when you suppress relevant evidence. The Genetic Fallacy blows the genesis of an idea out of proportion. Did you hear about that tourist getting mugged in Russia last week? And then there was the awful train wreck last year just outside Moscow where three of the twenty-five persons killed were tourists.
The speaker is blowing these isolated incidents out of proportion. Millions of tourists visit Russia with no problems. Another example occurs when the speaker simply lacks the information needed to give a factor its proper proportion or weight:. The speaker does not realize all experts agree that electric and magnetic fields caused by home wiring are harmless.
However, touching the metal within those wires is very dangerous. Being vague is not being hopelessly vague. Dwayne can never grow bald. Loaded language is emotive terminology that expresses value judgments.
When used in what appears to be an objective description, the terminology unfortunately can cause the listener to adopt those values when in fact no good reason has been given for doing so. Also called Prejudicial Language. Asking a question in a way that unfairly presumes the answer.
Obscuring the issue by using overly-technical logic tools, especially the techniques of formal symbolic logic, that focus attention on trivial details.
A form of Smokescreen and Quibbling. A fallacy of reasoning that depends on intentionally saying something that is known to be false. When the Fallacy of Jumping to Conclusions is due to a special emphasis on an anecdote or other piece of evidence, then the Fallacy of Misleading Vividness has occurred.
Yes, I read the side of the cigarette pack about smoking being harmful to your health. But let me tell you about my uncle. He even won a ski race at Lake Tahoe in his age group last year. You should have seen him zip down the mountain. He smoked a cigarette during the award ceremony, and he had a broad smile on his face. I was really proud. I can still remember the cheering. The vivid anecdote is the story about Uncle Harry. Too much emphasis is placed on it and not enough on the statistics from the Surgeon General.
Also known as the Fallacy of Reification and the Fallacy of Hypostatization. There are two footballs lying on the floor of an otherwise empty room.
When asked to count all the objects in the room, John says there are three: the two balls plus the group of two. A less metaphysical example would be a situation where John says a criminal was caught by K-9 aid, and thereby supposed that K-9 aid was some sort of concrete object. John could have expressed the same point less misleadingly by saying a K-9 dog aided in catching a criminal.
Committing the error of trying to get someone else to prove you are wrong, when it is your responsibility to prove you are correct.
Person A: I saw a green alien from outer space. Person B: What!? Can you prove it? If the misrepresentation occurs on purpose, then it is an example of lying. This is the error of treating modal conditionals as if the modality applies only to the then-part of the conditional when it more properly applies to the entire conditional.
James has two children. If James has two children, then he necessarily has more than one child. So, it is necessarily true that James has more than one child. This apparently valid argument is invalid. He could have had no children. It is logically possible that James has no children even though he actually has two. Modal concepts include necessity, possibility, and so forth. Because women are naturally capable of bearing and nursing children while men are not, women ought to be the primary caregivers of children.
Here is another example. Owners of financially successful companies are more successful than poor people in the competition for wealth, power and social status.
Therefore, the poor deserve to be poor. Jones : But McDougal over there is a Scotsman, and he was arrested by his commanding officer for running from the enemy. When a conclusion is supported only by extremely weak reasons or by irrelevant reasons, the argument is fallacious and is said to be a Non Sequitur. However, we usually apply the term only when we cannot think of how to label the argument with a more specific fallacy name.
Any deductively invalid inference is a non sequitur if it also very weak when assessed by inductive standards. Nuclear disarmament is a risk, but everything in life involves a risk. Every time you drive in a car you are taking a risk. His blood stains are on her hands. So, she committed the murder.
Explaining something obscure or mysterious by something that is even more obscure or more mysterious. Let me explain what a lucky result is. It is a fortuitous collapse of the quantum mechanical wave packet that leads to a surprisingly pleasing result. See the Fallacy of Guilt by Association. You oversimplify when you cover up relevant complexities or make a complicated problem appear to be too much simpler than it really is.
I say there should be a trade embargo against Cuba. The issue in our election is Cuban trade, and if you are against it, then you should vote for me for president. Whom to vote for should be decided by considering quite a number of issues in addition to Cuban trade.
When an oversimplification results in falsely implying that a minor causal factor is the major one, then the reasoning also uses the False Cause Fallacy. The Pathetic Fallacy is a mistaken belief due to attributing peculiarly human qualities to inanimate objects but not to animals. The fallacy is caused by anthropomorphism. This old car always breaks down on days when I have a job interview.
Some people try to win their arguments by getting you to accept their faulty definition. Same as the Definist Fallacy. Poisoning the Well when presenting a definition would be an example of a using persuasive definition.
You said hiring a house cleaner would solve our cleaning problems because we both have full-time jobs. Now, look what happened. Every week, after cleaning the toaster oven, our house cleaner leaves it unplugged.
I should never have listened to you about hiring a house cleaner. Poisoning the well is a preemptive attack on a person in order to discredit their testimony or argument in advance of their giving it. A person who thereby becomes unreceptive to the testimony reasons fallaciously and has become a victim of the poisoner. This is a kind of Ad Hominem, Circumstantial Fallacy. When is the defense attorney planning to call David Barnington to the stand?
Suppose we notice that an event of kind A is followed in time by an event of kind B, and then hastily leap to the conclusion that A caused B. If so, our reasoning contains the Post Hoc Fallacy. It is a kind of False Cause Fallacy. Every time I buy a good seat, our team wins. Every time I buy a cheap, bad seat, we lose.
My buying a good seat must somehow be causing those wins. This is the mistake of over-emphasizing the strength of a piece of evidence while paying insufficient attention to the context. The forensic scientist testified that the chance of a randomly selected person producing such a match is only one in two thousand.
The prosecutor concludes that the suspect has only a one in two thousand chance of being innocent. On the basis of only this evidence, the prosecutor asks the jury for a conviction. That is fallacious reasoning, and if you are on the jury you should not be convinced.
The prosecutor paid insufficient attention to the pool of potential suspects. Suppose that pool has six million people who could have committed the crime, all other things being equal. The suspect is just one of the , so the suspect is very probably innocent unless the prosecutor can provide more evidence. The prosecutor over-emphasized the strength of a.
If you have sufficient background information to know that a premise is questionable or unlikely to be acceptable, then you use this fallacy if you accept an argument based on that premise. We quibble when we complain about a minor point and falsely believe that this complaint somehow undermines the main point. To avoid this error, the logical reasoner will not make a mountain out of a mole hill nor take people too literally. Logic Chopping is a kind of quibbling.
Jones : Let me quote Smith for you. We rationalize when we inauthentically offer reasons to support our claim. We are rationalizing when we give someone a reason to justify our action even though we know this reason is not really our own reason for our action, usually because the offered reason will sound better to the audience than our actual reason.
A red herring is a smelly fish that would distract even a bloodhound. It is also a digression that leads the reasoner off the track of considering only relevant information.
Will the new tax in Senate Bill 47 unfairly hurt business? I notice that the main provision of the bill is that the tax is higher for large employers fifty or more employees as opposed to small employers six to forty-nine employees.
To decide on the fairness of the bill, we must first determine whether employees who work for large employers have better working conditions than employees who work for small employers. I am ready to volunteer for a new committee to study this question. How do you suppose the committee should go about collecting the data we need? Bringing up the issue of working conditions and the committee is the red herring diverting us from the main issue of whether Senate Bill 47 unfairly hurts business.
An intentional false lead in a criminal investigation is another example of a red herring. This fallacy occurs when regression to the mean is mistaken for a sign of a causal connection. Also called the Regressive Fallacy.
You are investigating the average heights of groups of people living in the United States. You sample some people living in Columbus, Ohio and determine their average height. You have the numerical figure for the mean height of people living in the U. Your second sample of the same size is from people living in Dayton, Ohio. There is most probably nothing causing people from Dayton to be more like the average resident of the U.
Considering a word to be referring to an object, when the meaning of the word can be accounted for more mundanely without assuming the object exists.
Also known as the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness and the Hypostatization. The larger point being made in this last example is that nouns can be meaningful without them referring to an object, yet those who use the Fallacy of Reification do not understand this point.
Drawing an improper conclusion about causation due to a causal assumption that reverses cause and effect. A kind of False Cause Fallacy. All the corporate officers of Miami Electronics and Power have big boats.
The false assumption here is that having a big boat helps cause you to be an officer in MEP, whereas the reverse is true. By the last clause I presume is meant, that it is not susceptible of any other proof; for otherwise, there would be no fallacy.
This is a fallacy of overlooking; or of non-observation, within the intent of our classification. A false or mistaken idea based on faulty knowledge or reasoning. For example, kings who have divorced their wives for failing to produce a son have held to the fallacy that a mother determines the sex of a child, when actually the father does. See sex chromosomes. New Word List Word List. Save This Word!
See synonyms for fallacy on Thesaurus. We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms. Definition of fallacy noun from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.
Find the answers with Practical English Usage online, your indispensable guide to problems in English. Join our community to access the latest language learning and assessment tips from Oxford University Press! Find out which words work together and produce more natural sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app. Toggle navigation. Resources home Text Checker.
0コメント