3.4: Fallacies Of Presumption, Ambiguity, And Illicit Transference

Front 1

fallacies of presumption:

include begging the question, complex question, false dichotomy, and suppressed evidence.

Back 1

these fallacies arise not because the premises are irrelevant to the conclusion or provide insufficient reason for believing the conclusion but because the premises presume what they purport to prove.

Front 2

fallacies of ambiguity:

include equivocation and amphiboly

Back 2

these fallacies arise from the occurrence of some form of ambiguity in either the premises or the conclusion (or both).

Front 3

fallacies of illicit transference:

include composition and division

Back 3

arguments that commit these fallacies involve the incorrect transference of an attribute from the parts of something onto the whole, or from the whole onto the parts.

Front 4

begging the question

(petitio principii, "request for the source")

Back 4

committed whenever the arguer creates the illusion that inadequate premises provide adequate support for the conclusion by leaving out a possibly false (shaky) key premise, by restating a possibly false premise as the conclusion, or by reasoning in a circle.

Front 5

complex question

Back 5

committed when two (or more) questions are asked in the guise of a single question and a single answer is then given to both of them.

Front 6

leading question

Back 6

a question in which the answer is in some way suggested in the question.

Front 7

false dichotomy

also called "false bifurcation" and the "either-or fallacy"

Back 7

committed when a disjunctive ("either ... or ...") premise presents two unlikely alternative as if they were the only ones available, and the arguer then eliminates the undesirable alternative, leaving the desirable one as the conclusion.

*such an argument is clearly valid, but since the disjunctive premise is false, or at least probably false, the argument is typically unsound.

Front 8

supppressed evidence

Back 8

committed when an inductive argument ignores some important piece of evidence that outweighs the presented evidence and entails a very different conclusion.

Front 9

equivocation

Back 9

occurs when the conclusion of an argument depends on the fact that a word or phrase is used, either explicitly or implicitly, in two different senses in the argument.

*such arguments are either invalid or have a false premise, and in either case they are unsound.

Front 10

amphiboly

Back 10

occurs when the arguer misinterprets an ambiguous statement and then draws a conclusion based on this faulty interpretation.

*the original statement is usually asserted by someone other than the arguer, and the ambiguity usually arises from a mistake in grammar or punctuation---a missing comma, a dangling modifier, and ambiguous antecedent of a pronoun, or some other careless arrangement of words.

Front 11

composition

Back 11

committed when the conclusion of an argument depends on the erroneous transference of an attribute from the parts of somethings onto the whole.

*occurs when it is argued that because the parts have a certain attribute, it follows that the whole has that attribute, too, and the situation is such that the attribute in question cannot be legitimately transferred from parts to whole.

Front 12

composition:

collective predication

Back 12

an attribute is predicated collectively when it is assigned to a class as a whole.

Front 13

composition:

distributive predication

Back 13

an attribute is predicated distributively when it is assigned to each and every member of a class.

Front 14

division

Back 14

committed when the conclusion of an argument depends on the erroneous transference of an attribute from a whole (or a class) onto its parts (or members).