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An exception is analytic philosopher John Searle, who called it an incorrect assumption that produces false dichotomies. Searle insists that "it is a condition of the adequacy of a precise theory of an indeterminate phenomenon that it should precisely characterize that phenomenon as indeterminate; and a distinction is no less a distinction for ...
Hasty generalization is the fallacy of examining just one or very few examples or studying a single case and generalizing that to be representative of the whole class of objects or phenomena. The opposite, slothful induction , is the fallacy of denying the logical conclusion of an inductive argument, dismissing an effect as "just a coincidence ...
If a fair coin lands on heads 10 times in a row, the belief that it is "due to the number of times it had previously landed on tails" is incorrect. [61] Inverse gambler's fallacy – the inverse of the gambler's fallacy. It is the incorrect belief that on the basis of an unlikely outcome, the process must have happened many times before.
Another feature of an argument based on false premises that can bedevil critics, is that its conclusion can in fact be true. Consider the above example again. It may well be that it has recently rained and that the streets are wet. This does nothing to prove the first premise, but can make its claims more difficult to refute.
Overconfidence effect, a tendency to have excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time. [5] [44] [45] [46] Planning fallacy, the tendency for people to underestimate the time it will take them to complete a ...
Such a proof is again a refutation by contradiction. A typical example is the proof of the proposition "there is no smallest positive rational number": assume there is a smallest positive rational number q and derive a contradiction by observing that q / 2 is even smaller than q and still positive.
In the context of knowledge management, the closed-world assumption is used in at least two situations: (1) when the knowledge base is known to be complete (e.g., a corporate database containing records for every employee), and (2) when the knowledge base is known to be incomplete but a "best" definite answer must be derived from incomplete information.
To promote a neutral (useless) product, a company must find or conduct, for example, 40 studies with a confidence level of 95%. If the product is useless, this would produce one study showing the product was beneficial, one study showing it was harmful, and thirty-eight inconclusive studies (38 is 95% of 40).