Ask Your Questions About Logical Fallacies

Welcome! This is the place to ask the community of experts and other fallacyophites (I made up that word) if someone has a committed a fallacy or not. This is a great way to settle a dispute!


Dr. Bo's Criteria for Logical Fallacies:

  • It must be an error in reasoning not a factual error.
  • It must be commonly applied to an argument either in the form of the argument or in the interpretation of the argument.
  • It must be deceptive in that it often fools the average adult.
Therefore, we will define a logical fallacy as a concept within argumentation that commonly leads to an error in reasoning due to the deceptive nature of its presentation. Logical fallacies can comprise fallacious arguments that contain one or more non-factual errors in their form or deceptive arguments that often lead to fallacious reasoning in their evaluation.
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Fallacies in formal writing

Which are the most common fallacies in formal writing, e.g., annual reports or research papers? I am building a machine learning model to detect fallacious arguments and would like to limit them to the most relevant ones.

asked on Saturday, Apr 02, 2022 04:55:00 PM by Maha Lubbers
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Formal writing & fallacies

What are the most common fallacies found in formal writing, e.g., annual reports, research papers?

asked on Saturday, Apr 02, 2022 04:41:31 PM by Maha Lubbers
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If I Feel It Strongly, It Must Be True

Is there a specific name for concluding something is true because I feel it strongly?   Is this a type of Confirmation Bias or does it have some other name?   In today's Wall Street Journal , there's a column by Peggy Noonan in which she...

asked on Saturday, Apr 02, 2022 03:32:17 PM by Ed F
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Demographics and politics. What are the fallacies people use when describing Trumps base.

Politics and party affiliation have demographic trends. A trend I've seen and other people as well is that a large portion of non-college-educated whites voted for Trump. A lot of them went for Obama, Kerry and Gore in the past but turned to Trump. ...

asked on Saturday, Apr 02, 2022 12:10:14 PM by Jakub M
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Principle of Charity

Consider this example from an article discussing a computer programming textbook.  The first paragraph is from the textbook; the second from the article Your computer can only understand machine logic, a compact series of computer-readable ins...

asked on Saturday, Apr 02, 2022 11:15:59 AM by Ed F
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Ben Shapiro (not exact quote, paraphrase)

Because it has the name "boy" in it boy scouts is for boys only not for girls.

asked on Friday, Apr 01, 2022 09:31:05 AM by Jakub M
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Appeal to extremes? Absurdity?

I just had a situation come up where a person said "But you can't be 100% sure  that there is no possibility of this" well, no, I can't be sure that the earth won't get hit by an asteroid and we're all wiped out tomorrow either, so they're perh...

asked on Wednesday, Mar 30, 2022 02:13:18 PM by rx7man
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Logical implication and evidence

From what I’ve read on Wikipedia, a valid logical implication is only when P is a sufficient condition for Q. So if something is a cat, it logically implies that it’s an animal. This also means that correlation does not imply causation s...

asked on Wednesday, Mar 30, 2022 10:15:27 AM by Alex
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"Why is stealing wrong? Well, first of all, staling is taking another person's property. Second, taking another person's property is impermissible. That's why stealing is wrong."

what fallacy is the above?

asked on Tuesday, Mar 29, 2022 10:31:14 PM by Moses
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"Why is stealing wrong? Well, first of all, staling is taking another person's property. Second, taking another person's property is impermissible. That's why stealing is wrong."

asked on Tuesday, Mar 29, 2022 10:27:17 PM by Moses