Understanding logical fallacies is crucial to bringing order and discipline to our arguments. But fallacies are also the stock-in-trade of any keyboard warrior fighting it out in the online trenches. It can get tedious. “Fallacy bro” is a term used to pick out this annoying quality. The accusation of a fallacy often comes too quickly, or comes while missing a larger point. So, along with learning the fallacies and why they’re harmful, it’s a good idea to learn how a claim might look like it’s committing a fallacy without actually being guilty of it. This new series of posts will take on that task, starting with this introduction to the landscape.
The fallacies of interest here are “informal,” and an even more informal kind I’ll call heuristic, a kind of catch-all term for this purpose. These intellectual missteps are contrasted with the formal kind. Formal fallacies are mistakes in the logical structure of an argument. “If A, then B; B, therefore, A,” is a classic example of a formal fallacy, namely, affirming the consequent. It is invalid. B will come along if A happens, but that doesn’t mean B can’t arrive differently. Students are often given the ready-made example “If it is raining, then the ground is wet. The ground is wet. Therefore, is must be raining.” You can see something wrong there.
One way to fix this is to back up to just before the claim that the ground is wet, and replace it with “the ground is not wet.” This denies the consequent, which is valid (also know as modus tollens). We can then deduce that it is not raining (If P, then Q. Not Q. Therefore, not P). When it comes to formal logic at the introductory level, once you get a few of these under your belt, you move to a kind of pure reasoning through propositional variables, operators, and lines of deduction.
Informal fallacies are looser, and are more properly conceived as a topic in everyday language, rather than symbolic logic. A typical starting example is the ad hominem fallacy, which occurs when the person making the argument is the subject of attack rather than the argument itself. The straw man fallacy is another one encountered in the wild with some frequency. The straw man occurs when an argument is characterized, implicitly or explicitly, in a way that makes it easier to defeat. So it’s a mischaracterization that’s nevertheless not so extreme to be out of the family resemblance of the argument. It’s to attack an argument “made of straw” rather than the actual claim.
We can put the informal fallacies into buckets. The aforementioned ad hominem and straw man fallacies are fallacies of relevance, which as a group reflects ways of avoiding the relevant parts of the targeted argument. Another bucket holds fallacies of ambiguity, which use unclear or shifting terms that makes it too difficult to discern the exact claim to evaluate. A common example here is equivocation, and a frequent case of equivocation is the motte-and-bailey. Like a motte-and-bailey castle, the motte is easier to defend, the bailey is harder. The fallacy starts with the bailey, then retreats to the motte when challenged on the more difficult claim.
An example I can recall from my own experience comes in observing a debate between a believer and a skeptic on the topic of miracles. The common definition of “miracle” seemed to be the baseline, which is an interruption, major exception, or overriding of natural law by a divine power. After some back and forth, the believer turned to the skeptic, incredulous, and said “You don’t believe in miracles?! Look around you!”
The believer, in lodging this challenge, was relying on a non-literal use, like, the miracle of life, the miracle of nature, the miracle of the United States beating Russia in hockey at the 1980 Winter Olympics (“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!“). It’s a poetic use. You’d have to be jerk to quibble with this version of “miracle,” but it’s not the same as the version used at the start of the argument. The definition of the key term was shifted by a conversation participant, and in a way that made the claim easier to defend relative to the claim made at the beginning.
Perhaps because informal fallacies have fuzzy boundaries and require more holistic judgement to parse, some philosophers say they aren’t fallacies at all. That’s a dispute about whether a fallacy has to be formally invalid, which isn’t of interest here. We don’t have to go so far as to say that informal fallacies don’t even count as fallacies to make the point. That would be too easy. The lumping of formal with informal fallacies into a larger category, while making a distinction between them, has worked well enough for years. Informal fallacies really are important; it’s just that they’re sometimes overused as an accusation. That goes double for heuristic fallacies, the next on the docket.
Heuristic fallacies, for our purposes, is a bit of a miscellaneous category, and it could be subdivided further if we were determined. But that’s not necessary. The key thing is that we can conceive of three buckets of intellectual or argumentative mistakes: i. formal fallacies, ii. informal fallacies, and iii. heuristic fallacies. The focus in this series will be on ii and iii, in no particular or predetermined order.
Heuristic fallacies can include cognitive biases, illusions, and just good old fashioned mistakes that have been called “fallacy” somewhere along the way, and the name stuck. Confirmation bias is a common term that comes to mind, which is the selection or interpretation of information that favors one’s already established beliefs. This isn’t done with the conscious goal of excluding reliable information from the outside, but perhaps due to implicit bias or simply a feedback loop from a closed epistemic network that coheres strongly within itself. News consumption habits are vulnerable to creating and/or reinforcing this bias, especially with echo chambers and algorithmic feeds online.
Another alleged mistake is the Hot Hand Fallacy, a “fallacy” that causes a surprising level of controversy among debate participants. The mistake here is said to be projecting a meaningful pattern onto random events, or in this case, events controlled only by skill on a case-by-case basis. When a player hits two or three shots in a row, fans will insist that the player is on a hot streak, but random numbers sometimes cluster in seeming streaks too. Here, fans commit a kind of bizarro gambler’s fallacy.
Finally, wrapping up the introductory examples in the heuristic category is the Naturalistic Fallacy, which is taking something to be good because it is natural. Much has been written in examining this claim, but the common conception of it is similar to the is/ought problem, which is a claim that an “ought” (what ought to be done) cannot be derived from an “is” (the state of affairs alone). This is another “fallacy” that deserves the scare quotes, but like all the fallacies this series will examine, it gets at something useful. It only needs proper boundaries. The insight of the naturalistic fallacy can be seen when people appeal to nature to a gratuitous degree or make the appeal as a knock-down argument against another’s position. The fact that nature exhibits something certainly doesn’t make it right automatically.
That’s the lay of the land. The fallacies explored will not be limited to the specific ones mentioned in this piece. We’ll just see how far we can go. What a given post in the upcoming series will provide is a twofer – first an explanation of what the fallacy under discussion is, and then how the accusation of the fallacy can be overdone. The goal is to retain or even deepen our understanding of why certain classes of intellectual mistakes are mistakes in the first place, while taming the impulse to accuse others of those mistakes, because sometimes what appears to be a fallacy isn’t a fallacy, or indeed isn’t even a mistake at all.
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