r/fallacy

Thought of the day. Have your say?

Have your say?

Like, something that defies all known avenues of logic and reason but nonetheless cannot be denied?

I'm into debate, so I'm pretty good at spotting logical fallacies when someone I'm arguing with uses them. It's honestly made me realize how ridiculously common they are in everyday conversations (and even formal debates).

The problem is, I can recognize them, but I don't always know how to use that in the moment.

The ones I catch most often are Straw Man, Red Herring, False Dilemma, Slippery Slope, Appeal to Emotion, Motte-and-Bailey, Ad Hominem, etc.

I'm not trying to be the annoying guy who just yells, "That's a fallacy!" every two minutes. What I struggle with is finding the response that actually shuts it down while still sounding persuasive to the judge in a debate or the person I am casualy talking with (knowing he might not know anything about fallacoes.)

So for those of you who are better at this: how do you counter these fallacies effectively?

People say that - We should expect reciprocation in relationships and make the required efforts according to the actions of the other person.

I'm not like that.

To counter this......

People say that - It is not necessary to wait for the other person to do something for you if you truly respect your bond with them. Instead, be the one who provides without needing anything back-as an act of pure devotion and love that you do share with the other person in a relation.

I'm not like that as well.

Something I would do while making relations is selecting one of these ideologies in that particular instant and selecting the other in another situation.

Does that make me a hypocrite?

Philosophy gave us this term "hypocrisy"- "But I will just call it human nature of being considerate and selective of their actions they want to perform according to the factors that they do care".

I don't know about "hypocrite" but stating that "I am not like that" for both ideologies at first and then admitting to use either of these ideologies......-This might make me look "Spineless"

Have your say?

So, not to drag that argument here, let's go ahead and pretend that this argument was about the existence of Sasquatch. Let's pretend further that I said there's no such thing as Sasquatch. This person demanded that I provide evidence for my claim that Sasquatch doesn't exist, and became angry when I stated that the burden of proof was on them, because they had previously made it known that they are a Sasquatch believer.

We argued back and forth over whose responsibility it was to bring the evidence, and this person claimed that because I had made the positive statement that Sasquatch isn't real, the burden of proof is on me. I told them that because they make their own personality revolve around believing in Sasquatch, and preaching the word of Sasquatch to unbelievers, the burden of proof is on them, not the least of which because you can't prove a negative.

Which of us was right?

Hello all. Quick and easy question that I couldn't find the right words to Google.

What's the name of the logical fallacy wherein someone says something like "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" and someone else says "This thing swings, therefore it means a thing!"

No, you've extrapolated very poorly.

It's gotta be one of the most basic and common fallacies, but I can't think of the name of it.

(Sorry for the odd example, thank you for the replies.)

How do logical fallacies go in, say, a CSI case?

Wouldn't they be hitting every single one?

"This person knows them, so they are a suspect."

"Person A is too young to steal a car, therefore we can rule that out."

"That person doesn't own a dog so those bite marks are from something else."

"Person B is allergic to nuts so they couldn't have stolen them."

What do you say as a critical thinker about these? You would think someone in a normal day to day conversation could not possibly get away with such statements. Is crime different because it's more important? Or is it down to saving time because your suspicions have much greater weight in helping solve the crime?

Have you ever used a statistic to form an opinion or win an argument? If so, are you aware of how easy it is to misinterpret one? Some of you may have heard of the Prosecutor's Fallacy; other readers, fasten your seatbelts, because you are in for a shock.

The fallacy is confusing the probability of A given B with the probability of B given A (A and B are events). P(A | B) denotes the probability of A given that B has already occurred.

Suppose a disease affects 1% of the population, and the doctor uses a test that is advertised as 95% accurate. You test positive. What's the chance you actually have the disease? Most people say 95%. The real answer is about 16%. Out of 10,000 people, about 100 are sick and 95 test positive; of the 9,900 healthy people, about 495 also test positive, so only 95 of the 590 total positives are real. You've confused P(positive | disease) with P(disease | positive).

Okay big deal! This looks like another useless mathematical concept I'm not gonna use in my life. How does knowing about the prosecutor's fallacy affect my life? Because it is so, so easy to commit the prosecutor's fallacy.

Here's an example with real-life consequences. Per the U.S. Sentencing Commission, about two out of three people sentenced for robbery between 2021 and 2025 were Black. Some people let that color how they see every Black man they pass on the street. Same fallacy: confusing P(Black | sentenced for robbery) with P(sentenced for robbery | Black). The stat says nothing about what fraction of Black people commit robbery, which is tiny; almost none do. The statistic can be correct and the conclusion completely wrong.

This is just one of many statistical traps, alongside selection bias, Simpson's paradox, and mistaking correlation for causation. So how sure are you that every statistic you've used to form an opinion was interpreted correctly?

"I understand this," "my opinion is rational," "my worldview is supported by evidence." Once an opinion becomes part of our identity, we stop questioning how it formed. We accept statistics that support us and attack those that challenge us. A misunderstood statistic becomes a belief.

The lesson isn't that statistics are useless; it's that confidence doesn't guarantee correctness. Don't just question the information in front of you. Question the mind interpreting it.

I've been trying to wrap my head around this Motte-and-bailey fallacy Wikipedia article (let's call it M&B for short). Then I ran into an interesting edge case in which a two contradicting propositions could be a Motte-and-bailey doctrine but it would not be a fallacy. That's when I discovered an interesting distinction that is often overlooked, perhaps by fault by its creator Nicholas Shackel.

Motte-and-bailey doctrine was coined by Philosopher Nicholas Shackel in 2005 in his paper. Shackle explains that the M&B doctrine is simply the pair of different propositions (the hard-to-defend Bailey, the defensible Motte).

What happened is people concluded that, hey! If someone deploys the motte and bailey together to create their argument, it can lead to a fallacy. Basically, If Bailey is true -> then Motte is true

“It is possible that I am partly to blame for that misunderstanding”
“Some people have spoken of a Motte and Bailey Doctrine as being a fallacy and others of it being a matter of strategic equivocation. Strictly speaking, neither is correct. A fallacy is an argument that is invalid and equivocation is giving different meanings to the same terms when you should be keeping their meaning invariant. A doctrine, however,  is a body of propositions, not an argument. So a Motte and Bailey Doctrine cannot be a fallacy and shifting from asserting the Bailey propositions to the Motte propositions is not in general effected by giving different meanings to the same words or statements.”
"So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy."

Now let's look at a complex example.

• Person A: "All X are Y."
• Critic: "I've seen some X that are not Y."
• Person A: "Duh. Not all X are Y."
• Person A: "I'm not going to tell Critic that I still think all X are Y right now."

Is this example an M&B Doctrine?

Yes. But how? It's because the doctrine only requires two related propositions: a desirable but difficult-to-defend (B) and an easier-to-defend (M).

Is there a fallacy here?

No. There isn't an argument here, therefore there is no fallacy.

If we pushed it to turn it into an argument, such as: “Not all X are Y, therefore all X are Y”, then it could technically be a fallacy since it is an argument built on faulty reasoning.

A better example for you.

Here’s an example I developed that would be an M&B Doctrine that is used to turn into an argument and therefore a fallacy.

• Me: AI is a human being (Motte)
• Critic: That's false. AI isn't biologically human.
• Me: All I’m saying is AI can pass the Turing Test (Bailey)
• Critic: I agree with that.
• Me: You admitted that AI can pass the Turing Test. And if it can pass the Turing Test, that means it is a human (Fallacy)

Scott Alexander, 2014, in the Slate Star Codex:
“One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do a very good job of it.”

I've seen this a lot lately.

Say a New York Times article discusses the homeless population. Nine times out of ten, someone in the comments section will blame a prior politician's policy.

Example: This all started when Reagan closed down mental hospitals...

Or: Well Some Group Somewhere pressured the government into taking Some Action during the 1990s...

Yeah, maybe it did, but instead of arguing about something that happened over 40 years ago, why not focus on the here and now, and what's to be done about an issue NOW?

I see this a lot of on FB (wow, what a shock!).

Example: local news site page has a headline about gas prices going up, some poster will invaribly say, 'under Biden gas was $x amount! Were you complaining then?'

Other than the name I listed, what is this fallacy called?

Most people have had this experience. An argument seems to follow. You can't find what's wrong. But something keeps pulling. Later the flaw becomes visible, and the feeling that had been sitting there releases.

What this experience reveals is that the implicit processing system is running on a larger dataset than conscious reasoning can access and for a specific category of bad argument, it's faster and more accurate than deliberate analysis.

The interesting case is when the feeling persists even when you can't locate the flaw. This happens most reliably when an argument is missing something that can't be named not because the logic went wrong, but because the vocabulary for a necessary premise doesn't exist in the language the argument is being conducted in.

An argument can be internally valid every step correct and still be false. Because the concept space it's operating in has been shaped, deliberately or not, to exclude a variable that would change the conclusion.

The missing word is the missing premise.

I'm calling this false by omission. The aha that comes later is often not I found the logical error but I found the word for the thing the argument had no room for.

The clearest concrete example is the snitch/informant asymmetry in criminal justice. These two words appear to refer to the same act. They don't. Informant is a functional institutional category. Snitch encodes a complete moral and relational framework developed by the people with the most direct empirical knowledge of the institution that is inadmissible in formal proceedings. Arguments conducted in the courtroom's vocabulary are formally valid and missing their most important variable.

When learning about both of these fallacies, I understand the meaning but when I take a look at the examples, I cant help but notice that all of the examples are just Circumstantial Ad Hominem.

Example:

argument: Women should have equal rights.

Circumstantial : You are only saying that because you are a woman.

Bulverism: You are only saying that because you are a woman.

Noticed how most examples online is like this, the same format.

From what I understand:

Circumstantial: claiming the arguer is biased to dismiss or de legitimize the argument.

Bulverism: assume the argument is wrong. Then, explain why the arguer believes it.

So as I think the Circumstantial example is fits the meaning. The bulverism example? not so much.

What I think the bulverism example should be like:

You are wrong because you are a woman.

What do u think?