Fallacy

“ That such a fallacy could be imposed upon any human understanding, or that an author could have advanced a position so remote from truth and reason, any otherwise than as a declaimer, to shew to what extent he could stretch his imagination, and with what strength he could press his principle, would scarcely have been credible, had not this lady kindly shewn us how far weakness may be deluded, or indolence amused. ”

“ If he is convinced of its character, he must either have grounds for that conviction or not. If he has grounds, let him examine them, draw them out, try if they are valid, and then the fallacy will stand exposed. If he has no grounds for suspecting a fallacy, what an irrational conclusion he confesses himself to have arrived at! ”

“ Since every case where a conclusion which can only be proved from certain premises is used for the proof of those premises, is a case of _petitio principii_, that fallacy includes a very great proportion of all incorrect reasoning. It is necessary, for completing our view of the fallacy, to exemplify some of the disguises under which it is accustomed to mask itself, and to escape exposure. ”

“ To declare it to be obvious is to suggest the naturalistic fallacy: just as, in some recent books, a proof that genius is diseased, abnormal, has been used in order to suggest that genius ought not to be encouraged. Such reasoning is fallacious, and dangerously fallacious. The fact is that in the very words ‘health’ and ‘disease’ we do commonly include the notion that the one is good and the other bad. ”

“ For every property, therefore, in facts, or in our mode of considering facts, which leads us to believe that they are habitually conjoined when they are not, or that they are not when in reality they are, there is a corresponding kind of Fallacy; and an enumeration of fallacies would consist in a specification of those properties in facts, and those peculiarities in our mode of considering them, which give rise to this erroneous opinion. ”

“ To launch a clever and startling fallacy which will float for a week and stir up a hard fight, seems almost as great a triumph as the discovery of an important fact or law; and the honest student is distracted with the multitude of doctrines, and hustled aside by the crowd of ambitious groundlings. ”

“ To detect a fallacy in another's argument is to weaken, if not to destroy, his case; to avoid making a fallacy in one's own argument means escape from humiliation and defeat. Hence, a knowledge of fallacies is one of the most essential parts of a debater's equipment. ”

“ Whately's logic is, of course, applied here—it is true in mood and figure, and yet the argument is fallacious. A fallacy is defined as 'an ingenious mixture of truth and falsehood, so entangled as to be intimately blended—that the falsehood is, in chemical phrase, held in solution: one drop of sound logic is that test which immediately disunites them, makes the foreign substance visible, and precipitates it to the bottom.'* But whence is to come 'this drop of sound logic?' Not from the Doctor's Elements, they have sent forth the fallacy. ”

“ But several fallacies underlie this second question. The fallacy that the moral principles of our nature are necessarily connected with the extent of our intellectual capacities; the fallacy that Divine Truths can be adequately expressed through the inaccurate instrument of human language; the fallacy that deep things are necessarily made plain by the use of plain words; the fallacy that everything upon which we act is necessarily understood. ”

“ I am indeed disposed to think that the fallacy now under consideration has been the cause of two-thirds of the bad philosophy, and especially of the bad metaphysics, which the human mind has never ceased to produce. ”

“ We transfer the contempt based upon mere size, to the motives, which are the same in big men and little. The argument, if argument there be, is a fallacy; but it is equally efficacious for the feelings. ”

“ But it is enough that such assertions should be either contradictory to the known laws of nature, or exceed the limits of our experience, that their fallacy or irrelevancy to our consideration should be demonstrated. They persuade, indeed, only those who desire to be persuaded. ”

“ In this chapter I have begun the criticism of certain ethical views, which seem to owe their influence mainly to the naturalistic fallacy—the fallacy which consists in identifying the simple notion which we mean by ‘good’ with some other notion. They are views which profess to tell us what is good in itself ”

“ If a dilemma is correct in form, the conclusion of course rigorously follows: but a material fallacy often underlies this form of argument in the tacit assumption that the alternatives offered in the minor constitute an exhaustive division. ”

“ In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. ”

“ And first, let us contemplate a common fallacy in men's opinions about human affairs, which pervades the several fallacies fostered by the political bias.
Results are proportionate to appliances—see here the tacit assumption underlying many errors in the conduct of life, private and public. In private life every one discovers the untruth of this assumption, and yet continues to act as though he had not discovered its untruth. ”

“ Conformably to what we have before remarked to be of frequent occurrence, this fallacy might without much impropriety have been placed in a different class, among Fallacies of Generalization; for experience does afford a certain degree of countenance to the assumption. The cause does, in very many cases, resemble its effect; like produces like. ”

“ In supposing that we combine these different impressions together, that we compare different objects, that we reason upon them, it seems we only deceive ourselves, and mistake a rapid and mechanical transition from one idea to another for the actual perception of the relations between them. Thus have these philosophers sacrificed all the known facts and conscious operations of the mind to a literal deduction from a gross verbal fallacy. ”

“ But, in all except the most eminently philosophical minds, it is infected with precisely the same kind of fallacy as that is. For we must remember that even this other and better generalization, the progressive change in the condition of the human species, is, after all, but an empirical law ”

“ Whenever in the course of our reasoning we are involved in error, either the conclusion follows from the premisses or it does not. If it does not, the fault must lie in the process of reasoning, and we have then what is called a Logical Fallacy. If, on the other hand, the conclusion does follow from the premisses, the fault must lie in the premisses themselves, and we then have what is called a Material Fallacy. ”

“ It is for the interest of truth that every thing be viewed in fair and open day light, and it can only be some sinister purpose that is favoured by darkness or concealment of any kind. My sentiments may be fallacious, but if no body were allowed to write against me, how could that fallacy be made to appear? ”

“ To expose fallacy or inconsistency, was found to be both an easier process, and a more appreciable display of ingenuity, than the discovery and establishment of truth in such manner as to command assent. ”

“ It is a fallacy, however, to believe, because certain results have followed certain causes, that, therefore, those results were striven for by the men who endeavored to put those causes into motion, for the purpose, perhaps, of securing results of quite another sort. ”

“ But the theory, by which I have defined Metaphysical Ethics, is not that Metaphysics has a logical bearing upon the question involved in practical Ethics 'What effects will my action produce?,' but that it has such a bearing upon the fundamental ethical question, 'What is good in itself?.' This theory has been refuted by the proof, in Chap. I, that the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy ”

“ By a fallacy is meant a piece of reasoning which appears to establish a conclusion without really doing so. The term applies both to the legitimate deduction of a conclusion from false premisses and to the illegitimate deduction of a conclusion from any premisses. There are errors incidental to conception and judgement, which might well be brought under the name; but the fallacies with which we shall concern ourselves are confined to errors connected with inference. ”

“ In this way all deeply-rooted opinions and feelings are enabled to create apparent demonstrations of their truth and reasonableness, as it were, out of their own substance.
The other form of the fallacy: Things which we can not think of together can not exist together—including as one of its branches, that what we can not think of as existing can not exist at all—may thus be briefly expressed: Whatever is inconceivable must be false. ”

“ Passing from physics to metaphysics, we may notice among the most remarkable fruits of this a priori fallacy two closely analogous theories, employed in ancient and modern times to bridge over the chasm between the world of mind and that of matter; the species sensibiles of the Epicureans, and the modern doctrine of perception by means of ideas. These theories are indeed, probably, indebted for their existence not solely to the fallacy in question, but to that fallacy combined with another natural prejudice already adverted to, that a thing can not act where it is not. ”

“ That we may discover the fallacy of his hypothesis, we need only consider, that a false conclusion is drawn from an action, only by means of an obscurity of natural principles, which makes a cause be secretly interrupted in its operation, by contrary causes, and renders the connection betwixt two objects uncertain and variable. ”

“ Fallacies in language, because they result from permitting more than one interpretation, may be also denominated fallacies of equivocation.
(1) Ambiguous middle is the fallacy of giving to the middle term a double meaning.
The fallacy of four terms, as the name signifies, exists when the argument has four terms in both form and meaning. Ambiguous middle is a matter of four terms in meaning but only three in form.
(2) The fallacy of amphibology is committed when the given proposition conveys more than one meaning. ”

“ The fallacy is a radical one; and therefore all efforts based upon it are fore-doomed to ultimate failure, whether they take the form of reliance on personal force of will, or magical rites, or austerity practised against the body, or attempts by abnormal concentration to absorb the individual in the universal, or the invocation of spirits, or any other method--the same fallacy is involved in them all, that the less is larger than the greater. ”

“ The so-called 'fallacy of the senses,' of which the ancient sceptics made so much account, is not fallacy of the senses proper, but rather of the intellect, which interprets wrongly what the senses give. ”

“ The vice and fallacy of this way of looking at things is that it assumes that men can by thinking things call them into being; or that men can add by thinking to the existing conditions some element which is not in them. ”

“ Composition and division involve “number of,” accident, “meaning of.”
(3) The fallacy of irrelevant conclusion results when the argument does not squarely meet the point at issue. It is the fallacy of arguing to the wrong point either purposely or ignorantly. This may be accomplished by (1) appealing to sympathy of audience, (2) defaming character of opponent, (3) assuming that the fact is true because of inability to prove the contradictory, (4) gaining point by force, (5) citing authority.
(4) “Non sequitur” is the fallacy of deriving a conclusion which does not follow from the premises. ”

“ There is I fear this farther weakness in the foregoing Argument, which would perswade us, That therefore those Maxims are to be thought innate, which Men admit at first hearing, because they assent to Propositions, which they are not taught, nor do receive from the force of any Argument or Demonstration, but a bare Explication or Understanding of the Terms. Under which, there seems to me to lie this fallacy; That Men and supposed not to be taught, nor to learn any thing de novo; when in truth, they are taught and do learn something they were ignorant of before. ”

“ And he proceeds to say, that independently of the love of the marvellous, or any other bias in the inclinations, there is a natural tendency in the intellect itself to this kind of fallacy; since the mind is more moved by affirmative instances, though negative ones are of most use in philosophy ”

“ The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained, was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments of this drilling. ”

“ Many people of knowledge and common sense have risen above it. But the evidences of this idea to be found still in prominent places at home, and the instances of it abroad, which are here cited, prove that there has been in popular thought too much leaning in that direction, and show that there is need to point out the fallacy, and the evil of it. ”