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The following statements are examples of false equivalence: [3] "The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is no more harmful than when your neighbor drips some oil on the ground when changing his car's oil." The "false equivalence" is the comparison between things differing by many orders of magnitude: [ 3 ] Deepwater Horizon spilled 210 million US gal ...
Incomplete comparison – insufficient information is provided to make a complete comparison. Intentionality fallacy – the insistence that the ultimate meaning of an expression must be consistent with the intention of the person from whom the communication originated (e.g. a work of fiction that is widely received as a blatant allegory must ...
A false analogy is an informal fallacy, or a faulty instance, of the argument from analogy. An argument from analogy is weakened if it is inadequate in any of the above respects. The term "false analogy" comes from the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who was one of the first individuals to examine analogical reasoning in detail. [2]
An example is a probabilistically valid instance of the formally invalid argument form of denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent. [ 12 ] Thus, "fallacious arguments usually have the deceptive appearance of being good arguments, [ 13 ] because for most fallacious instances of an argument form, a similar but non-fallacious instance ...
Part of understanding fallacies involves going beyond logic to empirical psychology in order to explain why there is a tendency to commit or fall for the fallacy in question. [ 9 ] [ 1 ] In the case of the false dilemma , the tendency to simplify reality by ordering it through either-or-statements may play an important role.
In mathematics, certain kinds of mistaken proof are often exhibited, and sometimes collected, as illustrations of a concept called mathematical fallacy.There is a distinction between a simple mistake and a mathematical fallacy in a proof, in that a mistake in a proof leads to an invalid proof while in the best-known examples of mathematical fallacies there is some element of concealment or ...
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] [43] [44] [45] Planning fallacy, the tendency for people to underestimate the time it will take them to complete a ...
A seemingly simple question about the number of words in the English language immediately encounters questions about archaic forms, accounting for prefixes and suffixes, multiple definitions of a word, variant spellings, dialects, fanciful creations (like ectoplastistics from ectoplasm and statistics), [10] technical vocabulary, and so on.