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Question of the day: when is an argument that looks fallacious actually bad?

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Fallacies & paradoxesGreek & RomanIndianNyayaAristotleC. L. HamblinDouglas WaltonGautama (Akṣapāda)#argumentation#fallacies#informal-logic#question-of-the-day
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Its coordinates: 4.2.1 Fallacies

Today's question comes from the card on fallacies: when is a bad-looking argument actually bad?

Three arguments that would fail a textbook test:

  • "Don't trust his evidence on the drug's safety; the company paid him." (Attacking the person.)
  • "My doctor says I need the operation, so I should have it." (Appeal to authority.)
  • "If we allow this exception, more will follow." (Slippery slope.)

Yet each can be a perfectly good reason in the right setting. So what makes the difference?

  • The list view. Fallacies are recognisable types of bad reasoning, and learning their names protects you. The tradition starts with Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations, which sorts thirteen kinds, some depending on language and some not.
  • The standard treatment is a muddle. In 1970 C. L. Hamblin argued that the textbook lists had no coherent theory behind them: the same form is a fallacy in one place and sound in another.
  • It depends on the dialogue. Douglas Walton and others treat many "fallacies" as reasonable but defeasible arguments that become fallacious only when they block legitimate questions. Pragma-dialecticians define a fallacy as breaking a rule of honest discussion.

The Nyāya tradition in India also kept a careful list: the "pseudo-reasons" (hetvābhāsa) that look like evidence but are not, alongside rules for when a debater has lost. The card sets out the positions: 4.2.1 Fallacies.

Bring examples. A "fallacy" you think is unfairly named is especially welcome.

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4 answers

  1. Sam Ellery

    Contributor

    Every debate season I watch the list view fail in real time. A student shouts "ad hominem!" because the other side said the study was funded by the industry it favours. That's not an ad hominem. It's a reason to check the study more carefully.

    The rule I give them now is Walton's in kid form: an argument isn't fallacious because of its shape. It's fallacious when it tries to end a question that should still be open. "He was paid, so ignore him" is a fallacy. "He was paid, so look harder" is good reasoning.

  2. Meera Kulkarni

    Fellow

    The Nyāya list is interesting precisely because it is not a list of argument shapes. The pseudo-reasons are defects of the reason in relation to what it is supposed to prove: a reason that is also present where the conclusion is absent, a reason that actually proves the opposite, a reason that is no better established than the conclusion, and so on.

    So a Naiyāyika would never ask "is this an ad hominem?" She would ask "is this reason really tied to the conclusion?" The paid expert is a reason tied to reliability, loosely, and therefore relevant. Hamblin would have liked them, I think.

  3. Akosua Mensah

    Contributor

    The slippery slope is not always foolish. When the government first allowed one buyer to deduct "moisture weight" from our bags, the farmers said: next it will be every buyer. It was every buyer within two seasons. Sometimes the slope is real because people are watching each other.

  4. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    Akosua's case is a good test, because it shows the slope argument is really a prediction, and predictions can be right. What makes a slippery slope fallacious is treating the slide as inevitable without any account of the mechanism. Her farmers had a mechanism: buyers copy one another when one gets away with something. That is evidence, not a fallacy.

    Vague slopes are a different matter, and the ones I care about. "If one grain isn't a heap, two aren't" is not a prediction at all.