|
Fallacies
A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument that may appear to be well-reasoned if unnoticed. The term was introduced in the Western intellectual tradition by the Aristotelian '' De Sophisticis Elenchis''. Fallacies may be committed intentionally to manipulate or persuade by deception, unintentionally because of human limitations such as carelessness, cognitive or social biases and ignorance, or potentially due to the limitations of language and understanding of language. These delineations include not only the ignorance of the right reasoning standard but also the ignorance of relevant properties of the context. For instance, the soundness of legal arguments depends on the context in which they are made. Fallacies are commonly divided into "formal" and "informal". A formal fallacy is a flaw in the structure of a deductive argument that renders the argument invalid, while an informal fallacy originates in an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Informal Fallacy
Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not just due to the ''form'' of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but can also be due to their ''content'' and ''context''. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually ''appear'' to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them. These misleading appearances are often connected to various aspects of natural language, such as ambiguous or vague expressions, or the assumption of implicit premises instead of making them explicit. Traditionally, a great number of informal fallacies have been identified, including the fallacy of equivocation, the fallacy of amphiboly, the Fallacy of composition, fallacies of composition and Fallacy of division, division, the false dilemma, the fallacy of begging the question, the ad hominem fallacy and the appeal to ignorance. There is no general agreement as to how the various fallacies are to be grouped into cate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mathematical Fallacy
In mathematics, certain kinds of mistaken proof are often exhibited, and sometimes collected, as illustrations of a concept called mathematical fallacy. There is a distinction between a simple ''mistake'' and a ''mathematical fallacy'' in a proof, in that a mistake in a proof leads to an invalid proof while in the best-known examples of mathematical fallacies there is some element of concealment or deception in the presentation of the proof. For example, the reason why validity fails may be attributed to a division by zero that is hidden by algebraic notation. There is a certain quality of the mathematical fallacy: as typically presented, it leads not only to an absurd result, but does so in a crafty or clever way. Therefore, these fallacies, for pedagogic reasons, usually take the form of spurious proofs of obvious contradictions. Although the proofs are flawed, the errors, usually by design, are comparatively subtle, or designed to show that certain steps are conditional, and a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sophistical Refutations
''Sophistical Refutations'' (; ) is a text in Aristotle's ''Organon'' in which he identified thirteen fallacies.Sometimes listed as twelve. According to Aristotle, this is the first work to treat the subject of deductive reasoning in ancient Greece (''Soph. Ref.'', 34, 183b34 ff.). Overview ''On Sophistical Refutations'' consists of 34 chapters. The book naturally falls in two parts: chapters concerned with tactics for the Questioner (3–8 and 12–15) and chapters concerned with tactics for the Answerer (16–32). Besides, there is an introduction (1–2), an interlude (9–11), and a conclusion (33–34). Fallacies identified The fallacies Aristotle identifies in Chapter 4 (formal fallacies) and 5 (informal fallacies) of this book are the following: :Fallacies in the language or formal fallacies (''in dictionem''): # Equivocation # Amphiboly # Composition # Division # Accent # Figure of speech A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentiona ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deductive Reasoning
Deductive reasoning is the process of drawing valid inferences. An inference is valid if its conclusion follows logically from its premises, meaning that it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. For example, the inference from the premises "all men are mortal" and " Socrates is a man" to the conclusion "Socrates is mortal" is deductively valid. An argument is ''sound'' if it is valid ''and'' all its premises are true. One approach defines deduction in terms of the intentions of the author: they have to intend for the premises to offer deductive support to the conclusion. With the help of this modification, it is possible to distinguish valid from invalid deductive reasoning: it is invalid if the author's belief about the deductive support is false, but even invalid deductive reasoning is a form of deductive reasoning. Deductive logic studies under what conditions an argument is valid. According to the semantic approach, an argument is valid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Formal Fallacy
In logic and philosophical logic, philosophy, a formal fallacy is a pattern of reasoning rendered validity (logic), invalid by a flaw in its logical structure. propositional calculus, Propositional logic, for example, is concerned with the meanings of sentences and the relationships between them. It focuses on the role of logical operators, called propositional connectives, in determining whether a sentence is true. An error in the sequence will result in a deductive argument that is invalid. The argument itself could have true premises, but still have a false logical consequence, conclusion. Thus, a formal fallacy is a fallacy in which deduction goes wrong, and is no longer a logical process. This may not affect the truth of the conclusion, since validity and truth are separate in formal logic. While a logical argument is a ''non sequitur'' if, and only if, it is invalid, the term "non sequitur" typically refers to those types of invalid arguments which do not constitute formal fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Attacking Faulty Reasoning
''Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-free Arguments'' is a textbook on logical fallacies by T. Edward Damer that has been used for many years in a number of college courses on logic, critical thinking, argumentation, and philosophy. It explains 60 of the most commonly committed fallacies. Each of the fallacies is concisely defined and illustrated with several relevant examples. For each fallacy, the text gives suggestions about how to address or to "attack" the fallacy when it is encountered. The organization of the fallacies comes from the author’s own fallacy theory, which defines a fallacy as a violation of one of the five criteria of a good argument: * the argument must be structurally well-formed; * the premises must be relevant; * the premises must be acceptable; * the premises must be sufficient in number, weight, and kind; * there must be an effective rebuttal of challenges to the argument. Each fallacy falls into at least one of Damer's five fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biases In Judgment And Decision Making
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment. They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics. Although the reality of most of these biases is confirmed by reproducible research, there are often controversies about how to classify these biases or how to explain them. Several theoretical causes are known for some cognitive biases, which provides a classification of biases by their common generative mechanism (such as noisy information-processing). Gerd Gigerenzer has criticized the framing of cognitive biases as errors in judgment, and favors interpreting them as arising from rational deviations from logical thought. Explanations include information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called ''heuristics'', that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive ("cold") bias, such as mental noise, or motivational ("hot") bias, such as when bel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denying The Antecedent
Denying the antecedent (also known as inverse error or fallacy of the inverse) is a formal fallacy of inferring the inverse from an original statement. Phrased another way, denying the antecedent occurs in the context of an indicative conditional statement and assumes that the negation of the antecedent implies the negation of the consequent. It is a type of mixed hypothetical syllogism that takes on the following form: :If ''P'', then ''Q''. :Not ''P''. :Therefore, not ''Q''. which may also be phrased as :P \rightarrow Q (P implies Q) :\therefore \neg P \rightarrow \neg Q (therefore, not-P implies not-Q) Arguments of this form are invalid. Informally, this means that arguments of this form do not give good reason to establish their conclusions, even if their premises are true. The name ''denying the antecedent'' derives from the premise "not ''P''", which denies the "if" clause (antecedent) of the conditional premise. The only situation where one may deny the an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Psychology Of Reasoning
The psychology of reasoning (also known as the cognitive science of reasoning) is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It overlaps with psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory. Psychological experiments on how humans and other animals reason have been carried out for over 100 years. An enduring question is whether or not people have the capacity to be rational. Current research in this area addresses various questions about reasoning, rationality, judgments, intelligence, relationships between emotion and reasoning, and development. Everyday reasoning One of the most obvious areas in which people employ reasoning is with sentences in everyday language. Most experimentation on deduction has been carried out on hypothetical thought, in particular, examining how people reason about conditionals, e.g. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Legal Argument
Argumentation theory is the interdisciplinary study of how conclusions can be supported or undermined by premises through logical reasoning. With historical origins in logic, dialectic, and rhetoric, argumentation theory includes the arts and sciences of civil debate, dialogue, conversation, and persuasion. It studies rules of inference, logic, and procedural rules in both artificial and real-world settings. Argumentation includes various forms of dialogue such as deliberation and negotiation which are concerned with collaborative decision-making procedures. It also encompasses eristic dialogue, the branch of social debate in which victory over an opponent is the primary goal, and didactic dialogue used for teaching. This discipline also studies the means by which people can express and rationally resolve or at least manage their disagreements. Argumentation is a daily occurrence, such as in public debate, science, and law. For example in law, in courts by the judge, the parties ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mathematical Proof
A mathematical proof is a deductive reasoning, deductive Argument-deduction-proof distinctions, argument for a Proposition, mathematical statement, showing that the stated assumptions logically guarantee the conclusion. The argument may use other previously established statements, such as theorems; but every proof can, in principle, be constructed using only certain basic or original assumptions known as axioms, along with the accepted rules of inference. Proofs are examples of exhaustive deductive reasoning that establish logical certainty, to be distinguished from empirical evidence, empirical arguments or non-exhaustive inductive reasoning that establish "reasonable expectation". Presenting many cases in which the statement holds is not enough for a proof, which must demonstrate that the statement is true in ''all'' possible cases. A proposition that has not been proved but is believed to be true is known as a conjecture, or a hypothesis if frequently used as an assumption for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
