There’s a particular style of fallacious argument that tries to explain one mystery by appealing to another. It’s most prominent in the case of ‘quantum mind’-approaches—the mind is mysterious, so is quantum theory, maybe one explains the other?
I vaguely recall there being some short, snappy term for it, but googling around hasn’t yielded any good results. I thought it was ‘economy of mystery’, on the account that one motivation for it might be to keep the total amount of mysteries as small as possible—we haven’t really explained anything, but rather than two, we’re not left with one unexplained thing. So I guess, two questions:
Is there another term for this I’m failing to recall/find?
If not, would ‘economy of mystery’ work? How about ‘parsimony of mystery’?
I’m unsure whether the OP means that you have a hunch (or hypothesis) that one unsolved issue may be solved by explaining it as a manifestation of another unsolved issue. That in itself is no fallacy: you can argue that physics does so when explaining one force by way of another force. Of course the examples in the OP are rather far-fetched, but as a hypothesis this argument is not fallacious.
If the OP means that you have a mysterious phenomenon, and your explanation consists of introducing a new, also unknown phenomenon, this is akin to the vita dormativa reasoning in a play by Molière who parodied a form of fallacious reasoning: a sleeping potion causes sleep because it contains a sleep-inducing element.
I think there are two fallacies at least here anyway.
The easy one isn’t the the OP wants. A syllogistic error fallacy of the Undistributed Middle. Here that is something a bit like A \implies B, C \implies B, B \therefore C \iff A.
But the specific appeal to mystery, rather than an other falsely common attribute is a bit harder. You get Appeals to Mystery, but that is a different fallacy again.
The OP’s fallacy seems to depend upon a specific characteristic of mystery to invoke a false explanatory relationship. In the end suggesting that all mysterious things come from a common source and share a common explanation. That starts to sound more like mysticism than simple fallacy.
This specific case would be “Quantum woo.” Consciousness is a mysterious phenomenon and no one really understands it. Quantum mechanics is, to a layman, mysterious and no one really understands it, but Scientists use it to explain mysterious phenomena. Therefore, quantum handwave, QM can explain consciousness.
Beyond that, I’m not aware of a more general term.
Is it, not so much a fallacy, as it is just simply explaining something wrong, even if it’s due to not understanding it?
This would be along similar lines as the Dunning-Kruger effect. That is, the person making the argument believing they understand what they’re talking about when they don’t (and often getting it wrong in the process).
How about an appeal to faith. That is, when you have something you can’t explain (whether or not it CAN be explained is another issue), so instead of looking for a logical reason, you explain that the person just needs to have faith that it’s true.
If you want to get away from a fallacy that will inherently invoke religion, you can go with an Appeal to Tradition. In short, it’s true because it’s always been like this.
Both of those (appeal to faith and appeal to tradition) seem to come from a place of ‘it’s right because I said it is’, which IME, tends to turn into the person making the argument getting angry about being challenged and eventually saying ‘why do you ALWAYS have to correct me’ or ‘why do you always have to argue about everything’. Those people, again IME, have a hard time understanding that I’m not arguing, I’m trying to understand.
Appeal to mystery is sort of the reverse, though—the cases I’m thinking of concern a purported explanation, that however is itself mysterious, and is in fact suggested because of this mystery. Sort of in this way:
This is nearly verbatim the purported ‘argument’ I was thinking of, as a paraphrase by somebody critical of ‘quantum mind’-like arguments. But the way I’m remembering it is that it was then called ‘an instance of…’, where I had thought the ellipsis was something like ‘economy of mystery’ or ‘equalization of mystery’ or something in this vein with the intended meaning of ‘reducing the total number of mysteries by proposing that two unrelated mysteries are really one and the same’. But snappier. Probably I just confabulated it, thought.
It’s not whataboutism; the post by @gdave quoted above gets at what I was trying to express.
It’s not strictly a fallacious argument, as such, and I may have inadvertently poisoned the well by calling it that. Rather, it’s an explanation that fails to explain, because the explanans is itself an explanandum.
Yes, it’s certainly an instance of that. But I seem to recall something more specific (or at any rate, I would prefer a more specific term).
Not the term I had in mind, but yes, that’s the phenomenon I’m after. How did the shark manage to track the people? Because of a voodoo curse. How does the mind work? Because of quantum mechanics. If we knew how voodoo worked, or how quantum mechanics worked (I mean, of course we know how it works as a formalism, but you get the idea), we could assess whether the claim made is plausible; but without it, it’s just empty of content.
There’s an element of that, too, particularly regarding the woo-ier regions of ‘quantum mind’-kind of claims, where you get things like ‘quantum mechanics says that everything is connected to everything else, so that’s how telepathy works’—although that is really another layer of bafflement, explaining a phenomenon that doesn’t exist with a statement that doesn’t have any content. But still, not quite it.