What is the name of the fallacy being employed here:
“If I lose one hair from my head tonight, that will not make me bald. If I lose a second hair tomorrow, I still won’t be bald. Indeed, the loss of a strand of hair will never cause me to be bald. Therefore, baldness doesn’t exist.”
It has to do with ignoring the fact that “baldness” is not a binary property.
I’ve seen this fallacy described – with a name – before, but I can’t find it anywhere.
If stated a little differently, it isn’t a fallacy* at all and is in fact a rebuttal of the fallacy of false dilemma.
*For example if you said: “The loss of a single strand of hair is not a sufficiently significant event that it alone can signify the transition from the state of notbaldness to the state of baldness”, there would be no fallacy at all.
However, to argue that, since the loss of any individual hair cannot cause baldness, the state of baldness is unattainable, is either some fallacy of generalisation, or perhaps a variation on the fallacy of division.
First of all, there’s simply a wrong definition of ‘baldness.’ Baldness can be the complete lack of hair, but it is more often characterized by having notably less hair. Therefore, the loss of any hair, even one, is a process by which baldness can be obtained… it’s cald ‘balding’. I guess a false definition can be defined as a faulty premise, which is a logical fallacy.
The argument focuses on one hair being lost, and assuming the rest of the hair that is left will keep the man from being classified as bald. But of course, we all know that the hairs on the head, though they may seem uncountable at a glance, are rather countable, and the man will run out of them. To assume that, if I take one item away from a set of things one time, that I can keep it up forever and never run out makes the presumption that the count of that full set is infinite. That’s the fallacy of a hasty generalization.
Peace.
That sound suspiciously like this one I’ve heard before: You’re walking towards a door; at some point you have to cover 1/2 the distance to the door; then you have to cover 1/2 the remaining distance, and 1/2 that remaining distance, etc. and therefore you will never reach the door. Or something like that. I could have sworn there was a Straight Dope article on that one, but I can’t find it.
Zeno’s paradox, resolved by the observation that one is simply infinitely dividing the line or period until the event ot object is actually reached.
Hmmm…
I could swear that this has a specific name. Let me be more general in my description:
The fallacy argues that because there is no clear cut-off point at which a concept applies, that concept signifies nothing.
This doesn’t strike me as being inductive, nor a division fallacy, but maybe it is. I’m not convinced.
**Fallacy of the beard **
Actualy, AIUI, you have misstated the (false) conclusion. It shouldn’t be* ‘I can never become bald’* but instead ‘bald and hairy are the same thing.’
Here’s that fallacy in reverse: the trunk of my car can hold an infinite amount of sand.
Because there is no point at which I can close the trunk of my car with n grains of sand, but cannot close it with n+1 grains of sand. Therefore, I can keep filling my trunk with grains of sand until infinity and still be able to close it.
It’s the Sorites paradox.
It’s the comb over fallacy. In professional circles it’s sometimes called the “DT”, in tribute to Mr. Trump.
The Sorite Paradox, eh? It sound like it’s the opposite of the Black & White Fallacy, where one falsely treats a problem as having a simple, either/or solution, where in fact there is whole spectrum of “gray” situations in between.
In this, case, however, the person notes the various shades of gray, and falsely concludes that black and/or white are meaningless, or impossible to obtain, or somesuch other erroneous consclusion.
That’s simply not true. I’ll pour enough sand in the trunk of your car that you can’t close it, count the number of grains of sand in it, and declare that an upper bound on the number of grains of sand you can fit in the trunk of your car.
The correct form of the reverse paradox is this:
A man with no hair on his head is bald.
If a man is bald, giving him one more strand of hair won’t make him not bald.
Therefore, every man is bald.
But if you pour just enough sand into it that I can just barely close it (perhaps with great effort), can I not still close it with that amount of sand + one grain?
Maybe, maybe not. The point is, grains have non-zero volume, and so even if there’s no wasted space between them, there’s a certain number of grains whose total volume is equal to the volume of your trunk, and certain number of grains whose total volume is equal to twice the volume of your trunk. The greatest number of grains of sand that you can put in your trunk and close it is somewhere between those two numbers.
Strike that last post. The essence of the sorites paradox is that it’s operating with a property that is vague but appears to be well-defined and binary. There’s no vagueness in whether you can close your trunk–either you can, or you can’t. That’s why it’s not a valid instance of the paradox.
Thanks, ultrafilter.
Yep, it’s the Sorites paradox.
Thanks everyone!