232
This line of argument is basically a strawman fallacy, which is when you construct a weaker version of your opponent's argument in order to then disprove it. In this case the weaker argument is that "guns kill people" all by themselves. No one actually believes that or argues that. Even the most committed gun control advocate acknowledges that firing a ...
53
This is not the only issue with Pascal's Wager, but what is described in the question is called the fallacy of proving too much. It happens when an argument is structured in such a way that the reasoning can be extended to reach "absurd" conclusions. This gives an effective strategy for refuting arguments on the arguer's own terms by exposing the fact they ...
45
Do you have a proof that we don't hold ourselves to higher standards?
There's actually a rather interesting little corner of mathematics called "proof theory." It deals with the question of what a proof is and how can we use them. It starts to look like philosophy from time to time.
I think the real difference is that mathematics typically starts with a ...
43
To complement Chris' answer I'll try to deconstruct some of the reasoning in the arguments a bit.
Suppose we claim that "guns don't kill people; people kill people." The only reasonable way to parse this into a slightly more formal statement is:
Guns are not responsible for killing people; people are responsible for killing people.
I can think of ...
42
Why does Dawkins think it is wrong to posit that a paragon of 100% morals could theoretically exist?
dimension of comparison = something you can compare things about. i.e., consider two dogs: a toy poodle and a doberman pinscher.
You can compare them in terms of size in which case size is the dimension of comparison. You can compare then in terms of weight in which case weight is the dimension of comparison.
This is not a term of art in philosophy. This ...
38
If you are dismissing an argument because its proponent is dismissing their own advice, then you yourself are committing a fallacy. It's a version of the ad hominem called tu quoque (basically: you too!). The fallacy is also known as: The appeal to hypocrisy.
What is valid though, is that you have reason to then doubt the integrity of the person. While the ...
33
This is not a fallacy, just the old problem of induction. A case of hasty generalisation would be to conclude that the witness tends to lie, if you have observed it two times in a row.
32
Why does Dawkins think it is wrong to posit that a paragon of 100% morals could theoretically exist?
Dawkins is using the concept of smelliness for laughs, but the serious point that he's making is that we are capable of judging smelliness without a supremum of smelliness. The same goes for elevation: we do not need an "Absolute Up", like some sort of absolute zero, to make height comparisons. Humans are perfectly capable of making relative judgements of ...
32
All informal fallacies take their force from their similarity to strong arguments. In this case, if you say "This boy lied 19 days in a row, therefore we have good reason to disbelieve him on Day 20," that is a perfectly good argument (assuming it isn't suppressing other relevant information).
But if you say "This boy lied 19 days in a row, therefore what ...
22
Why does Dawkins think it is wrong to posit that a paragon of 100% morals could theoretically exist?
In my opinion this isn't actually a philosophical problem.
What Dawkins is attempting to point out is that the fact that any two elements are comparable doesn't mean there are absolute maximums or minimums.
A less contentious example is the set of integers. Sure, it is the case that 2 is greater than 1 in the usual metric, but that doesn't magically imply ...
22
The second premise is false unless "heinous crime" and "insane" are defined to make it true by definition, in which case the definitions are question begging. But because people committing heinous crimes are convicted despite the insanity defense, premise 2 fails at least on the legal definition of "insanity".
The third premise is also false; otherwise ...
20
I'm going to have to disagree with Chris.
Any analogy is going to rely - to one extent or another - on the background knowledge of the audience it's being presented to.
In this particular analogy, it relies on the audience knowing what guns are, that there is already legislation in place controlling them, that some people violate this legislation, and ...
20
"Belief" is a modality; thus, you are right in saying that "do not believe P" is not equivalent to "to believe not-P".
Compare with possibly and necessary :
The operator ◊ (for ‘possibly’) can be defined from □ [‘it is necessary that’] by letting ◊P = ¬□¬P.
This means that e.g. : ¬◊P is not equivalent to ◊¬P.
The same thing happens with quantifiers; ¬∃...
19
I think I found something that comes close:
Appeal to probability (Wikipedia)
An appeal to probability (or appeal to possibility) is the logical fallacy of taking something for granted because it would probably be
the case (or might possibly be the case).
and
An appeal to probability argues that, because something probably will
happen, it is ...
18
"Guns don't kill people; people kill people" is not an argument, it's a slogan. It may be the case that this slogan is just a way to get people to discuss the role of individual responsibility in what policies the government ought to adopt with respect to guns or something like that. Or perhaps it is just a signal that a person has some particular position ...
18
If I'm understanding your question correctly, then you're basically asking "why doesn't philosophy have the same level of rigor as mathematical proof?"
I think there's two parts involved in answering this.
First, one aspect of philosophy for many philosophers (arguably all) is that philosophy is actually a form of history, meaning we are studying ideas ...
17
This is officially called the fallacy of relative privation, colloquially better known as appeal to worse problems, or "children are starving in Africa" argument. The implication is that anything short of starving children is not worthy of serious discussion. More precisely the fallacy is "arguing that expressing concern about a (relatively) small problem ...
17
I think the fallacy is something along the lines of:
Because we cannot provably apply rational thought to what motivates every insane person, every time, we can never apply rational thought to the insane in any situation.
It also presumes that an explanation one's actions has to be necessary and sufficient, rather than merely a way to convey information.
...
15
Let's skip straight to the end.
then it is trivial that logic is circular.
Correct. Logic is circular.
Note that due to Agrippa's Trilemma, there are only three things logic could possibly be founded upon: unsupported axioms we take on faith, circular reasoning, or an infinite regress. Or, of course, a combination of the three.
Lewis Carroll ...
15
I don't think we can categorize it under a single fallacy. Furthermore...why would we want to? We'd have to explain our reasoning anyway.
What we do instead is simply look for the premises of the argument and attack them.
Pascal's Wager makes the following problematic premises:
There either exists a god C or there don't exist any god.
We either believe ...
14
It's a tautology, but the mapping between logic and the English-language description is wrong.
(p ==> s) || (r ==> q)
is equivalent to
(!s || p || !q || r)
which is:
Either we're in London, or we're in Paris, or we're not in England, or we're not in France.
Quite so--in fact, for geography, we could drop the whole London and Paris thing, and ...
14
The implicit crux of the analogy is that Gun Control only affects law-abiding citizens. The idea is that law abiding people don't misuse guns, the same way that sober people don't drunk-drive. Meanwhile, criminal elements will continue to obtain and use guns, so if the problem with gun violence is from criminal elements, making it harder to have guns won't ...
14
Philosophical theories are more like scientific theories than mathematical theories, in that they have empirical content. As such, there aren't any (universally agreed upon) "first principles" that must be respected. Any potential first principles might get discarded if the reasons for doing so are compelling enough. And even if there are some such ...
13
This is basically an analogy of the form
Gun control IS TO reducing deaths from gun violence AS making it harder for sober people to own cars IS TO reducing deaths from drunk driving.
So whether or not the analogy is good depends on how closely the parts match. As it stands, the biggest mismatch is the "sober" on the right side, which has no natural ...
13
Formally the validity of an argument has nothing to do with the person who makes it. But I'd like to specifically address the your example
I've heard a different version of the environmental argument you mention, which makes it far from clear that it is a simple matter of hypocrisy. It went something along the lines of...
Society has a reliance on certain ...
13
The questioner believes that Pascal must be committing a fallacy since he reasons that Pascal's reasoning can be applied to other cases, e.g., to show the existence of Black Magic or Satan. The questioner reasons as follows:
If the use value is the reason for believing in God, then surely, one should believe in any ideas insofar as believing in their ...
12
The sky is blue
Therefore, grass is green.
The premise and the conclusion are both true. But the argument is not sound, because it's not valid. And it's not valid because the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
11
If they are wealthy then they don't worry about money
they don't worry about money
Then they are wealthy.
This is "affirming the consequent" fallacy.
1) If P, then Q.
2) Q.
3) Therefore, P.
An argument of this form is invalid, the conclusion can be false even when statements 1 and 2 are true. Since P was never asserted as the only sufficient condition for ...
11
This is a black-or-white fallacy. While logically it checks out as true and is difficult to disagree with in real-time discussion; the intention is to frame the argument using an oversimplification of the context, and to the exclusion of other options. Such as excluding middle cases or alternatives.
Also called false dilemma, fallacy of false alternative or ...
11
I think you can view the "X doesn't do A; Y does A" formulation as either
(a) a response to an equivocation meant to elucidate it
OR
(b) an equivocation itself
Working with the classic "guns don't kill people; people kill people", we can parse this into slightly more helpful language:
Guns don't cause people to die; people cause people to die.
In ...
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