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Types of Fallacies in Argument

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The Wikipedia pages on logical fallacies is quite informative.

Few interesting ones:

No True Scotsman fallacy

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When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule.

Example:

Alice: All Scotsmen enjoy haggis.
Bob: My uncle is a Scotsman, and he doesn’t like haggis!
Alice: Well, all true Scotsmen like haggis.

An example of a political application of the fallacy could be in asserting that “no democracy starts a war”, then distinguishing between mature or “true” democracies, which never start wars, and “emerging democracies”, which may start them. At issue is whether or not something labelled as an “emerging democracy” is actually a democracy or something in a different conceptual category.

Reductio ad Hitlerum

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Reductio ad Hitlerum is a logical fallacy that consists of trying to refute an opponent’s view by comparing it to a view that would be held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.

Reductio ad Hitlerum is no more than guilt by association, a form of association fallacy. The fallacy claims that a policy leads to—or is the same as—one advocated or implemented by Adolf Hitler or the Third Reich, and so “proves” that the original policy is undesirable. For example: “Hitler loved animals, so animal protection is a fascist activity [because the things Hitler did were wrong, or because it could lead to results ideologically or morally aligned with Hitler].” Used broadly enough, ad Hitlerum can encompass more than one questionable cause fallacy type, by both inverting cause and effect and by linking an alleged cause to wholly unrelated consequences. For example, Hitler was fond of dogs and children, but to argue that affection for dogs and children is wrong on this basis is not logically sound.

Broken window fallacy

We covered this one in detail.

Interestingly, when you type ‘broken window fallacy’ in google, here is what comes up !!

Nirvana fallacy

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The nirvana fallacy is the logical error of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealized alternatives. It can also refer to the tendency to assume that there is a perfect solution to a particular problem. A closely related concept is the perfect solution fallacy.

Example: “If we go on the Highway 95 at four in the morning, we will get to our destination exactly on time because there will be NO traffic whatsoever.”

By creating a false dichotomy that presents one option which is obviously advantageous—while at the same time being completely implausible—a person using the nirvana fallacy can attack any opposing idea because it is imperfect.

Poisoning the well

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Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a rhetorical device where adverse information about a target is pre-emptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything that the target person is about to say.

Texas sharpshooter fallacy

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The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a logical fallacy in which pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern. This fallacy is the philosophical/rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem in statistics, and apophenia in cognitive psychology. It is related to the clustering illusion, which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns in randomness where none actually exist.

The name comes from a joke about a Texan who fires some shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the biggest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.


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