The Fallacy List

[CapnAwesome]

The fallacy fallacy is the most important one to know.

[bennyboy]

Retrospective determinism – the argument that because an event has occurred under some circumstance, the circumstance must have made its occurrence inevitable.

I'd argue that this represents an Appeal to Fallacy.  It's not actually a category of logical fallacy, but rather a philosophical position that might be presented as one in an effort to quash part of a discussion.

For example, if you're arguing free will, and attempt to demonstrate that everything we know is either explainable by physics or not currently explainable, a Christian might call your physical examples "retrospective determinism" and argue that at a given moment, you COULD have done something different-- you just didn't.

Now, I'm not saying whether determinism is right or wrong.  But until it's finally settled, calling it a Fallacy of You-Refuse-to-Agree-with-Me doesn't actually make it a fallacy.


The same goes for Etymological Fallacy. This is not a logical fallacy, either, and in my opinion often hides a moving of the goalposts or an Argumentum ad Populum or an Appeal to Authority (like a dictionary editor). For example, I've often had frustrating arguments about the nature of mind; I'll be talking about the nature of qualia (the subjective experience of what things are like), the nature of ideas, and so on. But often someone will come up with something like: "Mind is the ability of the brain or some other material system to perform goal-oriented interactions in a given environment" or something, and point to a definition in http://www.ImRight.com where they have that same definition, despite the word having a completely different meaning for about five thousand years.

Now, I know how definitions like this come up: they get used in a special context (i.e. AI or robot engineering), but eventually become common enough that people have to know that "mind" sometimes means that. But if we're in a philosophical discussion, I'm not going to allow you to beg the question by using this kind of definition-- because it's not the phenomenon I'm interested in talking about. If you start crying about "Etymological Fallacy" because I won't let you change the meaning of a crucial word 30 pages into a thread, then I'm likely to lose interest in the thread and start fantasizing about duct tape, batteries and nipple clamps.

[Caligvla XXI]

For a good illustration of the fallacy of reification, do a Google image search on"'is nothing sacred' 'gahan wilson'." Should come up as the first image in the upper left of the screen.