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Carl Sagan explains in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Appeal to ignorance: the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa. (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore, UFOs exist, and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe.
Definitional retreat – changing the meaning of a word when an objection is raised. [23] Often paired with moving the goalposts (see below), as when an argument is challenged using a common definition of a term in the argument, and the arguer presents a different definition of the term and thereby demands different evidence to debunk the argument.
An argument is a series of sentences, statements, or propositions some of which are called premises and one is the conclusion. [1] The purpose of an argument is to give reasons for one's conclusion via justification, explanation, and/or persuasion.
Opposition is a semantic relation in which one word has a sense or meaning that negates or, in terms of a scale, is distant from a related word. Some words lack a lexical opposite due to an accidental gap in the language's lexicon. For instance, while the word "devout" has no direct opposite, it is easy to conceptualize a scale of devoutness ...
An antithesis must always contain two ideas within one statement. The ideas may not be structurally opposite, but they serve to be functionally opposite when comparing two ideas for emphasis. [4] According to Aristotle, the use of an antithesis makes the audience better understand the point the speaker is trying to make. Further explained, the ...
Reverse psychology is a technique involving the assertion of a belief or behavior that is opposite to the one desired, with the expectation that this approach will encourage the subject of the persuasion to do what is actually desired.
For example, considering the proposition "all bachelors are unmarried:" its negation (i.e. the proposition that some bachelors are married) is incoherent due to the concept of being unmarried (or the meaning of the word "unmarried") being tied to part of the concept of being a bachelor (or part of the definition of the word "bachelor").
An early occurrence of proof by contradiction can be found in Euclid's Elements, Book 1, Proposition 6: [7] If in a triangle two angles equal one another, then the sides opposite the equal angles also equal one another. The proof proceeds by assuming that the opposite sides are not equal, and derives a contradiction.