ONE OF SEVEN WAYS OF SEEING
Spot the gaps between a persuasive argument and a sound one.
Moving the goalposts means refusing to acknowledge that an agreed standard has been met and demanding additional evidence or performance instead. The error lies in changing the condition for acceptance after the other person has satisfied it.
When many statistical tests are run, there are more opportunities for false positives. The error is presenting selected significant findings without accounting for the full set of comparisons.
The mystery, therefore magic fallacy occurs when one takes the inability to find a natural explanation for a phenomenon as a reason to accept a magical, supernatural, or fantastic explanation. It is a form of appeal to ignorance, where ignorance of natural causation is mistaken as evidence for supernatural intervention.
The misapplication of Darwinian ideas to fields like economics, where people wrongly assume continuous progress and survival of the fittest, ignoring the role of randomness, negative mutations, and regime switches.
The narcissist fallacy occurs when one falsely assumes that others are thinking about, noticing, or caring about them, projecting their own self-importance onto others' motivations.
Moore’s naturalistic fallacy concerns identifying goodness with a natural property, such as pleasure. Related but distinct problems are deriving an ought from purely descriptive premises and assuming that whatever is natural must be good. Arguments about nature need their ethical premises made explicit.
Harrison argues that near-death accounts do not, by themselves, establish an afterlife. Their emotional force and the sincerity of the storytellers do not rule out dreams, memory errors, or unusual brain states as alternative explanations.
Negating both sides of a conditional does not produce its contrapositive unless their order is also reversed. From if p then q, the valid contrapositive is if not q then not p; if not p then not q does not follow.
A logical fallacy where a categorical syllogism has a negative conclusion yet both premises are affirmative, violating the rule that any valid syllogism with a negative conclusion must have at least one negative premise.
The Nirvana Fallacy occurs when a realistic solution is dismissed because it does not achieve perfection, ignoring the value of incremental improvements.
The No True Scotsman fallacy occurs when someone redefines the criteria for group membership to exclude a counterexample that would otherwise falsify a generalization, often used to protect ideological claims from criticism.
A logical fallacy where the conclusion does not follow from the premises; the evidence or reason presented is irrelevant or adds very little support to the conclusion.
Everyday language uses 'if...then' in ways that are not governed by strict logical implication. Being 'alogical' (non-logical) is different from being 'illogical' and is often necessary, while illogicality is undesirable.
The notable effort fallacy treats hard work on an argument as sufficient reason to accept its conclusion. Effort can help produce evidence, but the evidence and reasoning still need to be assessed.
The fallacy of oversimplification occurs when we attempt to make something appear simpler by ignoring relevant complexities. It often involves assuming a single cause for complex events or reducing nuanced positions to binary choices.
A generalization that is technically accurate but has so many qualifications that it eliminates most cases, making the argument weaker than implied. The exceptions are often presented in place of evidence rather than in addition to it.
The package-deal fallacy occurs when one assumes that things often grouped together must always be together, or that separating them will have disproportionately severe effects, without evidence. This ignores the possibility of successful separation and adaptation.
The perfectionist fallacy is the argument that if a task or goal cannot be achieved perfectly or with complete certainty, it is not worth attempting, thereby dismissing the value of partial progress or effort.
The false equivalence between expressing a personal preference and criticizing those who hold a different preference. People often mistake statements like 'I don't like X' as implying 'I don't like people who like X', which is a logical error.
A logical fallacy where the conclusion is assumed in the premises, creating circular reasoning. The argument fails to provide independent support for its claim.
A philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious human but lacks conscious experience. Dennett's 'zimbo' adds recursive self-representation to make the zombie truly indistinguishable, challenging the conceivability of pure philosophical zombies.
Poisoning the well is an unfair attempt to discredit a speaker before their argument is heard. A character attack or accusation of bad faith primes the audience to dismiss what follows. Some versions also treat any reply as confirmation, but a claim need not be unfalsifiable to poison the well.
The author uses this label for an inference that people or ideas must have identical properties because treating them differently might offend. Equal rights or respectful treatment do not by themselves imply identical factual probabilities; claims about differences still need relevant evidence.
The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy occurs when one argues that a causal relationship exists between two events solely because one event precedes the other. This reasoning is flawed without additional evidence of causation.
Post-designation treats a pattern noticed after inspecting data as though it had been predicted in advance. Exploratory analysis can generate useful hypotheses; confirmation requires accounting for the search and testing the pattern appropriately.
Prejudicial language uses favorable or unfavorable labels to make a position seem morally required without supporting the claim. Examine the reasoning behind the label.
Arguments break down when they rely on unstated assumptions or incorrect definitions, leading to fallacies like straw man and false equivalence.
A proof or argument can fail because it skips needed steps, makes an invalid inference, or substitutes confident assertion for justification. Checking what each conclusion follows from helps distinguish these problems.
The fallacy of projection occurs when one assumes others share their own feelings, beliefs, or attitudes without evidence, ignoring that individuals may have different experiences and interpretations.
Proof by intimidation makes an argument deliberately hard to understand so the audience will accept it, or so the speaker can avoid providing evidence. It often involves questioning the audience’s authority or assumptions.
Proof by verbosity uses a volume of claims, technical language, or tangled reasoning to discourage scrutiny. The problem is treating difficulty or an unanswered barrage as evidence that a conclusion is sound. A long or technical argument can still be valid; its supporting claims and inferences must be assessed.
A claimant shifts the burden of proof by treating someone’s inability to disprove existence as evidence that something exists. Some non-existence claims can be proved; the issue is whether the claimant has supplied adequate support for the particular claim.
An argument proves too much when the same reasoning supports an unacceptable conclusion or incompatible prescriptions. This is a warning to examine its premises and inferences, illustrated here by objections to Pascal’s wager and Zeno’s arguments about motion.
The pseudo-profundity fallacy occurs when a statement appears profound but is actually vague and meaningless.
The psychologist's fallacy is the confusion between first-person and third-person perspectives, assuming that psychological descriptions pertain to or are part of the experience itself. It manifests in three versions, with the most extreme called psychologism.
A quantifier-shift fallacy changes the order of quantifiers without justification: a different object may satisfy a condition for each person, while no single object satisfies it for everyone.
The fallacy of invoking quantum mechanics to support a claim that has no legitimate connection to quantum physics, exploiting the mysterious and complex reputation of the field to lend false credibility.
Concluding that one thing caused another, simply because they are regularly associated.
Rationalization is offering false or inauthentic excuses for a claim or action because the real reasons are less persuasive, more embarrassing, or harsher than the manufactured ones given.
A red herring diverts attention from the issue under discussion by introducing irrelevant material. It may leave a question unanswered or distract from an argument’s weakness. The diversion can be intentional or inadvertent; the key is whether the new point bears on the issue.
Reductio ad absurdum tests a proposition by assuming it and deriving a contradiction. A valid refutation requires the consequences to follow and the other premises to be justified; merely finding an outcome strange or unwelcome is insufficient.
Reductio ad Hitlerum is a logical fallacy that dismisses an argument or claim by comparing it to Hitler or Nazism, often used to discredit the source rather than address the claim itself.
A probabilistic version of reductio ad absurdum used in null hypothesis significance testing; it assumes the null hypothesis is true and rejects it if an observed outcome is highly improbable, but this reasoning is flawed because improbable events occur frequently.
A reductive explanation becomes fallacious when it treats one factor as a complete account of a complex phenomenon while ignoring relevant evidence or other causes.
The regression fallacy credits an intervention for a change without accounting for regression to the mean. After an unusually extreme measurement, a later measurement may be closer to the usual level even if the intervention had no effect.
Reification becomes a reasoning error when an abstraction is treated as a concrete entity and unsupported properties or powers are inferred from it. Personifying Nature or speaking of what a government does can be harmless shorthand; the question is whether the argument relies on taking that language literally.
Dismissing or praising a situation by comparing it with a more extreme case, when that comparison does not address the relevant standard or concern.
Representativeness judges likelihood through resemblance to a typical case, which can neglect base rates and other evidence. The excerpt outlines Study 2 and its matching tasks but does not supply the results needed to assess participants’ errors.
This label describes trying to relieve a problem through the same source that sustains it. The error lies in treating temporary relief as a solution while overlooking whether the underlying problem becomes worse.
Assuming that because something happened, it necessarily had to happen, i.e. that it was the only possible outcome.
Reverse causation means mistaking the direction of a causal relationship. An association alone does not tell you whether one variable affects the other, both directions operate, or another factor explains the pattern.
The ecological fallacy occurs when conclusions about individuals are drawn from aggregate group data, leading to incorrect inferences, often seen in political, economic, and sociological analysis.
The round-trip fallacy is a logical error where people treat "most X are Y" as equivalent to "most Y are X", often leading to stereotyping and misinterpretation of probabilities.
Unfairly blaming an unpopular person or group for a problem, often targeting those who are easy to blame.
A self-sealing argument admits no possible counterevidence, so it cannot be falsified. This makes it vacuous as an argument.
A logical fallacy where the arguer improperly places the burden of proving a claim on the opponent, arguing that because the opponent cannot disprove the claim, it must be true. It is a form of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
A slippery slope argument becomes fallacious when it treats a chain of consequences as established without enough support for the links. Assess the proposed mechanism and likelihood of the chain; a warning about gradual escalation can be reasonable when supported by evidence.
The sorites fallacy occurs when one argues that because a continuum exists between two distinct categories, those categories cannot be truly distinguished, thus rendering the distinction meaningless. It is rooted in vague predicates and incremental changes, and it often leads to paradoxes about heaps, wealth, or moral status.
Special pleading is a logical fallacy that involves applying double standards—claiming an exemption for oneself or one's side without a relevant justification, thereby violating the principle of fairness in argumentation.
The Spiritual Fallacy occurs when something literal is insistently reinterpreted as 'spiritual' to justify contradictions or unfalsifiable claims, making it immune to logical scrutiny.