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refute – The traditional meaning of refute is "disprove" or "dispel with reasoned arguments". It is now often used as a synonym for "deny". It is now often used as a synonym for "deny". The latter sense is listed without comment by M-W [ 110 ] and AHD4, [ 111 ] while CHAMBERS tags it as colloquial. [ 112 ]
A self-refuting idea or self-defeating idea is an idea or statement whose falsehood is a logical consequence of the act or situation of holding them to be true. Many ideas are called self-refuting by their detractors, and such accusations are therefore almost always controversial, with defenders stating that the idea is being misunderstood or that the argument is invalid.
Everyday (one word) is an adjective meaning "ordinary". [48] exacerbate and exasperate. Exacerbate means "to make worse". Exasperate means "to annoy". Standard: Treatment by untrained personnel can exacerbate injuries. Standard: Do not let Jack talk to the state trooper; he is tactless and will just exasperate her. expedient and expeditious.
During a typical Gish gallop, the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies, making it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate. [2] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert.
Synonyms of counterargument may include rebuttal, reply, counterstatement, counterreason, comeback and response. The attempt to rebut an argument may involve generating a counterargument or finding a counterexample .
A combination of "nut" (i.e., insane person) and "cherry picking", as well as a play on the word "nitpicking," nut picking refers to intentionally seeking out extremely fringe, non-representative statements from or members of an opposing group and parading these as evidence of that entire group's incompetence or irrationality.
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.
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.