Fallacies that I've noticed

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Some common fallacies I notice here and elsewhere in the world, not sure if any of these have been formally named or identified. Feel free to add your own noticed fallacies that may not have been identified yet. Or if any fallacies here have already been formally named and identified please let me know.

  • The inability to explain something sufficiently well enough to demonstrate the claim you’re making is not an argument against the claim itself.

  • Failing to more fully map the conceptual space of an idea leads to mental myopia. And being mentally myopic appears to go hand in hand with being equally emotionally restricted. (not so much a fallacy, more of an observation)

  • Claiming it’s a fallacy to use your own personal experience as a reason to believe something, is itself a fallacy. This is often done by people who misunderstand the anecdotal fallacy and is more of an emotional sperg in the moment.

  • Nothing is refuted merely because it has reasons for being whatever it is, yet this is often the form arguments take. “Oh yeah, well that’s only because of this (other thing that explains why the first thing is what it is)!” --Ok, and?

  • Arguing words rather than meaning. (another observation, but people do this all the time and it makes their arguments fallacious)

    • ^ related to the above, When the conversation is about something itself but someone keeps talking about how we talk about it, rather than talking about the thing itself. Maybe this is related to some epistemological fallacy, talking about how we know or don’t know rather than talking about the claim itself directly.

  • Subjectivity fallacy, as I call it: mistaking the fact that you have a perspective for the claim that “everything is perspectival” or “it’s all subjective”. Just because you experience through a subjective lens does not mean that 1) you never experience anything non-subjective or 2) nothing that exists is non-subjective.

    • ^also related to that, When people confuse the notion of relativity for the notion of subjectivity. Just because something is relative to something else does not mean it is subjective (non-objective). Related to that, confusing the claim “X itself is subjective” for “X exists subjectively”. (essentially confusing an ontological claim with a scientific one)

  • The fact that something will end, change, or stop existing at some future point in time is not an argument against that thing itself (not an argument against it either being right or wrong, or existing/not existing, or being meaningful or not).

  • The fact that it is logically not impossible that we might be mistaken about something and not know it, does not itself translate into a reason for doubt. (this one could probably be called Descartes’ Fallacy)

    • ^ And related to the above, a big one I see often, Doubting as a default position is as irrational as believing as a default position. Beliefs and doubts both need reasons backing them up. To doubt something merely because it is technically possible that it could be wrong but we just don’t know how or why, is fallacious.
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I sense harmonic triads.

Believing implies doubting at least one alternative conclusion, and doubting implies believing at least one alternative conclusion. Agreed.

Is there a tool you use to map the conceptual space of an idea? Something similar to a square of opposition? I want to create one that incorporates the harmonic triads. By all means… please show me you beat me to it.

Imagine how useful it would be in literally every field.

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A new one I just noticed:

Blindness Fallacy: when you fail to see or appreciate the meaning, significance and/or truth of something because of your own blindness and then you project that lack of meaning/significance/truth onto the other person or onto the thing itself.

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Alcohol can do that to a person. You should probably stop drinking.

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Stop trolling, you are derailing the topic. Keep it focused to the topic here, thanks.

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Self-Ignorance Fallacy: when people pretend not to know something they actually do know, in order to either avoid an uncomfortable truth (cognitive dissonance), seemingly score an easy argumentative point (“gotcha!” moment), or because of their own ego-investment in something. I also have seen people utilize this fallacy to attempt to appear more “down to earth” and “with the people”, like “huh, what’s a tweeter, is that from the interwebs or what?” People who genuinely pretend not to know something they really do know, and who use it for social bonding purposes like that, are usually conservatives. For some reason many conservatives act like being intelligent is a mark against them, they would rather signal their own ignorance about something but in a way that also makes them seem “cool” and “above it all”. Of course it can at least be said that conservatives do possess the self-awareness to perform an operation like that, whereas liberals/leftists seem to utilize the self-ignorance fallacy entirely unconsciously.

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Connection Fallacy: just because one thing is connected to something else or requires another thing to keep existing as it is, isn’t an argument against its own existence, meaning, or independent being. (note this fallacy stems from a mistaken assumption that it would be possible for something to be absolutely independent and not connected to or dependent upon anything else, which of course would be impossible)

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Trigger fallacy: The error that when you are triggered by something, that means it commits a fallacy of appeal to emotion and can be restricted from consideration thereby. Especially while drunk.

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I wasn’t making a claim that what you said could be ignored on the basis of you being triggered. I was simply pointing it out.

Maybe that’s another new fallacy, …naw, that’s just a straw man on your part.

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Own your triggers.

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So is the charade over then?

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Please stop trolling. Make your posts stick to the topic, thanks.

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I’ll take that as a no.

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The Bright Boy Fallacy: Naively believing naming a conceptual knot a “fallacy” conduces to clarity or fruitful exchange. It simply provides fodder for eristic debate between ineffectual individuals. Go get your head broke at a pro-Palestine protest or something. Learn the market value of your pet ideas.

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I’m on the fence about this one. It’s literally true that one person not knowing why a claim is true doesn’t entail that the claim is false. But if two people disagree, and one of them is unable to explain why their position is true, it does seem like the other person is more likely to be right.

At the very least, if a person is unable to explain why their claim is true, it should weaken their conviction that the claim is true.

The thing is not refuted, but a competing reason might be.

Suppose someone argues that X is true, and offers as evidence the claim that Y is true, and Y is caused by X. In that case, an argument similar in form to "“Yeah Y is true, but only because Z is true” would be an argument against X (if only by removing Y as evidence for X).

I think I understand what you mean, but the way you worded it hints at why it comes up so often: words have meanings, so the distinction isn’t always sharp.

This isn’t usually fallacious. As above, talking about how you talk about “it” is a way of checking that your “it” and my “it” have the same referent. Different people frequently use the same word to refer to different things, and noticing when that happens is important. And the only way to notice it is to talk about it.

This is a sharp distinction and definitely a fallacy I see in the wild frequently.

There’s a class of related fallacies that I can’t quite sum up, but examples include:

  • “X can be more than one thing” is taken to mean “X can be anything at all”, or
  • “X is uncertain” to mean “X is whatever I want it to be”.

Where I’ve seen this, it’s not really an argument, but an appeal to take seriously my own fallibility before responding. Sometimes it works.

This feels similar to burden-of-proof tennis: “You’re projecting!” “No, you’re projecting your own projection!” “No, you’re…” etc.

A reasonable prior seems to be that about half the time someone is tempted to accuse another person of this, they’re the one committing the fallacy.

Having a name for a concept helps to cement the concept, which helps to pattern-match it. So while bandying names in the middle of a discussion might not always be fruitful, the names can help a person notice when they themselves are employing a dubious pattern of argument, or help to identify the mistake someone else is making so they can respond to it in fruitful ways.

1 Like
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Depends on the relative ‘bandying’in the middle of discussion, whether such can identify the sought after clarity aiming for, or remain dubious, until at last it becomes more clear than not that certainty could be attained by probable cohesion rather than singular validation.

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I think my point was a little unclear, I mean that a person having a name for the fallacy helps them keep a concept of the fallacy.

For example, they might see what @HumAnIze describes as the Subjectivity Fallacy, and think to themselves, I recognize that pattern, it’s the Subjectivity Fallacy! But instead of saying “You are committing the Subjectivity Fallacy”, they could say, “I acknowledge your perspective on X, but it’s important to remember that there’s an objective thing behind that perspective, and I’m talking about that objective thing here.”

Because @Agrippa makes the good point that throwing out jargon isn’t always the best way to make progress in a conversation. I only mean to point out that naming the patterns can still good and useful even if those names never come out in conversation.

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.

Fallacies run rife amongst these boards.

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Thanks , MagsJ, I was intending to mention a conflation between the Humanize’s ‘Subjective fallacy’ mentioned and the Bright Boy’s fallacy whereas such can convey erroneous blips, within expandable , reasonable limits of understanding.

Simply, sticky situations require tolerable margins of comprehension.

This one is definitely on me, as naively put.

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Carleas

To be honest, you’re feeling of being unclear, is mostly due to my error, in not recognizing patterns which usually arise at the middle of the conversation, alluding to the focus of the function of identifying how communication gets tangled between obscuring what is said, with what is said.

The focus on it detracts from its intent on objectivity, and thus tend to lean toward the subjective. And that does secondarily takes away from it is that was meant to be said, from the wish to transcend situations, that otherwise could be said…