Today's name that fallacy thread - The "doomsayer" fallacy?

Factual Questions
21

If it were all as simple as a game of bridge where my fallacy card trumps your argument card, the world would have worked most everything out by now. Thinking in terms of fallacy identification only solves a limited class of problem, in a way similar to that in which arithmetic only solves a limited class of problem. Trying to use arithmetic to solve an algebra or calculus problem will leave you with an unsolvable problem. The answer will be undecideable. If you can get an answer to some simple problem with arithmetic, it will undoubtedly be true, but for most interesting problems in maths you need a much bigger tool kit than arithmetic only can provide.

Translating that idea to fallacy thinking, suppose a climate change denier says “It is simply the height of hubris for arrogant humans to believe they can change the climate.” The argument has a superficial appeal because we admire humility and are taken by surprise by it, but the argument can readily be identified as fallaciously circular. It assumes the correctness of the denier’s position. It is only arrogant and hubristic to believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change if it is not true, a proposition the denier has assumed without demonstration. Other ways of constructing the fallacy inherent in this argument are available. But this approach is only sensible for a limited class of case. And notice that the identification of a fallacy does not tell us whether ACC is true or not. It only tells us that specific argument is of no value.

Suppose I see man A enter a room with man B arguing together. They are alone in the room. I hear a shot. The door opens and A runs off with a gun in his hand. B is dead on the floor of the room with a gunshot wound to the head. Fallacy thinking tends to say things like “The fact that A fled the scene does not mean he is guilty because he might have been frightened”. Or “B might have shot himself and A picked up the gun and ran off in panic”. And so on. The problem is that the misapplication of this style of thinking tends to leave problems like this undecideable. There is no language within it to say “The overwhelming probability, notwithstanding hypothetical conjectures, is that A shot B”. A proposition within the realm of fallacy thinking is either certain beyond argument, or must be wholly rejected, and there is no middle ground.

And the vast majority of real world problems are not of this limited class. Fallacy identification, like deductive reasoning (of which fallacy thinking is a sub-class) applies in limited contexts. Maths. Dumb politics. Unproductive debate about the existence of Og. Remember, identifying a fallacy on the part of a believer does not prove atheists right. It just proves that specific theist argument unreliable. But abductive reasoning is what we rely on mostly. It doesn’t have the promised certainty of syllogisms, but neither does science, which always acknowledges the hypothetical possibility of error. Nevertheless, it is more productive than gotcha arguments about fallacies.

And to address some up thread observations about lawyers (and I am one) not arguing about fallacies in court because jurors wouldn’t understand - that is not the reason. I can’t recall ever seeing fallacy identification as an argument in appellate courts either, although no doubt it has happened. The reason is that the problems involved are more complex than simply purporting to identify a fallacy will solve. If they were so simple that they could be solved that way, they would have been long before the matter even got to trial.

22

Excluded middle fallacy :slight_smile:

You are right that some people try to weaponize the identification of fallacies in a naive way, trying for “gotchas” as though it’s the last word. That’s why at the end of my comment above I was careful to say:

But still, thinking about the logical structure of an argument, abstracting the structure of the argument from the emotions and biases associated with the specific case under consideration, can often increase our awareness of potential cognitive errors. I think you go too far in minimizing the value of this kind of analysis in clarifying our thinking.

23

Questions of degree that are not quantifiable are difficult to argue about. But when, as I have said, professional arguers find almost no use for playing around with logical fallacies, then I would respectfully maintain my assertion that their use is restricted to a limited domain. If you find them useful to refine ideas, who am I to say you don’t? But we don’t vote by looking for fallacies, we try to weigh conflicting information to make the best prediction about how some candidate or other will behave in the future. We don’t buy a car by analysis of logical fallacies, we try to balance competing features that each candidate car has that the other doesn’t. And so on. Even our background political views in the field between conservative and liberal are not really achieved by fallacy hunting. Rather, we generally think in terms of principles (small government, the duty of government to protect the needy) each of which we realise must give way on occasions.

I, too, once thought of logic chopping about fallacies the sine qua non of reason. When I kept discovering that no-one actually used them very much, I realised why. I have never said there is no place for them, just that they are not often useful as a first go-to idea. The OP was talking about logical fallacies in a domain where it was not particularly useful to do so. Hence my comments.