Word Finder - fallacy

definition

Deceptive or false appearance; that which misleads the eye or the mind.

synonyms

• deceitfulness
• deception

definition

An argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it is not. A specious argument.

Paradox, however, soon becomes stale, and fallacy wearisome.

Violation of this is the fallacy of " undistributed middle."

But his arguments are generally vitiated by the fallacy of assuming what they profess to prove.

How does inference become the source of error and fallacy?

So the so-called naturalistic fallacy is no fallacy at all.

A popular expression often used to argue against the view that the author is the determiner of meaning is the " intentional fallacy.

According to Frazer's view, " as time goes on the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent and is slowly displaced by religion; in other words the magician gives way to the priest.

Dealing with the phenomena of interest, he exposes the old fallacy that the rate depends upon the amount of money in a country; low interest does not follow on abundance of money.

He appeals to the direct testimony of consciousness in the sense in which the appeal involves a fallacy.

But Vuk Stefanovich Karajich, a self-taught writer, proved the fallacy of that assumption.

Joe Cummins has exposed the fallacy of this claim [3] .

The work also amply demonstrates the fallacy of that argument.

The novel shows the falsity of his public image in order to demonstrate the fallacy of the doctrines he pretends to hold.

In this report the continued insistence on this test shows the fallacy of judging the system by the wrong mark of efficacy.

For Ignoratio Elenchi (ignorance of the refutation) see Fallacy.

Another now classic fallacy has been called the illigitimate totality transfer.

This distinction, however, does not exist for science, and indeed the first definition involves a fallacy of which it will be as well to dispose forthwith.

In no case is the evidence of the senses fallacious or mendacious; the fallacy is in the inference.

If we may pass by the doctrine of the Identity of Indiscernibles, which played a part of some importance in subsequent philosophy, and the Law of Continuity, which as Leibnitz represents it is, if not sheer dogma, reached by something very like a fallacy, Gerhardt, vi.

The extreme formalist is guilty of a fallacy of composition in regard to abstraction.

Yet, as has been already said, he showed his consciousness of the fallacy of his claim by offering to barter it again and again during the course of the war for land or money.

What is possibly not so obvious is the extent to which libertarians have themselves been guilty of a similar fallacy.

If tradition has not misrepresented these paradoxes of time, space and motion, there is in Zeno's reasoning an element of fallacy.

The fallacy argumentum ad hominem (abusive) supported by unsubstantiated assertions.

The ecological fallacy has become a bugbear to frighten people away from interpreting social observations in collective terms.

This illustrates the fallacy of treating acute disturbance in this manner.

This is why Moore's own view of goodness as sui generis and irreducible is supposed to avoid the naturalistic fallacy.

Fifth, the whole thing involves the extreme value fallacy.

I've always been a big fan of the pathetic fallacy, unlike Ruskin, who coined the term.

Ah, the logical fallacy of " You prove it first.

The ' ecological fallacy ' is a statement about ' ecological correlation ', not about ecology in itself.

From the period of the rediscovery of the catacombs in the 16th century till comparatively recent times a gigantic fallacy prevailed, repeated by writer after writer, identifying the Christian burial-places with disused sand-pits.

More particularly "argument" means a synopsis of the contents of a book, the outline of a novel, play, &c. In logic it is used for the middle term in a syllogism, and for many species of fallacies, such as the argumentum ad hominem, ad baculum, &c. '(see' Fallacy).

Part of this comparison fallacy ignores the facts.

Thus, the concept of firm breast exercises is a fallacy.

As you probably know, spot training is a fallacy.

Nor does the process of acquiring the premisses of eristical syllogism, which is fallacious either in its premisses or in its process, differ, except that, when the premisses are fallacious, the dialectical interrogations must be such as to cause this fallacy.

He concluded therefore that, having disposed of this fallacy of introjection, we ought to return to the view of reality as an essential co-ordination of ego and environment, of central part and counterpart, with R-values, C-values and E-values.

There will always be adherents of the fallacy that Italy should have attacked through the Trentino, though they are in the main confined to those who do not know the country, or those who have no experience of modern war.

Hence also induction is a real process, because, when we know that this individual magnet attracts iron, we are very far from knowing that all alike do so similarly; and the question of inductive logic, how we get from some similars to all similars, remains, as before, a difficulty, but not to be solved by the fallacy that inference is identification.

By the lastnamed he finally exploded a fallacy which had up to that time vitiated the chronology of contemporary Egyptologists.

Fish were supposed to be born in the water without sexual connexion, and on the basis of this old physiological fallacy the Cathars equally with the Catholic framed their rule of fasting.

In most of the delusive machines commonly called perpetual motions, of which so many are patented in each year, and which are expected by their inventors to perform work without receiving energy, the fundamental fallacy consists in an expectation that some reciprocating force shall restore more energy than it has been the means of storing.

He could not have become suddenly blind to the fallacy of the expectations derived from such a course; and all his life it had been his distinction to look above the transient and trafficking expedients of the professional politician.

They were no doubt expelled or absorbed by the Hittites, but we have the proof of their existence and of the fallacy of the statement that the Semite never crossed the Taurus, in the cuneiform tablets written in their language which have been found near Kaisariyeh and are now being published by various scholars.

Hence the fallacy of those who, like Bosanquet, or like Paulsen in his Einleitung in die Philosophie, represent the realistic theory of inference as if it meant that knowledge starts from ideas and then infers that ideas are copies of things, and who then object, rightly enough, that we could not in that case compare the copy with the original, but only be able to infer from idea to idea.

As for the claim that the "Renaissance" delivered men from that blind reliance upon authority which was typical of "medieval" thought, that is a fallacy cherished by those who themselves rely upon the authority of historians, blind to the most ordinary processes of thought.

So our ability to find cause and effect in that—and to really discern fact from fallacy, what's good from what's bad for us—is highly suspect.

Accordingly, it is a fallacy for any determination of x to consider "x is an x" or "x is not an x" as having the meaning of propositions.

He accepted the Leibnitzian fallacy that unity is indivisibility, which led to the Leibnitzian analysis of material bodies into immaterial monads, indivisible and therefore unextended, and to the theory of monadic souls and entelechies.