β Scribed by Robert J. Fogelin; Timothy J. Duggan
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Fallacies are things that people commit, and when they commit them, they have done something wrong. Commiting a fallacy is a kind of wrongful doing.' Put this way, two questions naturally arise: (1) what kind of activity (or activities) are people engaged in when they commit fallacies and ( 2) in what way (or ways) are they doing something wrong. This essay is intended to sketch an answer to these questions.
One common definition of fallacies answers both of these questions at once: to commit a fallacy is to argue invalidly. On this definition, the activity is arguing, and the wrong committed is doing so invalidly. On the assumption that any proposed definition should conform to established intelligent usage, there is much to be said against this proposal. First of all, not every fallacious argument is invalid. Blatantly circular arguments, where the conclusion merely repeats a premise, are models of validity, and, with luck, can be sound as well, yet they are considered fallacies. So even if we restrict our attention to arguments, it is not true that invalidity fully captures the wrong-doing involved in commiting a fallacy. 2 Beyond this, we sometimes call things fallacious which are not instances of arguing at all. This arises in two ways. First, and this is now widely recognized, many of the so-called informal fallacies are not instances of bad arguments, but, instead, instances of improper substitutes for arguments. Into this category fall appeals to force, emotion, pity, etc. Here the wrong-doing seems to be an attempt to establish something by means other than argumentation where argumentation is demanded. Secondly, assumptions, principles, and ways of looking at things are sometimes called fallacies. Philosophers have spoken of the naturalistic fallacy, the genetic fallacy, the pathetic fallacy, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the descriptive fallacy, the intentional fallacy, the affective fallacy, and many more. And outside of philosophy, we also hear sophisticated people using the term 'fallacy' to characterize things which are neither arguments nor substitutes for arguments. For example, the China expert Philip Kuhn
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
Milton Friedman's article, 'The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits,' owes its appeal to the rhetorical devices of simplicity, authority, and finality. More careful consideration reveals oversimplification and ambiguity that conceals empirical errors and logical fallacies. I