My objection to this kind of thing continues to be: having lists of fallacies arms everyone with fully general counterarguments that permit everyone to avoid thinking. No argument on anything important is watertight; every important argument is fallacious in some way; dismissing every fallacious argument will allow you to "win" every argument simply by pointing out all the ways in which your opponent is wrong, without ever actually arguing in favour of anything.
Fallacies and mental models (like precepts) are also for one to internalize. Not to really only use in debates to win arguments. Unless one a lawyer or a politician or something that stands to gain from untoward made-up agendas.
As with anything, the first step is awareness of the flaws, followed by working to correct those to whatever extent one can.
Indeed! But the site emphatically does not lead with the lesson that the proper use of fallacy-knowledge is to give you the tools to examine your own thoughts. I hold a weak belief that bare lists of fallacies do more harm than good because they don't install the necessary prerequisite of epistemic uncertainty.
Obviously it's bad logic. I put it in scare quotes for a reason. But having lists of fallacies available makes it a lot easier to commit this particular error of reasoning. I'm not sure I've ever witnessed an argument between normal people which was assisted by one party naming a fallacy.
It's interesting - I would think the exact opposite of what you said is true. If people are going to have a meaningful debate, or at least present water-tight arguments to back up some conclusion, they must be aware and explain how these fallacies don't apply in their circumstance. I have the third book in the book list at the bottom of the article, the Art of Argument (and I happen know the authors, which is fun but irrelevant). Many of their examples in the book are actually advertisements, which try to subtly persuade bordering on manipulation. Why would you not want to have tools in your reasoning arsenal to catch manipulation?
I should also add that one of the most successful modern fallacies is the straw man, and it crushes meaningful political discourse. How can pointing out a straw man "permit everyone to avoid thinking"? Fallacy awareness actually helps people avoid getting caught in traps on both sides of an argument. I would say this knowledge adds to discourse when used appropriately.
> How can pointing out a straw man permit everyone to avoid thinking?
Because pointing out fallacies is not argument, but feels a lot like it is. Pointing out fallacies allows you to defeat any other argument, but it does not allow you to take a position for anything. It is the perfect tool for allowing you to entrench yourself in your original view, by handily defeating those who would assail you in a fully general way that applies however correct you are. Merely saying "but to do so is to commit the fallacy fallacy" doesn't change the fact that it happens extremely commonly.
It's the "when used appropriately" that's the issue. A list of fallacies is probably a good thing to have access to after you've somehow had epistemic humility installed in you. But epistemic humility does not come naturally to most people, and must be taught.
That doesn't change the fact that having access to the resource makes it much easier to commit this fallacy. It's a rare environment where naming a fallacy actually contributes positively to the epistemic atmosphere. It's rather analogous to giving someone access to an easy-to-use extremely-high-power energy source, with a small warning label saying "caution: danger of death", and a wide array of cables and electrical components, and saying "go forth". If you know what you're doing, these components are useful and will allow you to construct safe things. If you don't know what you're doing, you kill yourself with them.
I'm on the same boat. From my experience, too often people use these lists as cheap shots against someone's position without actually engaging with those views in good faith. A far more productive way to use knowledge of fallacies is to improve your own reasoning and positioning, not attack others'.
Slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy. It's often being incorrectly used, usually as a result of the continuum fallacy, but it isn't a fallacy in and of itself.
I am not well versed into how these logical fallacies are supposed to be applied.
Everyone is operating with imperfect information, so no implication will ever be 100% logically tight.
For example, using "appeal to authority", it is logically true that just because a group of Fields Medalists think your proof is wrong, does not necessarily mean that your proof is wrong. But in practice, there is a very high chance you are in the wrong.
Logical fallacies are binary, but the world is more stochastic, so I may be wrong, but I think these logical fallacies do not actually apply to reasoning about the real world. They only work when applied to thought experiments.
But I am no philosopher so I do not know for sure.
Determinations of chance aren't material, they're a matter of perspective and a tool to use when making decisions. The chance that a wrong proof is correct is 0%, and the chance that a correct proof is correct is 100%, no matter what any selection of Fields medalists feel about it.
Whether, when you're making a business decision, you go with the lone whacko or the Fields medalists is a different question.
An argument can be logically sound but with a false conclusion. An argument can be logically invalid but with a correct conclusion. The role of logical fallacies is to point out unsound reasoning. They don’t demonstrate veracity or lack thereof.
Regarding the appeal to authority fallacy you mentioned. I personally do not believe this is a fallacy. I do agree that the appeal to false authority is a fallacy. We all have to rely on the expertise of others for much of what we believe to be true. Of course said beliefs might be wrong but relying on expert knowledge is not a fallacy in and of itself in my opinion.
> An argument can be logically sound but with a false conclusion.
That doesn't sound right. An argument is sound iff it is logically valid and its premises are true, right? From Wikipedia:
> In deductive reasoning, a sound argument is an argument that is both valid, and all of whose premises are true (and as a consequence its conclusion is true as well)
You mean valid. Not sound. By definition if an argument is sound, it is also valid (but not the reverse). And by definition if an argument is sound, then its conclusions are true.
I think you're just mixing up the terminology a bit.
Well I did use logically sound and not sound argument. I personally don’t see a difference in logically sound and logically valid but I clarified things in my previous post.
Obviously I'm speaking in the vernacular and as I stated I used the terms as they meant to me.
Besides logically sound and sound argument aren't the same thing in my mind. One refers to soundness of logic and the other to soundness of the argument. And that was the essence of my point. There's a difference in talking about an argument and talking about the logic used. Logical fallacies are only useful in determining if the reasoning was flawed.
I didn't disagree with anything you wrote and even clarified my meaning so as to be clear. There is also the fact that, linguistically speaking, every person has a unique language. The meaning of words can vary slightly between people who nominally speak the same language. That's why I mentioned to me in my previous post.
Clearly I was not writing in a mathematically precise way. I took mathematical logic in graduate school many years ago but am not qualified to use all of the terminology in a mathematically precise way. But this is an internet forum and not a course in mathematical logic. The standards of rigor are not so strict. Hence my phrase to me ought to have sufficed as far as clarification.
"I used the terms as they meant to me... every person has a unique language."
Private languages are useless for communication, which depends on shared semantics. This thread is a clear example of that, as your first post here is very misleading except to anyone who a) knows that you are using your own private language, and b) actually knows what you mean by your words. In that post, using your own private definition of the various terms under discussion is worse than useless, as anyone who does not know what the accepted meanings are will end up worse off for reading it.
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
I agree I should have used "valid" when I used "sound". I also clarified what I meant by "logically sound". I further stated that I was using my parlance when I used "logically sound".
What is interesting is that the responses to me have been about the meaning of sound argument and I never used this phrase. I used logically sound. Do you personally think logically sound and sound argument mean the same thing? I'm asking out of curiosity.
EDIT: Private languages and the acknowledgement of them is not useless. It's a basis for being able to clarify things without a discussion devolving arguments over definitions of words. We all have slightly different ideas of what certain words mean.
> I used logically sound. Do you personally think logically sound and sound argument mean the same thing?
Well, the real point is that it is not clear what you mean here, and consequently what you are writing is likely to cause confusion and misunderstanding. In particular, as I pointed out in an earlier post, you were inconsistent in your own usage, sometimes using 'sound' correctly, and sometimes incorrectly.
You also seem to think that because, in a series of follow-up posts, you can explain what you meant, then it follows that there was nothing wrong with your original post - but if no-one had replied to it, you would not have corrected it on your own, and it would have remained there, sowing confusion among those who did not know it was wrong (and, of course, being useless to those who do know it is wrong.)
The size of the responses to your original post is a clear testament to the way private usage inhibits understanding and spreads confusion (though there would be considerably less if you had simply acknowledged your mistake immediately, and henceforward used 'sound' in its conventional sense.)
> Private languages and the acknowledgement of them is not useless.
I said that they are useless for communication (of course, they can be useful to the extent that they are not entirely private, but that caveat actually bolsters my point.)
>It's a basis for being able to clarify things...
Quite the opposite, as shown here: it's most often a basis for confusion and misunderstanding - and how could it not be? You have to achieve a shared meaning before there can be clarity and mutual understanding.
You should step back and read the chapter of an intro to logic textbook where the topic of validity vs soundness is discussed. It’s easy to use these terms in a way that expresses your intent.
One nice thing about doing so is that an understanding of validity vs soundness, necessity vs sufficiency, and the truth tables themselves is all you need to understand all the formal fallacies.
All you need to understand about the informal fallacies is, if someone appears to need to discuss informal fallacies, what they really need is a hug. Or a kick in the pants.
Sound and valid are terms of art in deductive logic. They have clearly defined meanings.
Validity means the form of an argument is such that it's impossible for its premises to be true while the conclusion is false i.e. if the premises are true then the conclulsion must be true. Validity is a formal property of arguments and the relationships between premises. An argument can be valid even if its premises are false.
Soundness means that an argument is valid and that the premises are true (and therefore the conclusion must be true).
These are standard terms that have been used for over a century. You're going to generate a lot of confusion if you choose to use them differently to everyone who has ever studied elementary logic.
I'm not aware of these phrases being the same. I took mathematical logic in graduate school many years ago and I've used logically sound to be something different than sound argument.
I'm not disagreeing that valid would have been a better word choice. I did clarify my meaning in a subsequent post. I rewrote my point without using either sound or valid in an effort to be more precise.
This is indeed an example of a valid but unsound argument (unsound because the first premise is false), and your use of 'sound' is correct here.
Your first post, however, uses 'sound' in a manner that is inconsistent with both this example and correct usage. In particular, where you wrote "An argument can be logically sound but with a false conclusion" you presumably meant 'valid' instead of 'logically sound', as, by definition, sound arguments have true conclusions.
This is a pedantically pointless argument. In the domain of logic, 'sound' has a very definite meaning, so what are we to make of your use of the word 'sound' in a discussion of logic, especially given that you explicitly qualify it with 'logical'? What is the point of phrasing a statement in such a way that it will mislead everyone except those who can see what you actually meant? Those people already know what you are trying to say.
I have not "taken [your] phrase logically sound and then switched to sound arguments". What I did, in the clause "sound arguments have true conclusions", was to make a statement of fact about the meaning of the word 'sound' in the domain of logic. On account of that being so, it would have been unequivocally wrong for you to have written "An argument can be sound but with a false conclusion."
Ah, but you say (this is where it gets really pedantic) you did not write precisely that; you wrote "An argument can be logically sound but with a false conclusion" - but how do you think the modifier logically will be taken here, given that 'sound' has a specific meaning in the domain of logic? Don't tell us that (obviously!) 'logically sound' actually means 'valid'!
Communication is hard. It's harder when both parties are not using the same definitions. I've found this is one of the biggest difficulties in hashing out an argument with a stranger online. With someone I know I can spot when our definitions don't match. Online it takes a lot more back and forth and often is less friendly.
I think appeal to authority gets shaky when you appeal to an authority who's domain of expertise, or specific knowledge and experience might not extend to the issue at hand. It's a matter of trusting the process of scientific inquiry, challenge and verification, not just the person.
So for example I defer to Roger Penrose on anything to do with mathematics, and will absolutely he has earned a voice on astrophysics#, but quantum consciousness microtubules? Nobody is an authority on that, so who knows?
# And to be clear part of his credibility there is in making it clear what he believes with a high degree of certainty and what is more speculative.
Those examples of appeal to authority are a lot more nuanced than I’ve generally seen. It’s generally more blunt, like “we interviewed 5 PhDs about climate change and they all state that there’s no good evidence to support it.” Those PhDs however, were not experts in a domain that could validate an assertion on climate change.
The more nuanced versions in the examples make an uncritical assertion, based on an appeal to an authority in a closely related domain, to overturn an established set of “validated facts” (for the domain, say what you want about a religious creed).
Nicely put. Maybe it helps to think of the purpose of those conversations where pointing out logical fallacies might help?
Such conversations are almost always about changing someone's view of the world - sometimes through debate, where conflicting positions are taken and argued upon, and sometimes simply because someone (e.g. you) asks for a clarification in order to know which position to take.
So I think that the idea is that people can at least take well-reasoned positions, not necessarily equal positions, in a world that is not black and white.
The list of fallacies can then be a useful guide to judge the persuasiveness of the arguments of the different sides, including of course your own arguments, and to help you see whether a position might need to change because it is not well-reasoned.
In your example, I can say "I trust Fields Medallists" and therefore judge the proof to be likely wrong. That is a valid position to take. You may say that "the author of the proof is a very talented mathematician" so the proof is likely right, which would be equally valid. What we cannot do, without further information, is to claim that the proof must with absolute certainty be right or wrong - that I believe would be the fallacy here.
"appeal to authority" is a good example in our current situation. How many doctors are talking crap about Covid? Here lies one of our problem about misinformation. Too many people are just regurgitate opinions of "doctors".
Generally speaking, I like to use fallacies for myself, just to be aware about certain pitfalls. Not so much about discrediting others, but rather not fall into one myself.
If I realize other people are using fallacies to support their argument, it helps me to build an argument against it. Just don't use it naively: "you're wrong because of fallacy number 42". Using it like this is a bad habit, because of the wast number of fallacies, you can probably kill any discussion.
I saw an example of a poorly applied logical fallacy here on HN. The poster was claiming that an app’s popularity was meaningless via argumentum ad populum and that their chosen alternative was “correct.” It’s like arguing that everyone should replace their USD with Bitcoin. In an ideal world, perhaps, but we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in a world where popularity matters. I’m sure there are other examples of this kind of logical purism being misapplied to the real world, especially among programmers.
I don’t think those examples are right; argumentum ad populum is about relying on the popularity of a belief to prove whether it’s true or false.
What interesting is that in the example of Bitcoin, since currency is little more than a shared belief in something, this would not really constitute a logical fallacy.
Regarding your second: you’re making essentially the same mistake. There’s no objective argument here, no deliberations on abstract truth that could be easily countered by pointing out a logical fallacy. Just because it’s a shared belief doesn’t mean it’s not beholden to valid yet purely subjective arguments such as “I don’t have any BTC” or “I don’t have the technical ability to use BTC.” In reality, nobody is going to use your product or service because you can make a fallacy-free argument for it. On the other hand, popularity is a very real and useful indicator of utility. You may hate jQuery, for instance, but it’s going to have a plethora of documentation, blog posts, and StackOverflow answers.
Basically - the real world is tolerant and even encouraging of logical fallacies.
Yeah, I guess the real world is tolerant of them – otherwise we wouldn’t call them fallacies :) If we’re to get closer to the truth though, we must be intolerant of them (but not each other).
I think it also depends on precisely what statement you’re trying to prove. In the jQuery example you have to get really specific, because just talking about the best can be pretty vague. There are many examples of best where merely pointing to the popularity of jQuery is a logical fallacy, and perhaps some where it isn’t (e.g. the breadth of documentation making development easier). This is really a different class of problem to something more abstract such as the belief in alien civilisations, where the fallacy is more clear cut.
The currency example is a slightly different case though, because it’s the belief in the currency itself that creates the currency. So the statement everyone should replace their USD with Bitcoin is undermined by the overwhelming depth and breadth of belief in USD (misplaced or not). So I don’t think it counts as a logical fallacy, because it goes beyond merely trying to leverage the majority opinion on the subject; the beliefs themselves are absolutely instrumental in driving the relative utility of USD and Bitcoin.
I’m not arguing that it’s a logical fallacy, I’m arguing that it’s outside the scope of logical fallacies. In fact that’s why I’m using it as an example.
This is known as the "logical fallacy fallacy", which rarely shows up on these lists.
"orange_tee made an appeal to authority, therefore every conclusion he is attempting to draw is false and can be rejected out of hand."
It's a very jejune debate tactic, by people who have just dipped their toes into logic for the first time, and have discovered a brand new way to shut down arguments.
Yes, the "appeal to authority = fallacy" can be employed to shut down legitimate arguments, as well as the "ad hominem = fallacy". There is a great clarification here:
Logical fallacies should be part of a conversation, and shouldn't shut down anything. They are thinking tools, not debate weapons, although they can be used as such.
If someone is making an argument with obviously invalid logic, then I think it's reasonable to not continue the conversation if they are unwilling to present a logical argument.
If you really on logic for everything, people are eventually going to walk away from you. Don't ask me to logically prove that because all I have is the anecdotal evidence of experience.
Not every conversation is a scientific debate. If you want to learn, you should still participate in them.
Fallacious parts of an argument cannot contribute to its soundness. Fallacies either contribute untrue premises or invalid deductions, such as affirming the consequent. This is a matter of fact.
You misunderstood the fallacy. it's not "don't listen to experts". it's "a proposition isn't true only because another person says that it is true". While you may chose to save time by deferring to expertise, you can't use that to convince someone else that an idea is correct.
Logical fallacies are easy to misunderstand, which makes them very dangerous. That's why this website has examples, I guess. This is a case of knowledge that might require a teacher who can give feedback and guide understanding.
Maybe the word "fallacy", is in that case, misleading.
The probability that an assertion is true drastically increases if there is a clear consensus among the subject matter experts in that field.
This is important when certain assertions cannot be personally verified.
For example, I cannot personally verify that Pluto has a moon. ...but I can show people pictures of an object that the experts claim is Pluto's moon, and point to various statements that Pluto has a moon.
The probability that Pluto does not have a moon would require a massive conspiracy, or some unimaginable misunderstanding, that the probability is extremely low.
Is it still a "fallacy" to point to the statements of those scientists?
The point is that some retired professor in microbiology takes a little lamplight making claims about covid, which unfortunately are factually utterly and desperately wrong.
Now people refer to him expert in a facebook thread.
That's the "appeal to authority" fallacy, which you could call out.
Extensive use of fallacies is in the active repertoire of demagogues. That's why it helps to study them, a bit, so you recognize a skunk if you meet it in the wild.
This is the correct use of the word "fallacy." The "appeal to authority" fallacy is the belief that because some piece of info comes from someone (it's generally an individual) who is in a position of authority means that it's automatically true. It has nothing to really do with whether the piece of info is accurate or not, and consensus is generally a way to mitigate the issues that arise from this fallacy.
> You misunderstood the fallacy. it's not "don't listen to experts".
It certainly doesn't mean "listen to the experts". There is no such intellectual guidance there. The perspective of "logical fallacy" only cares about whether something must be true, and it has no opinion on how to judge whether something is probably true, or how to develop trust.
Formal methods became fashionable only late in mathematical history, yet mathematicians somehow achieved productivity up to that point.
> For example, using "appeal to authority", it is logically true that just because a group of Fields Medalists think your proof is wrong, does not necessarily mean that your proof is wrong. But in practice, there is a very high chance you are in the wrong.
The proof is wrong not because the status of those Field Medalists but instead because of the content of their argument. That's all that the appeal to authority is saying.
I'd agree that it's a mistake to relate the existence of a logical fallacies to the probability of a statement being correct. Instead, it only gives information about whether the reasoning of the statement is on solid ground.
But what kind of reasoning is on solid ground when we’re talking about logic... outside of math? Saying logic here is almost lying to ourselves because we’re not expecting anyone to create logical chains of reasoning.
Do mathematicians even use logic as a reasoning tool, as opposed to a proving tool?
Isn't that exactly the question that informal logical fallacies seek to address?
I don't think you can just throw away the word "logic" like that. We try to make arguments using deduction and inference, so there is a logical structure behind them. It's just that it isn't as well-defined and doesn't have the mathematical rigor of formal logic.
Logic a fundamentally different process of intellectual productivity, which is why mathematicians don’t see proving and reasoning as the same thing. Formal methods weren't even widespread until late in mathematical history, yet somehow we had mathematical productivity.
Mathematicians can scarcely describe their own thinking process, and proving is often the last step to mathematical reasoning.
Talking about logical fallacy in ordinary conversation is backward.
Many fallacies are perfectly sensible ways to reason in a messy, imperfect world.
ad hominem - someone you know to receive large sums of money from cigarette manufacturers gives you several plausible sounding reasons why cigarettes don't cause cancer. It's an adhominem to doubt his arguments based on your knowledge of how he's getting paid, but it's also sensible.
argumentum ad populum - an argument isn't necessarily true just because lots of people believe it, but in the absence of you being able to work out the absolute truth from first principles, it's completely sensible to take into account what other people believe when you evaluate your options, or what people in your situation have typically believed (appeal to tradition)
denying the antecedent - red sky in the morning implies shepherds should take warning. It's not true to say that just because there isn't red sky in the morning, then shepherds should assume the weather will be fine, but excluding one of the conditions in which shepherds need to be careful is weak evidence that shepherds will be fine.
The old 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' one, although I didn't see it on this page. Actually it is. It is weak and incomplete evidence of absence, but in the right circumstances it can be perfectly reasonable to change your opinion on whether something is present or not based on a lack of evidence for it being present.
In the real world, weak evidence is often the best we're going to get and we're often going to be in situations where thought shortcuts are necessary and valuable.
Pointing out fallacies is usually poor argumentation. My pet peeve on this one is the 'burden of proof'. Normal human debate isn't a game with strict rules and a judge that awards points, and I'm not sure it'd be any better if it were. You engage in a debate with someone when you both want to change the other persons mind. If you didn't want to change their mind you shouldn't be debating with them. You're very unlikely to change their minds by telling them that the burden of proof is on them not you (much more likely to end up arguing about who really has the burden of proof, a fruitless and uninteresting topic).
Yeah, nothing about a logical fallacy says it can't be useful just that it's not strict logical proof. As such it's useful to call out that a logical fallacy doesn't equate to/overrule direct evidence or sound logic but that doesn't mean things behind the indirect evidence or unsound logic are inherently 100% useless information in decisions or discussions.
It looks like that it intermixed a few things that are not logical fallacies in order to appear to have more content to sell books that are more than a few pages thick.
<<A student argues that he didn't do his homework because, he had lost his backpack, and when he found it the notebook was not in there, and it turned out that the dog had eaten his notebook.>>
It is clearly not a logical fallacies case:
either it is a lie, or if it is the truth, it is a logical explanation of the chain of unfortunate events that resulted in the student not to able to deliver.
It could be both. You can make an untruthful statement about why you didn't do your homework, and the untruthful statement can be logically fallacious as well as untruthful. I don't believe that one precludes the other. I would even go so far as to say that those properties frequently go hand in hand.
The GP leveled criticism at the specific example which does not contain a logical inconsistency.
I’d go further and say that the linked page doesn’t accurately describe the fallacy. The first part of the fallacy is offering so many arguments (or even just arguments swamped in endless text) your opponent can’t or won’t respond to everything. (There’s also generally an implication that these arguments are known by the “spewer” to be tenuous or outright fallacious.) The second part is claiming that an opponent’s lack of response to any or all of the arguments means the opponent is wrong.
To me, the first part is just bad faith, but it’s not necessarily illogical. It’s the second part that makes it a fallacy.
Are you sure we're reading the same page? Most things described as "logical fallacies" are informal anyway, and have nothing to do with "logic": they're not expressed in the form of a formal Quinean logical syllogism that maps out truth tables with elemental logical operators like AND, XAND, IFF etc.
The only work the word "logic" is doing here is not as a formal term but as a vague complement that approximately means something like "rational." And invoking that term, or witholding it is just a personal expression of whether you like something enough to award it a merit badge that has the word "logical" on it. It's just playing calvinball.
>The second part is claiming that an opponent’s lack of response to any or all of the arguments means the opponent is wrong.
This is just incoherent to me. Second part? The page isn't grouped into parts. I'm assuming you mean the second half of the sentence explaining the shotgun fallacy. But the second half of the sentence isn't expressing a second, isolated idea. The whole thing together describes a rhetorical strategy for expressing an argument that attempts to escape refutation. It's as real as any other informal fallacy. If it falls short of qualifying for your personal complement that it's "logical", well, either you're referring to formal logic or you're not, and if you're not, then this whole exercise in deeming it "logical" is just a game of calvinball that doesn't have anything to do with anything.
You’re talking about the logical fallacy as described by the page. I’m talking about the fallacy the page is poorly describing. The example quoted by the OP is an example of neither.
I was directly responding to your claims that (1) the example provided on the page supposedly "does not contain a logical inconsistency" and that (2) there is a "second part" that is making a claim that you believe is in error.
I don't know how responding to your own claims could possibly put me on the wrong side of a distinction between the fallacy itself and the fallacy the page is describing unless you were also on the wrong side of it, too.
I suppose you're saying my response addresses itself to the idea of the fallacy and not to your criticisms of the way it's illustrated on the page - but I find that to be quite obviously wrong, because I am talking about what's on the page. Perhaps there's an argument than I'm not seeing, but you're being too cryptic and difficult to interpret for me to figure out what that argument is supposed to be.
> The shotgun argumentation fallacy occurs when one chooses so many arguments, firing many shots as it were, in order to disable your opponent from answering them all.
The most useful and effective tool I've come across to use in a debate is to get the two sides to outline the position and argument of their critics as clearly as hey can, to the satisfaction of their critics, before engaging in the debate. That's not really practical in internet forum comment wars, but I think if you come to the table with this spirit in mind it can be very helpful.
Arming yourself with rhetorical weapons like this, especially if you rather view them as tools for thinking, will get you some way but I think rarely aid in reaching consensus or understanding where disagreement comes from.
I don't understand the appeal of lists like this. Attacking the structure of someone's argument only works in high school debate club, not real discussions with real people, where you need to actually engage with the substance of their argument. This feels like the conversational equivalent of tattling to the teacher and a slim step above criticizing someone's grammar to look smart.
Learning about informal fallacies is useful for a couple of good reasons and one bad reason:
- They help people to understand why a superficially appealing argument might not be a good argument. It's a useful innoculation against bullshit. Someone who has internalized informal fallacies can use them to spot bad arguments in the media or from politicians, for example.
- They help people to avoid using falacious arguments in their own conversations. If a person wants to make a strong case for a position, at work for example, they're more likely to be taken seriously if they avoid bad reasoning.
The harmful motivation for someone to be interested in a list like this is that they're effective rhetorical strategies when used with the right audience. If you're interested in persuading people and you aren't very moral, fallacies can be your friend.
> Attacking the structure of someone's argument only works in high school debate club
That's very much not true. For one thing, academic debate in high school has pretty much the same criteria as it does in a high school. But more importantly:
> where you need to actually engage with the substance of their argument
Fallacies are, without exceptions, weaknesses in the substance of an argument, or places where it fails to engage with the substance of the argument it is offered against. Identifying them is very useful if you are in a context (like, say, high school or collegiate debate, or, say, a court room) where that arguments engage with each other's substance is critical. Now, in most cases you will leverage the weakness revealed by having identified the fallacy rather than just pointing it out by name, but especially when the audience is familiar with them and the argument is in writing, naming them makes a convenient counterargument macro, as each fallacy is a compact name for a defect in the argument in serving it's purpose.
The definition offered is effectively a rewording of the formal fallacy.
In fact the very thing that makes an informal fallacy INformal is the fact that from a formal point of view it is not fallacious (i.e. the argument is technically valid)
Informality comes from the fact that while technically valid, an informally fallacious argument does not further the conversation, either because there is no universe where the premises could ever be true (i.e. a valid but unsound argument), or because the validity is the result of a "vacuous truth", or because it is structured in such a way that the conclusion, while not invalid, is designed to derail rather than further the conversation in a useful way (i.e. trolling)
This is because an analogy is in fact a form of fallacious thinking.
Except in the case where your analogy is effectively an argument to generalisation, attacked via a specialised example (but arguing only over the generalisable properties).
Any other type of analogy immediately falls flat as soon as someone calls out specialised property x that does not hold for oroginal argument y.
It’s probably a bad idea to use analogies in a combative argument where participants are more interested in winning than establishing the truth. But analogies are useful cognitive ratchets; they help people to begin to understand difficult abstract concepts, so they are useful when participants are more cooperative than competitive.
Analogies are usually not a proof, but they can help understanding things.
If humans were infinitely smart, analogies wouldn't be needed. But since we aren't, we often understand things better by seeing a comparison to something that is more visceral, or that we already know.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Analogies are useful to help build bridges when two parties have differing corpuses of knowledge.
If I want to discuss the merits of different woods in cavaquinho construction with someone that's spent all of their life in an office, then it is almost always easier to work in an analogistic manner that spend hours upon hundreds of hours building up their knowledge.
If it's a _debate_ with two parties trying to convince the other of a point, then analogies begin to fall short.
You did say _conversation_ though. Not all conversations are debates.
Analogies can help be instructive when parties are looking for understanding or inspiration. They are distracting when parties are arguing logic/reasoning.
My personal favourite is the logical-fallacy-fallacy. This is where someone names a logical fallacy that doesn't quite apply, but is close enough to fool people into making it look like they have won debate.
An example might be: "Listening to the scientists is just an appeal to authority"
The slippery slope fallacy (which I see made the list) is often abused in discourse to argue against anyone proposing that A could plausibly lead to B, even if the person thinks there's a fairly low probability of it playing out.
I would go so far as to say it's not a legitimate fallacy. People can both overestimate or underestimate the probability that A will lead to B, but we call the former fallacious and not the latter, which makes no sense. If we think that the former should be validly called the slippery slope fallacy then we need a fallacy for the latter too (inertia fallacy? fallacy of lack of imagination?)
One minute people are judicially applying the Slippery Slope fallacy, and before you know it we’re using it recklessly to dismiss very plausible outcomes.
Kidding aside, the point of the Slippery Slope argument isn’t that a chain of events can’t happen or won’t happen - it’s that we can’t assume they will happen.
I get your point on the definitional nuance, but why don't we have a fallacy for people who assume that something won't happen? Or is this also an instance of the slippery slope fallacy - asserting that A necessarily leads to NOT(B) instead of B?
Also I believe my other point stands with respect to how this fallacy is abused in common discourse to score debate points, at least according to my experience. In practice, not many commit this fallacy, since everyone except the most dishonest will admit there's a tiny probability that their causal chain won't play out.
It’s early here and it’s been about 20 years since my logic course in College, but I’ll give it a shot.
This is generally the domain of logic as a formal tool for argumentative analysis. In that context, one is trying to nail down whether an argument is valid or not. It’s important for us to make a distinction between what is logically sound, and what is a hypothetical that can’t be proven.
It comes down to feels not reals. Logic is reals. It is a formal system. It helps us ground our thinking. A slope may be indeed slippery, if it can be proven that A leads to Z every time. But usually a Slippery Slope is utilized as a way of scaring people into the assumption that A will lead to Z, even when there’s plenty of off ramps along the way.
It’s about certainty vs speculation.
To say that, “hey if we start doing A we might end up at Z” is not wrong because we say “might”, and it’s worthy of debating the risks and possibilities. But often people present it as a Truth. And it’s fair to point out that it’s neither a certainty, nor logically sound.
You're falling into a common trap of misassociating logic with truth. They are related, but not 1:1. A logical fallacy does not price something is false, it just demonstrates that an argument is not logically airtight.
A statement based on a logical fallacy can turn out to be true. A prediction based on nothing at all can turn out to be true as well. All a logical fallacy means is that the statement will not NECESSARILY turn out to be true.
There are only two fallacies: anticipation and procrastination.
If you're discussing something and it isn't directed towards an immediate course of action, stop already it's not worth wasting your attention.
I believe that there is a distinct difference between formal and informal fallacies and how they should be dealt with in a debate.
I agree with many here that just pointing out fallacies does not advance the debate, however I believe this only applies to informal fallacies (which are often much less clear cut). To me informal fallacies are often just poor debating style.
However formal fallacies should absolutely always be challenged, because the make the argument formally invalid (non sequitur).
If you can directly identify any of these fallacies while arguing on the internet your stance on the subject instantly becomes correct and the opposing view wrong.
perhaps we can add "name-dropping logical fallacies" itself as a logical fallacy
X: We shouldn't listen to health experts! They got it wrong at the beginning of the pandemic when they told us not to buy or wear masks, and therefore they are wrong now too!
Y: Wait, that doesn't make sense.
X: Strawman!
Y: Oh sorry sir/madam; you are correct. Please carry on.
> If you can directly identify any of these fallacies while arguing on the internet your stance on the subject instantly becomes correct and the opposing view wrong.
Elsewhere, this line of reasoning is called the "fallacy fallacy". But the linked site describes the fallacy fallacy as "an argument that is based on false claims, but is logically coherent", which sounds more like a false premise to me.
Yeah, that's my problem with these kinds of lists. They've turned from useful tools to help improve thinking/arguments to point cards where you win if can identify one.
What about "whataboutism"? It's not listed. Is me asking that question an example of whataboutism?
Joking aside, whataboutism is a "logical fallacy" that I see commonly invoked here on HN, most often when the topic is political in nature.
It seems like many people want to assert their opponents questions are whataboutism so that they do not have to consider the broader context of the issue, which almost always would invalidate the narrow, one sided, siloed analysis which they are desperately clinging to.
This sort of thing really isn't all that useful, since no argument outside of pure mathematics is logically airtight. In particular, arguments accused of employing a slippery slope fallacy or no true scotsman fallacy are not generally bad forms of argument.
> Women should be able to have abortions, so abortion should be legal and easily available.
This is given as the second example for circular reasoning, but I don't agree. I think it's a simple logical statement that doesn't prove its prerequisite.
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