Extralogical Reasoning Phallacies
Assumptive Premise, Phallacy of
A few principals of sophistry (the art of deceitful argumentation): If your preferred explanation (and/or conclusion) can’t explain the facts/evidence, don’t change the explanation (and/or conclusion); change the facts (/evidence). If the agreed upon premises don’t lead to your conclusion, don’t change the conclusion; change the premises and pretend they’re agreed upon.
People don’t just disagree about conclusions and thought processes, but also the individual premises themselves. In some cases, manipulators will pretend things are agreed upon that aren’t, or will conveniently assume they are.
Cause and Effect Phallacy
Causes and effects are often confused; sometimes things can be both, making it all the worse. But one is often more than the other. During mental health crises, sometimes the mind tries to attach emotions to context in order rationalize or understand them. For instance, the subconscious of a person predisposed to anxiety will try to latch onto whatever external causes will explain it. When someone’s subconscious adjusts to stressful circumstances, he/she might falsely attribute the adjustment to the resultant change in conscious mindset, rather than something the subconscious did on its own. As a third example, setting goals is more of an effect of motivation than a cause.
Conventional Manifestation, Phallacy of
Things can manifest different ways: People can like learning and not like school; people can like mathematics but not math BOOKS; people can like sports but not organized sports; you can believe in a loving god or be religious and not be Christian; you can be ambitious in an area unrelated to making a living.
Someone commits the phallacy of conventional manifestation when they suggest something that doesn’t manifest itself in the standard way doesn’t manifest itself at all. In many cases, this phallacy could also be attributed to the converse fallacy. For example, if you’re a Christian, you’ll almost certainly believe in a loving God, but you can believe in a loving god without being a Christian.
Chronological Phallacy
History is told form hindsight, but it happens in real time. History is messy; any coherent narrative of historical events necessarily belies the manner of it’s true unfolding.
In a historical context, it’s often convenient to explain events based on a neat timeline of other events that might have led to it. For example, if one wants to explain a scientific discovery, it makes the historian’s job a lot easier if each discovery led to each premise of the discovery’s clearest explanation, all in the same order. But history is rarely this neat. Oftentimes, scientists know nothing of the work of others before them—or it simply didn’t influence them. When it comes to large-scale historical events, this type of reasoning is especially dubious, and even if true, it’s usually unprovable.
Evidence, Phallacy of
This is similar to the phallacy of poor premises. The phallacy of evidence occurs when someone acknowledges a premise AS FACT but denies it as EVIDENCE because it’s used to explain an improbable conclusion. However improbable, there is still evidence that aliens have a presence on Earth. Human history is long enough and there have been enough government conspiracies that it’s all but inevitable that SOME evidence will exist for numerous types of spectacular events, true or not.
False Interpolation, Phallacy of
Like most things in the Universe, history is nonlinear. A historical trend doesn’t always happen continuously from point A to B; there can be deviations in between, often prolonged ones. Sometimes, scientific theories go out of style before coming back in, and the reduction in racial discrimination has not been as continuous as most think.
False Objective:
Principles of sophistry: If you can’t prove what you want to prove, prove something else and pretend they’re the same thing: If you can’t refute what you want to refute, refute something else and pretend they’re the same thing; if you can’t criticize what someone does, criticize their execution of an objective they never had and pretend they did.
This is the converse of the phallacy of False Objective and is can be used as a strawman.
Indications, Phallacy of
It’s easy to confuse the symptoms or indications of a property with the property itself, or the manifestation of it. You can usually have the symptoms of a condition without the disease itself, for example. You can have the indications of an ability or natural ability without the ability or talent itself—such as KNOWING about something without (or much less) UNDERSTANDING.
Intent, Phallacy of
Oftentimes, people have questionable objectives despite executing the objectives fairly well. When books, comic books, television shows etc. are adapted into movies, filmmakers may choose objectives for their adaption that critics don’t approve of, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t carry them out well. Writers and directors may create a character that critics don’t like, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the actor who played it didn’t have a good performance. Of course, it’s not necessarily wrong to criticize someone’s objectives, but it’s not the same thing—and failure to make the distinction can lead to miscommunications. It can also be used for sophistic purposes as means of straw-manning.
Irrationality’s Phallacy
The irrationality’s phallacy is one of the greatest indications of unbelief in logic. This phallacy occurs when someone suggests that just because they believe their conclusion to be correct that any thought process or chain of reasoning that CLAIMS to lead to the same conclusion is also logical or correct. For example, the sky is blue on a cloudless day, but that doesn’t mean it’s logical or correct to say the sky is blue because God’s in a good mood or it’s a sign you’re going to have an eventful evening.
Knowledge Phallacy/Lesson Phallacy
Knowing doesn’t always lead to understanding; understanding doesn’t always lead to proficiency; no amount of the latter three guarantees wisdom; and no amount of any of them grants someone infallibility.
There’s no such thing as a guaranteed benefit; yet almost everyone insists otherwise. The lesson phallacy occurs when someone suggests that exposure to the lessons guarantees that they were learned or remembered. One’s appreciation for what he/she learn plays a central role in how much he/she benefits from it, especially in the months and years following exposure. This is especially true with respect to the nuanced, unspoken lessons that lead to enlightenment, wisdom, and ability to apply to apply knowledge, especially to OTHER areas. People are also more likely to REMEMBER the knowledge they gain if they appreciate it. The LESSON phallacy pertains to EXPOSURE; the KNOWLEDGE phallacy to APPLICATION.
Logic, Phallacy of
Logic is the study of a thought process. Logic doesn’t care about conclusions beyond its relationship to thought processes. A conclusion can’t be inherently right, wrong, or irrational, only the thought process. For example, claims that aliens are running the government are (or ought to be) considered insane because of the improbability a person could come up with a plausible thought process that leads to it.
Objective Phallacy
If you want to find out what someone did, look at WHAT they did, not what they SAY they did. As stated, almost everyone insists that there’s such a thing as a guaranteed benefit. Having the right objectives and intentions are obviously important and obviously should be taken into account. But they don’t guarantee anywhere near as much as most people think, and what matters most in life is what someone DOES. There are any number of ways someone can fail to reach their objectives—and this assumes they’re sincere in the first place. Many schemers are instinctively aware of the objective phallacy and know that if they they can present their objectives well enough, they can trick people into thinking they reached them.
Outcome Phallacy
The quality of a decision is based on the thought and information-gathering processes that led to it, not the consequences, good or bad. The phallacy occurs when someone bases the merits of an action based on the consequences.
Phenomenological Phallacy
In my experience, no matter how much evidence you have to support a conclusion, if the evidence doesn’t in one way or another jive with what someone already believes, they will in one way or another deny or dismiss the evidence, even if it means denying and/or making up facts (what someone already believes could be a blind faith in authorities).
A phenomenology is something readily observed but inadequately explained by accepted knowledge. Much of scientific research centers on attempts to explain the many that exist—that is, the ones scientists don’t deny due to a lack of satisfactory explanation. The phallacy occurs when someone denies or dismisses evidence or its default conclusion on the basis that it lacks what they consider to be an acceptable conceptual explanation. In addition to the inertia in people’s thinking, the causation bias plays a major role, the natural human tendency to be way too quick to assume that the relationship between cause and effect will be ascertainable and satisfying. In the medical field, authorities have numerous times dismissed data confirming the lethality of certain practices because it wasn’t explained by prevailing theories—and people died.
Poor Conclusions, Phallacy of
This occurs when someone denies the truth of a premise because (in their mind) the premise doesn’t sufficiently explain the relevant conclusion. Someone may deny a student has problems outside of school because they don’t feel it adequately explains the student problems IN school. Its converse is the phallacy of poor premises—when one denies a conclusion on the basis of false (or believed to be false) premises.
Poor Premises
Logic is a means of finding truth, but each can exist in the absence of the other. Just as it’s possible to assume a thought process to be correct or logical just because the conclusion is true, someone may deny the conclusion based on the thought process. If I suggest the sky is blue because God’s in a good mood, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong that the sky is blue.
Precursor Phallacy
Just because B is always preceded by A doesn’t necessarily mean that B automatically follows from it. A certain amount of knowledge always precedes understanding—but not always. Having the prerequisites for something doesn't mean you have (or understand) that thing. Unlike what most think, there’s no such thing as a guaranteed benefit.
Quantity Heuristic Phallacy
The quantity heuristic, a derivative of the availability heuristic bias, is people’s tendency to confuse quantities and percentages. A small percentage of a sufficiently large quantity is still a large quantity. This can give the misimpression that a small quantity of something is a large percentage of it, or larger than it is.
The total QUANTITY of relevant information in a complex system (an ecosystem, society, economy, etc.) is absolutely massive, but since people often have large quantities of information about them, they all but automatically assume it’s a much higher PERCENTAGE of the relevant information than is actually the case.
There are two ways to measure the commonality of an event: One is simply how often it happens; the second is the PERCENTAGE of the time it happens for every CHANCE it has to happen. But if something gets enough chances, it can happen pretty regularly even though it happens a small percentage of the time it has a chance to happen. If only seven percent of local, state, and federal government officers and law enforcers were corrupt, this would still total hundreds of thousands of people. This can easily make corruption seem more common than the reality (movies may play the larger role). A primary care doctor that sees a lot of patients could easily (at least intuitively) overestimate the prevalence of disease, given he’ll inevitably meet many with it.
Relevance, Phallacy of
Things can be relevant for many reasons. When something’s relevance is contrary to or LESS THAN what’s assumed or proposed, people are too quick to write it off as irrelevant, when it may just be that its relevance is misunderstood. Sometimes, I suspect, people don’t ask people questions because they’d be skeptical of the answers. Even if they have a good reason to be skeptical, asking the question can still give you potentially relevant information. Especially if it’s a question about someone’s life, the very fact they chose to say what they said tells you at least SOMETHING about them. The significance of IQ tests, the NFL combine, preseason sports, and common wisdom have been questioned, often for good reasons, and people have made the extreme opposite mistake of saying they mean nothing. They all mean something, but none mean close to everything. Something can be INFORMATIVE without being DETERMINATE.
Rule-of-Thumb Phallacy
The rule-of-thumb phallacy is committed when someone confuses a rule-of-thumb used for guessing something with its actual definition. The quality of the finances of the average citizen could be guessed by looking at the GDP, especially in a democratic society, but it’s still perfectly possible for the GDP to be high while the finances of the average citizen to be down; this creates the illusion that GDP actually measures it. The murder rate, a good proxy for guessing crime rates, is not a measurement or definition of that thing. The merit of a decision is based (or ought to be based) on the quality of the thinking and information-gathering process, not its consequences, since no one can predict the future. However, looking at the consequences can help you make a good guess about its prudence (or lack thereof), in addition to psychologically reinforcing whatever lessons can be gleaned from it; and many people falsely (or impractically) define a decision by its consequences.
Skeptics Phallacy
There are plent of things to be skeptical about, but that can’t make it wrong. You also don’t have to have an opinion on a given issue; opinions are almost always OPTIONAL. A central axiom of extralogical reasoning is that in life, it’s wise to assume that having good thinking and judgment has more to do with avoiding being wrong in consequential ways than it does your ability to ascertain correct answers. In other words, it’s wise to consider misbeliefs and false assumptions more dangerous than correct answers are beneficial. A flaw of the human brain is that it doesn’t actively distinguish between WHAT it observes and how it INTERPRETS what it observes; left to its own devises, it will blur observation and interpretation together.
The above creates the illusion that opinions are mandatory, when they’re almost always optional, and it also makes people prone to jump to conclusions. Finally, if you come to conclusions prematurely and you turn out to be wrong, it becomes harder to realize it. For these reasons, extralogical reasoning suggests that it’s good for people’s immediate and general thinking to be very particular about the opinions they choose to take on.
Smoking Gun Phallacy
Smoking gun arguments are arguments that alone can (more or less) verify a conclusion. Supportive arguments are arguments than lend credence to a conclusion but can’t alone verify them, but several of them can (or come very close). The phallacy occurs when someone dismisses an overall argument on the basis that it doesn’t have a single smoking gun even though it may have several supportive arguments.
Statistical Increase Phallacy
Just because something INCREASES the chances of something doesn’t necessarily put it over fifty percent. Suggesting otherwise is an instance of this phallacy.
Sub Ultimate Cause Phallacy
A trigger is something “small” that sets something into motion that is already on the edge of being set into motion. For a mentally ill person, this is a small stressor like a vaginal period, a bad day at work, or lack of sleep. A catalyst is a larger/more “intrusive” stressor or force that sets events into motion that are also already prone to being set into motion. A catalyst is usually a severe case of what would normally be called a trigger, like an especially bad period or a great lack of sleep. An immediate cause (sometimes called a proximate cause) is a catalyst and secondary cause that occurs shortly before an event. When kids go on shooting sprees after being ridiculed by their friend’s, the latter is the immediate cause, while the ultimate cause is mental illness; if a mentally ill person has an episode after a devastating personal crisis, the personal crisis is the immediate cause. An ultimate cause is the main or “true” reason why something has happened.
The sub-ultimate cause phallacy occurs when a sub-ultimate cause is confused with an ultimate cause. People with addictions, mental illnesses, or unresolved psychological issues often mistake ordinary stressors as the true causes of episodes. When distressed, the HTO (human thinking organ) naturally tries to “latch onto” whatever causes and effects will explain why the person feels the way they do.
Standards, Phallacy of
How you perceive people is heavily influenced by the standards/expectations you set for them. Political moderates of a logical and scientific bent living in liberal strongholds may find themselves falsely assuming they’re more conservative than liberal, but it may just be that they hold the latter to higher standards. People tend to dislike heretics more than infidels not just because they’re a greater threat, but because they hold them to higher standards. To an 18th century Protestant, Jews and Muslims are so far off from what they are it becomes easy to not take them seriously enough to dislike them. When someone’s standards and/or expectations rise faster than someone is improving, this can obfuscate the fact that they are improving, just not at the rate people expect.
Truthful Premises Phallacy
The rules of logic make clear that no number of truthful premises ensures a correct and/logical conclusion. One who suggests otherwise has committed the truthful premises phallacy. This is something to watch out for when people try to convince you of theories relating to the human body. On the one hand, many things about the body are known; on the other hand, many things aren’t. This makes it all too easy for companies to find plausible explanations for almost anything.
Utility Phallacy/Phallacy of Truth
Just because something is useful doesn’t necessarily mean it’s correct, or entirely so—the utility phallacy. Just because something is true doesn’t necessarily mean it’s useful—phallacy of truth.
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