Category: Fallacies, Informal
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The Dictionary Fallacy
Substack latest Check out today's Facebook rant for something a bit more edgy.
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Another Transparently Worthless Argument that Justifies the Questioning of Motives
From my Facebook page, three years ago, today. Dick Durbin (D-IL): “I’m going to take you back in history for a moment. When that Second Amendment was written, we were talking about the likelihood a person could purchase a muzzle-loading musket.” The implied conclusion, of course, is that the Second Amendment does not protect…
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Haitians, Cats, and Red Herrings
Do Haitians eat cats? I don't know and I don't care. I do care that the Biden-Harris administration is violating the Constitution, undermining the rule of law, and destroying the country by importing illegal aliens. That's the issue. Whether Haitians chow down on what we consider pets is not the issue, but a distraction from…
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False Abstraction
Surely one of the idiocies of the age is the oft-repeated, "Diversity is our strength." Anyone who repeats this bit of thoughtless group-speak wears his folly like a scarlet letter. I'll leave it to the reader to work out why the falsehood is false and how it illustrates the fallacy of false abstraction. Why do…
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Trump’s ‘Bloodbath’ Remark
Outdoing themselves in hyper-ventilatory TDS-fueled rage, Joe Scarborough and the rest of the mendacious insanos at MSDNC (aka MSNBC) and at other lamestream media outlets have seized upon Trump's bloodbath remark as if to illustrate Ayn Rand's point about context-dropping. Although I am no fan of Rand or her acolyte Peikoff as you can readily…
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The No True Scotsman or No True Muslim Fallacy
Substack latest. In logic a fallacy is not a false belief but a pattern of reasoning that is both typical and in some way specious. Specious reasoning, by the very etymology of the term, appears correct but is not. Thus a logical fallacy is not just any old mistake in reasoning, but a typical or recurrent mistake…
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A Mistake Many Make
They think that what is not immediately intelligible to them is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation. The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework,…
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Add This to the Fallacy File
Beware of Kafkatrapping!
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Race, Social Construction, and Lewontin’s Fallacy
I asked a correspondent what it means when leftists say that race is a social construct. Here is his response with my comments: What do they even mean? I wonder about that too. What could it mean to say that race is a "social construct"? Do they mean that there are no biological or ancestral differences…
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On the Correct Use of ‘Begging the Question’
On Thursday, June 21, 2012 I heard Dennis Prager on his nationally-syndicated radio show use 'beg the question' when what he meant was 'raise the question.' This is a very common mistake nowadays. I correct Mr. Prager because I love him. The visage of Jeff Dunham's 'Walter' signals that a language rant is in the…
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The Fallacy of Objections
Via Vlastimil V.: There is something "which may be called the Fallacy of objections, i.e. showing that there are objections against some plan, theory or system, and thence inferring that it should be rejected; when that which ought to have been proved, is, that there are more, or stronger objections against the receiving than the…
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The No True Scotsman or No True Muslim Fallacy
This is a substantial revision, in the light of recent events, of an entry from about six years ago. This post examines the fallacy that Antony Flew brought to our attention and suggests that 'No True Muslim' is an equally good name for it. ……………. In logic, a fallacy is not a false belief but…