New answers tagged fallacies
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If one puts the proposition into a truth table generator one gets the following tautology:
Comparing this with P v ~P, the two propositions are equivalent. One could look at the first proposition as another way to write the law of the excluded middle:
However, I get a contradiction if I try to compare the first proposition with ~(P v ~P).
Michael Rieppel. ...
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The comparison between the sea and the sky suggests that an analogy is involved. One way for an analogy to be fallacious is for it to be a "weak" comparison.
Here is how Bo Bennett describes a weak analogy:
When an analogy is used to prove or disprove an argument, but the analogy is too dissimilar to be effective, that is, it is unlike the argument ...
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You should start with premises, deduce things by applying the rules of logic correctly, and arrive at a conclusion. If you try to apply the rules of logic, but apply them incorrectly, that's a mistake; mistakes happens. If you use rules other than the rules of logic, that's a fallacy.
If you give me some premises, and tell me that you'll punch me if I don'...
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Douglas Walton provides a brief assessment of circular reason which may help to suggest "measures" of its use.
Walton first notes that one should not assume circular reason is always fallacious:
Circular reasoning is very important and characteristic of all kinds of everyday argumentation where feedback is used. So it is often quite correct and useful — ...
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It is a fallacy of relevance and in particular an appeal to consequence.
Essentially, it claims to be an argument about the truth of P, and is instead is an argument about the individual self interest of behaving as if they believe P.
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To get a baseline this is how Wikipedia describes circular reasoning:
Circular reasoning (Latin: circulus in probando, "circle in proving"; also known as circular logic) is a logical fallacy in which the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end with. The components of a circular argument are often logically valid because if the premises are true, ...
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The article you reference is rather a mess. The author is confusing a simple conditional "if A then B" with a ground-consequent relation "A is a reason to believe B". The claim "if the bible is true God exists" does not have low probability; it is almost certain given that the bible states that God does exist. Also, the author does not correctly use the word ...
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Physical force itself is not an argument, obviously. But consider an exchange like this:
Person A: "I believe X, and I think you should agree with me."
Person B: "What reason can you give for agreeing with you? X seems ridiculous..."
Person A: "If you don't agree with me, I'll kill you."
Here the act of violence is offered up as a reason to produce ...
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Here is Bo Bennett's definition of Appeal to Force:
When force, coercion, or even a threat of force is used in place of a reason in an attempt to justify a conclusion.
It is not that force itself is the fallacy, but that one of the people who are arguing threatens to use force against another if the other person does not agree.
The OP asks:
I ...
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So, we've been having fun with this one. But your simulation friend is playing with dangerous toys.
Perhaps you saw the headlines along the lines of Physicists find we're not living in a simulation, and the huge amount of debate thereof about how they can't possibly prove that. Well perhaps not, but they can prove something. The universe can't be simulated ...
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I don't know its name, but this is the same fallacy that underlies Pascal's wager and the false paradox that says all hypotheses are false. The false paradox says that for any hypothesis, there are an infinite number of alternative explanations, each with a small but finite probability, and the sum of those probabilities infinitely exceeds the probability of ...
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Like most informal fallacies, pointing it out is not enough. Rarely is someone using a slippery slope argument to say "X, so therefore, Y". It's fallacious in this case; where someone is trying to use modus ponens in a literal sense; that is, trying to say that the "slippery consequence" of an antecedent will follow logically.
But most often, it's used to ...
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This is basically equivalent to solipsism, the idea that the only thing you can be sure really exists is yourself, and everything else could be just a figment of your imagination.
It's fundamentally irrefutable: any argument can be dismissed as "That's not real and I could imagine something different tomorrow", "But that's just what the simulator told you ...
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The use of large words is not a fallacy by any means. It's an implicit authority claim, and the issue with authority claims (as always) is whether or not they are substantive. Some people use big words to appear knowledgeable; others use big words because they are knowledgeable. It's the listener's job to discriminate.
Really, there's no such things as a '...
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Yes, although I do think people get too carried away with listing off informal fallacies. Any failure of reasoning that an informal fallacy describes can trivially be shown to be a flaw in the argument without using the label. And sometimes the labels can apply to good arguments (circular reason is a good tool if you want to draw out unobvious implications ...
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dun know what that big word 'fallacy' is, but im going to have to assume your whole debate is false, and i must respond with the truth such as to quote some black guy in a movie"Well, 'aight, check this out, dawg. First of all, you throwin' too many big words at me, and because I don't understand them, I'm gonna take 'em as disrespect. Watch your mouth and ...
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A person who is claiming to know something is asserting that they meet the criteria for claiming knowledge. There are three requirements for a person to "know" something:
They must believe the thing they claim to know.
They must have an objectively reasonable justification for that that claim.
The thing they claim to know must be true.
So if a person asks ...
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No, that argument is not logically correct because knowledge need not be absolute, but can be relative. To know the sky is blue means to connect the perception of the atmosphere that we call the sky with the quality we call blue. If the world is a simulation or not, the two perceptions are relatively the same.
This is common in science: The work done ...
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Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a term often cited in lay speak as a term for a fear of large words.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedalificatism, then, could arguably be taken as a term for the deliberate exploitation of that fear.
Though I think we'd need some specific examples, before we could delve to far into the full ...
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The issue here, as it often is, is that colloquial English is horribly ambiguous, which makes any sort of precise and rigorous discussion difficult. But with sufficient effort, it is possible to make claims precisely, and once you do that, the problem disappears.
Alice states that the sky is blue. Bob states that we live in a simulation. Let's assume for ...
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If a person claims to know anything could it be disproven by saying 'prove that we are not in a simulation'?
Yes, and this his is a very simple logical point.
"I know that p" implies "p is true". This is fundamental to the concept of knowledge.
And if p is true, then there is no possibility that p is false. Thus, if I know that p, then there is no ...
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Consider what the second person said:
You cannot prove that we are not in a simulation and that anything is real, hence you cannot prove that your claim was true.
This may be an example of an argument from ignorance. Here is how Wikipedia describes it:
Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (...
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One possibility is that this is a specific form of the fallacy of Appeal to Authority, in that 'big words' seem, by their impressiveness, to establish something. The given example of 'Because of New Keynesianism...' certainly seems to fit that interpretation.
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When presenting an argument, using any word/term that has meaning to some listeners/readers is not necessarily committing a fallacy. "New Keynesianism" (or, more commonly, "New Keynesian economics") is a term that has meaning in the field of economics and there is nothing wrong with using it in an argument. In fact, using jargon is often a much more ...
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There are various ways to misuse statistics. People listening to arguments using statistics as evidence need to be cautious. Wikipedia describes this misuse as follows:
Statistics are supposed to make something easier to understand but when used in a misleading fashion can trick the casual observer into believing something other than what the data shows. ...
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There isn't anything pertaining to logic in using a big term or small term, since the truth value ought to remain the same however you phrase a statement. Recall that a (formal) fallacy is a logical flaw in argumentation, thus there is nothing fallacious in using difficult words because the truth value is invariant under equivalent statements. Note the ought,...
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One fallacy that might fit is proof by intimidation. Here is Bo Bennett's description:
Making an argument purposely difficult to understand in an attempt to intimidate your audience into accepting it, or accepting an argument without evidence or being intimidated to question the authority or a priori assumptions of the one making the argument.
An arguer ...
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To enlarge perhaps on @shadowzee's comment:
Statistics is a mathematical tool which allows for example valid conclusions to be drawn from small samples drawn from large populations, while offering measures of confidence in those conclusions based on the relative size of the sample.
As such it is value-neutral in the sense that it is silent on the ...
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Yes, it is a red herring, trying to put the focus on the weakest scandal the company is facing (let's face it, beeing a member of the KKK, while bad, does not make one a less good beverage company CEO). Then the pundit is just stating, tongue in cheek, the fact that the company is not impacted by it's CEO's private activities. That looks to me as a straw man,...
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I'm not sure there are (named) fallacies in either of your arguments, but you're both making a similar mistake: trying to extrapolate personal success or failure with some treatment or practice into an overall conclusion about its actual (objective) effectiveness.
It does sound like you're already familiar with this idea: that double-blinded, rigorous, ...
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Just so it's said, Most of the things people refer to as (informal) fallacies — No True Scotsman and Strawman fallacies included — are not actually fallacies, but are simply mistakes in language. A fallacies is an error in the structure of the logic involved; a language mistake is derived from semantic content. Apples and oranges...
But that caveat aside, ...
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Rather than looking for fallacies to determine who was more rational in an argument, one might attempt to analyze the speech acts of the dialogue in terms of what Douglas Walton describes as "formal dialogue systems for argumentation" (page 2). This may help pinpoint more accurately where the argument succeeded or not for the participants.
Walton notes ...
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Modern determinism in the scientific sense is basically only about mathematical prediction--if the universe is deterministic that means complete knowledge of the universe's physical state at an earlier time can be used to predict the physical state at a later time with perfect accuracy, no additional notions associated with philosophical ideas about "...
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I'd say it is not so much logically-flawed as non-reductive or not fundamental, and for the reasons you give.
A fundamental theory cannot rest on a caused phenomenon or event. Hence an argument for Materialism is an ironic argument for a Divine Creator or miraculous origin.
For a solution one would have to examine the Perennial notion of a 'causeless ...
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