I understand that the bad reasons fallacy is committed when one assumes that a conclusion is false just because the argument is bad.
But is this fallacy committed very often?
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1What do you mean when you write “the argument is bad”? Depending on the meaning, there might be no fallacy at all.– Mark AndrewsCommented Oct 21, 2019 at 2:54
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Are you looking for an example or just asking whether it's committed often?– E...Commented Oct 21, 2019 at 3:16
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2The more common name is the fallacy fallacy, argumentum ad logicam. Wikipedia gives many examples. As most informal fallacies, it may well be plausibly valid in context. For example, if a sole argument given for a conclusion is shown to be invalid it is reasonable to dismiss the conclusion.– ConifoldCommented Oct 21, 2019 at 3:31
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2Isn't it more a sociological question, whether this fallacy is often committed?– Kristian BerryCommented Mar 4, 2021 at 17:48
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@KristianBerry While it is an empirical question, to be sure, why would a sociologist be privleged over a logician in determining an answer?– J DCommented Feb 28, 2022 at 5:18
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3 Answers
Here’s an example of a “bad reasons” fallacy:
I claim the Earth is a sphere since electricity is transmitted via copper (which IS a true premise, but it has nothing to do with supporting the desired conclusion, so it’d be a bad/invalid reason to accept it).
Another subtler form of a bad reasons” fallacy would be if I claim the Earth is a sphere, since humans can reach escape velocity to overcome its gravitational pull to enter orbit.
Even though the two claims ARE true, they aren’t connected together sufficiently to form a sound argument (they’d be connected if I said the Earth is a sphere, since we can reach escape velocity to enter Earth orbit and observe with our eyes the Earth is spinning underneath, passing over the same fixed point with each rotation: that’s inferential logic, based on observation & relying on accepted definitions of terms).
It’s a commonly-observed fallacy in life, since people readily believe conclusions for bad reasons (eg Qanon adherent believe all Dems are pedohiles who eat babies, with absolutely no evidence to support that claim, or Trump won election when they can only present a laundry list of allegations, but no actual evidence).
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1“Bad reasons fallacy” means that just because Trump has no evidence whatsoever for election fraud (that’s the bad argument), it is a fallacy to use this as evidence that no election fraud exists. There is a real argument “If there was election fraud then it would be so hard to hide that there would be evidence. No evidence implies no fraud”. Commented Mar 5, 2021 at 11:47
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gnasher729 is correct, you aren't guilty of the "bad reasons fallacy" when you give bad reasons for a conclusion (like unverifiable allegations used to support the conclusion that the election was stolen), you're guilty of that fallacy when someone else presents bad reasons for a conclusion, and you argue that implies the conclusion must be false. Commented Jul 2, 2021 at 19:03
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But, it's an oblate spheroid..? Therefore copper doesn't transmit electricity ;) Commented Jul 2, 2021 at 19:21
The problem with the “bad reasons” fallacy: You tell me that X is true because of some bad reason. The logical conclusion is that we don’t know if X is true or not.
But if you had a reason to convince me of X then I think “A wanted to convince me that X is true. If X were true, then A would have found a good reason why it is true, but they didn’t. Therefore we know at least that good reasons for X are hard to find. And from that we can - not 100% justified - conclude that X is false.
So while the argument isn’t 100% convincing it has at least some justification.
I think that I may just have witnessed a bad reasons fallacy. In yet another JFK assassination documentary, someone stated that the wound in JFK's throat was obviously an entry wound, and the wound to the back of his skull was an exit wound. The conclusion was that he was shot from the front not the back. I looked again at the autopsy results. A bullet entered very high on the back as he leaned forward and angled down to exit the throat. The exit wound was small. A bullet struck the back of the top of the skull and exited at the front shearing off the scalp and top of the skull. This is consistent with being shot twice from behind and above. The only unusual feature is the small size of the exit wound in the throat, but this might have been because of the trajectory through thick muscle. At first glance, the shooting from the front seems plausible, but on closer inspection it is probably a bad reasons fallacy. It is possible that the shooting did occur from the front rather than the back, but the reasons argued do not justify this conclusion. On the other hand, the autopsy results indicate that the shooting occurred from the back and above, but the anomalous circumstances around the autopsy cast doubt on the conclusion. The argument, however, is not fallacious. It is the evidence itself that is subject to doubt.
