New answers tagged fallacies
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It is perfectly possible to know that something is wrong ('sounds odd') without knowing what specifically and precisely is wrong about it.
For instance, you might be reading Lewis Carroll and see, recognise, that there is something wrong with the statement that the Cheshire Cat 'vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with ...
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It sounds like it was an ad hominem fallacy where you attack the speaker instead of the argument. Here the teacher is attacking the speaker by saying "why should we listen to you if you don't have any better ideas?".
The only context I can think of in which the teacher's argument would have been valid is if the other student had explicitly claimed the ...
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Haldane pointed out that when a corpse is buried, most of its cells are still alive. The corpse is not.
Living as a multicellular being involves a delicate between different cell lines, regulated by mechanisms including programmed cell death for defective cells. When these mechanisms fail, this is cancer. Individual cells become "immortal", but the organism ...
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In regards to HeLa cells, they are already termed immortal by biologists. According to the article:
HeLa (/ˈheɪlɑː/; also Hela or hela) is an immortal cell line used in scientific research.
So, by biological definition, they are immortal, though what that means to biologists philosophically isn't clear by the article. To restructure your assertion and ...
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HeLa cells are "immortal" because their genetic machinery is damaged, causing them to reproduce all the time, and they cannot repair that damage. They are cancer cells and although you can consider them to be "alive" in the sense that they grow and divide, they are not alive in the same sense that noncancerous cells or humans for that matter are.
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Perhaps you have in mind the following possibility. There is no indication from the example that A has noticed X, Y or any relationship between them. But when alerted to the fact that there a correlation between X and Y, when Y occurs the possibility or probability that X has occurred or will occur acquires an interest or importance or just plain curiousity ...
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I googled for that reddit thread (Gawd, reddit!), and the paragraph before the line you're citing reads like so:
That's the "asymmetry" part of Benatar's argument. He argues that the
nonexistent cannot be deprived of pleasure (they are already at peak
deprivation), and that the nonexistent will not experience pain (they
are at peak lack of pain); ...
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I have only a general knowledge of fallacies; I have never heard of 'Baker's Fallacy'. And the symbolism could do with some commentary. If valid, it's shorthand to an outsider.
Pure guess: If bakers never baked bread, no-one would suffer from eating bread. It doesn't follow that a world in which bakers don't break bread is preferable to one in which they ...
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The fallacies: "Correlation does not imply causation" + "anecdotal evidence" + "Single Cause fallacy".
The two events are related to the pasta. Experience would indicate this was not the cause, but logically they could be related. Perhaps the sauce would have been too dry. So it's more about the lack of information and jumping to a conclusion (which in this ...
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It does not sound as a problem of logic per se.
Let us put it this way: the real world obeys to the laws of the real world, not to the laws of human logical reasoning. There is no way to find out whether spitting in the pasta works with abstract reasoning alone. Humans use observation (and logical reasoning) to try and figure out what the real world might ...
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I'd just add a footnote to indicate without any disagreement with present's answer a different way of taking: 'I did it this way, it worked, so what I did is correct'. In the example used, that of spitting, it's assumed that spitting into the pasta while cooking it in some way improved the process of cooking or contributed essentially to the flavour or ...
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This kind of reasoning is not necessarily fallacious, at least if framed a little more cautiously, e.g.:
"I spat in my pasta while cooking it last time, it turned out good, and for all I know spitting in it was essential to it tasting good, so I'm going to spit in it again this time, just because I really want it to taste good again this time."
...
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The narrative fallacy
The narrative fallacy involves selecting a sequence of events, say in a person's life or in the history of a nation, and reading cause and effect between events in the earlier part of the sequence and events in the later. One might, for instance, produce a narrative in which I grew up in the countryside, my parents were farmers, my ...
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Is it sunk cost fallacy if it results in productive behavior?
Whether something is a fallacy doesn't depend on behavior; it depends on the form of reasoning.
"Is it the fallacy" and "is it an application of the fallacy" are two separate
questions. Your title and the text of your request are actually two DIFFERENT questions that hinge on the ideas of ...
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Excellent question which certainly preoccupies philosophers. It's good step on the path of better critical thinking, so keep at it!
The relation between natural language ambiguity and equivocation
First, as Conifold in the comments points out, equivocation is an informal fallacy whereby one uses two different meanings of the word when drawing an inference. ...
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Since there is no argument in 'power must be evil' or in 'Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely', both of which are only claims, neither can be fallacious (if no argument, then no fallacious or logically erroneous argument).
'Power corrupts', by the way, derives from Lord Acton, who said: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts ...
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Christian theology kind of specialises in this. We have a cognitive bias to believe we are good, we are the positive standard, and do things for the right reasons – and that is often extended to things like our ends justify our means, it's everyone else's means that are intrinsically or categorically immoral.
The Christian perspective is to accept we are ...
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Being a liar is a vice, and , according to Aristotle, a vice is a (bad) habit as well as virtue is a ( good) habit. A habit is a disposition, a tendency ( acquired through the repetition of an action).
The action of lying is not a habit.
One could imagine a man that is compelled to lie all the time ( maybe he is a secret agent but does not want his ...
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Your question is a good and important one. You are correct that mere appeal to authority is a bad idea, and that avoiding all possible appeal to authority is also not viable. Indeed the correct approach would be to not only attempt to gain a rough understanding of the concepts, evidence and explanations in the topic of interest, but also attempt to identify ...
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This would be a straight-forward case of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" or what is called argument from ignorance. As the article states:
This represents a type of false dichotomy in that it excludes the possibility that there may have been an insufficient investigation to prove that the proposition is either true or false.
Hence it is ...
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