The Fallacy List

[Silver]

It has changed since I last viewed it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

Appeal to the stone (argumentum ad lapidem) – dismissing a claim as absurd without demonstrating proof for its absurdity.

Argument from silence (argumentum ex silentio) – where the conclusion is based on the absence of evidence, rather than the existence of evidence.

Divine fallacy (argument from incredulity) – arguing that, because something is so incredible/amazing/ununderstandable, it must be the result of superior, divine, alien or paranormal agency.

[bennyboy]

I'd like to add one: Appeal to Fallacy.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I'd like to add one: Appeal to Fallacy.

And "Appeal to Appealing", where the argument is "it would certainly be nice if..."

[Minimalist]

Argument from silence (argumentum ex silentio) – where the conclusion is based on the absence of evidence, rather than the existence of evidence.

Frequently mis-applied by religitards and also incomplete as stated above.  The more precise definition should be absence of evidence where such evidence should be expected.  For instance, there is no evidence that Martians did or did not invade the Ohio Valley in the 17th century.  Since there should be evidence of such an event and there is none we must conclude for now that any such claim is bogus.

This needs to be distinguished from the more classic religitard claim such as when archaeologists dig down to 10th century BC levels in Jerusalem and find a shitty little one-horse village instead of the great and glorious imperial capital that the bible claims should be there.  This is not "absence of evidence."  It is the absence of evidence which will support their claims and those are two completely different things.

[bennyboy]

I think this argumentum ex silentio is really a hidden question of semantics.

If you say God is everywhere, then everything in the universe is evidence. It just doesn't support the assertion that God exists.

[Mister Agenda]

Thanks for sharing the name of 'Appealing to the stone', Lutrinae. I've been seeing that one a lot lately.

[Mister Agenda]

Another one I run into regularly seems to be a category of argument from consequences or force, and it's similar to Pascal's Wager (sometimes it IS Pascal's Wager): when the person cites the consequences of not believing their claim and also refers to how little the cost is to you to believe it in comparison to the cost of not believing it if you're wrong.

I've got 50 million dollars of werewolf insurance for you and it's just $5 a month...how can you afford NOT to buy that just in case?

[Silver]

Some other good ones I particularly like:

Argument to moderation (false compromise, middle ground, fallacy of the mean, argumentum ad temperantiam) – assuming that the compromise between two positions is always correct.

Etymological fallacy – which reasons that the original or historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its actual present-day usage.

Historian's fallacy – occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision.[40] (Not to be confused with presentism, which is a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas, such as moral standards, are projected into the past.)

Nirvana fallacy (perfect solution fallacy) – when solutions to problems are rejected because they are not perfect.

Psychologist's fallacy – an observer presupposes the objectivity of his own perspective when analyzing a behavioral event.

Referential fallacy[52] – assuming all words refer to existing things and that the meaning of words reside within the things they refer to, as opposed to words possibly referring to no real object or that the meaning of words often comes from how we use them.

Reification (concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) – a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating as a "real thing" something that is not a real thing, but merely an idea.

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

[vorlon13]

Because ISEDDSO.

[Silver]

I would like to use these fallacies at work.

Boss: You need to do this.
Me: I don't think so. I do not recognize your appeal to authority.