Logical fallacy #1: that actual argumentation in real life can be reduced to some axiomatic system where you can just discard arguments as logical fallacies.
It's easy as a nerd to fell into that trap, but real life has much more nuances than those fallacy lists capture.
Case in point: "the no true scotchman fallacy". In real life groups CAN be argued to have certain characteristics to recongnise members from non-members, hypocritical members, non-practicing members, posers and "fakes". So the "no true scotchman" fallacy breaks down when you're dealing with such nuances.
Or take "appeal to tradition": 1) X is old or traditional 2) Therefore X is correct or better.
Well, it depends on how you define correct or better. If you value tradition and see conformance to it as the most important metric, then X is indeed better for you.
Who is to say what metric you should use for "correct", in issues like ethical ones, that are not clear cut and measurable as things are in the hard sciences and mathematics?
I am curious have you ever taken any philosophy classes?
> Well, it depends on how you define correct or better. If you value tradition and see conformance to it as the most important metric, then X is indeed better for you.
This is a common response when people first hear/read about "appeals to tradition." So common that that linked web page deals with this response:
Obviously, age does have a bearing in some contexts. For example, if a person concluded that aged wine would be better than brand new wine, he would not be committing an Appeal to Tradition. This is because, in such cases the age of the thing is relevant to its quality. Thus, the fallacy is committed only when the age is not, in and of itself, relevant to the claim.
Just for completeness, the following is from rationalwiki has the following to say about your beloved "scotchman":
"Broadly speaking, the fallacy does not apply if there is a clear and well understood definition of what membership in a group requires and it is that definition which is broken (e.g., "no honest man would lie like that!", "no Christian would worship Satan!" and so on). "[1]
I know you're doing it in jest, but it's interesting how often the tendency to 'well-actually' minor, irrelevant factoids and the tendency to reduce conversations to axiomatic systems appear together. It's part of the hacker desire to be Less Wrong (TM).
But in doing so, they are More Wrong (TM). Both situations involve missed social cues. Correcting a minor point is another way of saying you place a higher priority on correctness for its own sake - even if doing so prevents you from reaching higher goals - than you do on understanding.
These things can make it hard to for non-hackers to converse with hackers, and vice versa.
> These things can make it hard to for non-hackers to converse with hackers, and vice versa.
Discussion should be about connecting and learning, not one-upping.
This distinction is why the Internet 'communities' almost never are. Nerds love to be pedantic while not realizing it doesn't add anything to the discussion. Actually, it potentially poisons the discussion, steering it towards who is more right, rather than actually, y'know discussing things.
"But, someone was WRONG!" It doesn't matter, and nobody cares.
Yes, and the ironic thing is that the 'well-actually' person is often /less/ correct in that they miss the main point in pursuit of compliance with arbitrary rules.
Being pedantic is akin to writing beautiful code that never gets used.
It's not necessarily correctness for its own sake. Sometimes it's the linguistic equivalent to pointing out a spot of mustard on someone's shirt, which is a courtesy in my book.
That being said, an audience member pointing this out to someone on stage is a net negative. But I'm not convinced that I should ignore irrelevant errors altogether, especially for errors that people use as signal levels of education or intelligence (nuclear and nucular, you're and your, etc.).
To be more specific - the notion that it's a courtesy is mistaken. It's considered rude at best, and the general public may (rightly) interpret a well-actually as a mark of low social or emotional intelligence.
So, we must carefully consider what really signals intelligence.
Linguistic errors pale in comparison to errors of understanding like missing the point.
> it's interesting how often the tendency to 'well-actually' minor, irrelevant factoids and the tendency to reduce conversations to axiomatic systems appear together.
Simplicity is seductive, especially when you're convinced that the minor factoid you're harping on is something you're absolutely sure is correct. If you take a situation and reduce it down to the abstract axiom that you know is true, you can assure yourself that your interpretation of the situation is correct regardless of any nuances in the reality. Because "facts".
This is the definition of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is named from the effort to get the fundamentals right. In doing so, they completely isolated and cut themselves off from reality.
You're completely misrepresenting what the No True Scotsman fallacy is. The key characteristic of a No True Scotsman fallacy is that the arguers original claim is revised to handle a counterexample. In the titular example, the arguer originally says "no Scotsman does x," and the obvious implied definition of "Scotsman" is simply a man from Scotland. But when faced with a counterexample (a man from Scotland who does do x), the arguer revises the original claim by adding the word "true." Under this revelation, the arguer's original claim is not an actual claim about what men from Scotland do, but rather a proposed definition for the term "true Scotsman."
Most of the time I see No True Scotsman called, it's because they were using ordinary imprecise language even though their group is real and the word they used for it is reasonable. Not because they were proposing a 'true' definition.
Such as 'no vegan eats meat' 'what if they had fries at mcdonalds with secret meat in the oil' 'okay no vegan purposefully eats meat' 'ha! you narrowed the group! no true scotsman! you lose!'
>You're completely misrepresenting what the No True Scotsman fallacy is. The key characteristic of a No True Scotsman fallacy is that the arguers original claim is revised to handle a counterexample.
Yes. I don't think I'm misrepresenting it. Revising an original claim to handle a counterexample is something that is essential in actual conversations. It can just mean you forgot an important distinction in your original claim.
>Under this revelation, the arguer's original claim is not an actual claim about what men from Scotland do, but rather a proposed definition for the term "true Scotsman."
That's beside the point. In real life conversations, we often use the term X to mean the essense of X (the true X) and not just the bare notion of X. That is, there's nothing fallacious about the following exchange:
The example you give about metal fans and Bieber is a perfect example of No True Scotsman. The term "metal fan" will be widely understood to mean "someone who likes metal music," not "someone who never listens to anything other than metal music." The initial claim is clearly false, so the person revises the claim to contain the word "true," which reduces the argument to nothing more than "well I refuse to consider you a metal fan if you listen to Bieber."
Understanding that "life can't be reduced to some axiomatic system" is a really important part of being a well-rounded human.
But I quibble on calling it a logical fallacy. It is emphatically not a logical fallacy. That's the whole point you're trying to make - which is that logic itself is limited in its ability to capture the totality of human experience.
Other philosophers call this the limits of Reason (capital R) or the failure of the Enlightenment. But calling it 'Logical Fallacy #1' undermines the very lesson you are trying to impart.
But maybe not: Consider this. Many, many formal systems describe behavior and not some underlying truth. The question of whether reality can even be reduced to a formal system is still open.
From the above axioms, we can reasonably conclude that what formal systems prove is provably true only insofar as the axioms reflect underlying reality exactly.
In 'social' formal systems like the one that describes logical fallacies, it is clear that context is inherently lacking, that the axioms are approximations, and that the system cannot be expected to accurately describe reality.
Thus, we can formally conclude that logical fallacies are, well, approximations.
Well, I might be too dense to grasp what you're saying, but I don't really understand it. I'm not sure, for starters, which axioms you're referring to.
It seems worth noting, however, that there is, and there should be, a distinction between formal logical fallacies and informal logical fallacies. The latter are what I have in mind when you use the term "social formal systems".
Mistaking ad hominem, or argument from authority, etc., for a formal fallacy is a huge mistake - the one OP seems to be referring to.
All I'm trying to say here to you is that there is no need to resort to formal systems theory, because the taxonomy of informal fallacies never was meant to be considered illogical in the same way that Affirming the Consequent (a formal fallacy)is.
Well, OP is saying that fallacies in logic are really only fallacies if the assumptions that constitute the definition of that fallacy actually apply to a particular situation. Because situations differ so much, context is critical, and OP is saying that people often incorrectly define real-world social situations as instances of logical fallacies.
> "In real life groups CAN be argued to have certain characteristics to recognize members from non-members, hypocritical members, non-practicing members, posers and "fakes". So the "no true scotchman" fallacy breaks down when you're dealing with such nuances."
On the other hand, where this most frequently pops up^, there is frequently no authoritative definition of what constitutes membership. Where there is, there is frequently no authoritative interpretation of the definition.
^ Any internet argument involving religion. The best you can typically manage is membership of particular sects which happen to have an agreed upon defining body. If the Pope says that you are not a Roman Catholic, you are pretty much by definition not a Roman Catholic. However if I define "Christian" in clear unambiguous terms, then point to my definition when asserting that somebody who claims to be a Christians is not a true Christian, then really I have said little of interest. That person may very well be a Christian by a definition other than my own (for instance, according to their definition), and I have justification for asserting that my definition is the true definition and theirs is false.
The issue here is not quite that there is a true Scotsman fallacy going on. Rather it is a failure to agree to the definition of terms before engaging in the discussion.
The way I look at it is that arguments are either factual or normative. Facts can be easy to test even if they are counter-intuitive. Normative, since you can't derive "is" from "ought" alone, means you are ultimately resting the conclusion on moral or value-based axioms. While people can reasonably disagree on the value axioms themselves, there might still be logical errors in the implications that flow from it, so it can still be useful to engage in a dialect to test for that.
They aren't intended as some magical argument ending tool, they are designed as reminders are common flaws in logic. They are more for personal use than use against others, because it is easy to fall into bad logic, even more so when emotions (notoriously immune to logic) are involved. Being aware of them will help you be self-aware.
RE: "No True Scotsman" -- you missed the point a bit. The point is that it is a shell game. "No hackers news reader would EVER do X" ... I link to a hackers news reader doing EXACTLY X ... "Well, no REAL hackers news reader" -- it is a informal fallacy about goal moving basically. You can't add "no REAL abc" to excuse counterpoints, because it means that ANYTHING I say / prove / point out, you will always claim "no TRUE hacker news reader would do that", making the argument pointless.
Re: Appeal to tradition. The point is that tradition has no inherent value, and doesn't relate to correctness. If my mother thought 2+2=17... and she taught that to me, and I taught that to my children, that would be a tradition in our family. The point is that just cause something is traditional doesn't mean it is correct.
"Who is to say what metric you should use for "correct", in issues like ethical ones, that are not clear cut and measurable as things are in the hard sciences and mathematics?"
See this talk[1] by Sam Harris for an argument as to why that is an illusion. In essence he argues that we make axiomatic claims all the time in areas for which there aren't specifically quantifiable goals. In terms of morality the metric is the well-being of conscious creatures. If you argue that there's something else that's more important than the well being of conscious creatures then you probably don't know what you mean.
Likewise with the idea of 'health'. 'Health' is a squishy idea. But if you were to argue that "My idea of health is involuntarily vomiting 6 times a day" we'd have nothing to discuss.
Thanks coldtea, I think you're onto something important. I'll try to expand on it, tho it's hard to do this briefly.
People reason (and discuss) in several modes, which are ordinarily mixed freely. Deductive, a.k.a. logical (in the proper sense) reasoning is one, and the fallacy-or-not analysis is strictly applicable.
Another mode is that of empirical science, which is basically inductive. You can't prove logically that, for example, substance X causes condition C, but you can establish a good probability by isolating the case, ruling out other factors, showing that the relation is reliably reproducible, etc..
A third mode is humanistic or intuitive. It is an error to suppose that this is unreliable or categorically invalid. Say you have thefts at a workplace, and question employees, and most answer straightforwardly, but one is evasive, furtive, avoids eye contact, can't explain simple events - despite the inapplicability of the logical or scientific modes, this is a rational basis for directing suspicion.
Errors of a meta variety enter when one mode is evaluated by the standards for another. E.g., this writer depicts "slippery slope" as a fallacy of logic by inserting "inevitably" in his interpretation of claims - attributing to the argument-maker the claim that A inevitably leads to B. But in fact "slippery slope" belongs to the third mode, and as such it can be valid - censors do tend to expand their categories, and the actual claim may be, not that the progression is inevitable, but instead that it's unacceptable to go further in that direction - and on this kind of interpretataion there may be no fallacy at all.
It's a good list of logic fallacies, but we just have ot make sure we don't try to apply the refutations in the context of other modes of reasoning.
Exactly. These are fallacies that are constrained to arguments that are logical in nature. That is, the agreed upon rules of argument and discussion is to use logic. And most arguments even of your second or third category use elements of logic to help strengthen the argument.
However, not all arguments are meant to be or can be solved with pure logic. Otherwise we'd all be Kantians. People will intentionally argue using Appeal to Emotion or Slippery Slope and, within certain contexts, this can be perfectly fine. Just throwing around "That's a logical fallacy, therefore your argument is invalid" is the perfect example of Fallacy Fallacy.
Even worse, just relying on having a codex of fallacies to throw around into any context reduces most arguments into petty squabbles and making it too easy to dismiss your opposition. But for discussions of the second and third mode you need to engage the person and get to the root of their ideas and argue using the proper rules and context.
It is absolutely correct to question the underlying premises. All the modes have them. It's just that the evaluations are not amenable to the same standards.
E.g., you can cast doubt on a scientific hypothesis of "A causes B" by pointing out a previously overlooked possible common cause. Or e.g., the polygraph is fairly bogus, not because of the mere logical possibility of false positives and false negatives, but rather because of their relative magnitudes and the poor support of the premises (about physiological correlates of lying or truth-telling). The flaws are strictly defined in one mode, approximate or probabilistic in another.
I thought Stephen Toulmin had the most useful formulation of argumentation.
"Toulmin's practical argument is intended to focus on the justificatory function of argumentation, as opposed to the inferential function of theoretical arguments. Whereas theoretical arguments make inferences based on a set of principles to arrive at a claim, practical arguments first find a claim of interest, and then provide justification for it. Toulmin believed that reasoning is less an activity of inference, involving the discovering of new ideas, and more a process of testing and sifting already existing ideas—an act achievable through the process of justification."
It's easy as a nerd to fell into that trap, but real life has much more nuances than those fallacy lists capture.
Case in point: "the no true scotchman fallacy". In real life groups CAN be argued to have certain characteristics to recongnise members from non-members, hypocritical members, non-practicing members, posers and "fakes". So the "no true scotchman" fallacy breaks down when you're dealing with such nuances.
Or take "appeal to tradition": 1) X is old or traditional 2) Therefore X is correct or better.
Well, it depends on how you define correct or better. If you value tradition and see conformance to it as the most important metric, then X is indeed better for you.
Who is to say what metric you should use for "correct", in issues like ethical ones, that are not clear cut and measurable as things are in the hard sciences and mathematics?