# Substituting one mystery for another **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 10, 2021, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156 "2021-07-10T14:36:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2021, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/1 "2021-07-10T14:36:32Z")
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’? ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2021, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/3 "2021-07-10T17:10:36Z")
Moved to GQ (from QZ). ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2021, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/4 "2021-07-10T17:17:51Z")
Oh, thanks. Somehow I hadn’t realized I was in the QZ-category when writing the OP… ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2021, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/5 "2021-07-10T18:39:25Z")
“[Appeal to mystery](https://www2.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Appeal%20to%20Mystery.html#:~:text=Appeal%20to%20Mystery&text=Description%3A,to%20be%20explained%20is%20unexplainable.)”? Weak analogy? Fallacy of composition? It’s not a formal fallacy. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2021, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/6 "2021-07-10T19:23:39Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > There’s a particular style of fallacious argument that tries to explain one mystery by appealing to another. If you don’t mean [whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism), can you provide an illustrative example of what you do mean? ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [July 10, 2021, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/7 "2021-07-10T21:08:44Z")
How were the pyramids built? Aliens. But who/where are the aliens and why did they do it? Why does the universe exist? God made it. But why does God exist? The idea is clear to me, but I don’t know a term for it. ---
**Author:** ![Tusculan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecd19e/32.png) [@Tusculan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tusculan)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2021, 6:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/8 "2021-07-11T06:43:23Z")
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_](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dormitive_virtue) 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. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2021, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/9 "2021-07-11T07:16:47Z")
“Turtles all the way down” …? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2021, 7:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/10 "2021-07-11T07:21:07Z")
I think it’s a variety of _Argument from Ignorance_ - the thing is assumed to be true because it has not been (or cannot be) proven false. ---
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2021, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/11 "2021-07-11T13:00:18Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > ‘quantum mind’-approaches—the mind is mysterious, so is quantum theory, maybe one explains the other? 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. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2021, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/12 "2021-07-11T13:54:57Z")
Tv Tropes calls this a [Voodoo Shark](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VoodooShark). ---
**Author:** ![gdave](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gdave/32/3683_2.png) [@gdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gdave)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2021, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/13 "2021-07-11T14:05:07Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > 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? 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. ---
**Author:** ![Joey\_P](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/919ad9/32.png) [@Joey\_P](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joey_P)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2021, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/14 "2021-07-11T14:31:24Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2021, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/substituting-one-mystery-for-another/946156/15 "2021-07-11T16:58:01Z")
> [@Max\_S](#): > > “[Appeal to mystery](https://www2.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Appeal%20to%20Mystery.html#:~:text=Appeal%20to%20Mystery&text=Description%3A,to%20be%20explained%20is%20unexplainable.)”? > > Weak analogy? > > Fallacy of composition? > > It’s not a formal fallacy. 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: > [@gdave](#): > > 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. 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. > [@elfkin477](#): > > If you don’t mean [whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism), can you provide an illustrative example of what you do mean? It’s not whataboutism; the post by @gdave quoted above gets at what I was trying to express. > [@Tusculan](#): > > 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. 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. > [@Mangetout](#): > > I think it’s a variety of _Argument from Ignorance_ - the thing is assumed to be true because it has not been (or cannot be) proven false. 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). > [@John\_DiFool](#): > > Tv Tropes calls this a [Voodoo Shark](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VoodooShark). 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. > [@Joey\_P](#): > > 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). 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.