Informal fallacies – arguments that are fallacious for reasons other than structural (formal) flaws and that usually require examination of the argument's content.[15]

Argument to moderation (false compromise, middle ground, fallacy of the mean, argumentum ad temperantiam) – assuming that the compromise between two positions is always correct.[16]

Continuum fallacy (fallacy of the beard, line-drawing fallacy, sorites fallacy, fallacy of the heap, bald man fallacy) – improperly rejecting a claim for being imprecise.[17]

Correlative-based fallacies

Suppressed correlative – a correlative is redefined so that one alternative is made impossible.[18]

Definist fallacy – involves the confusion between two notions by defining one in terms of the other.[19]

Divine fallacy (argument from incredulity) – arguing that, because something is so incredible or amazing, it must be the result of superior, divine, alien or paranormal agency.[20]

Double counting – counting events or occurrences more than once in probabilistic reasoning, which leads to the sum of the probabilities of all cases exceeding unity.

Equivocation – the misleading use of a term with more than one meaning (by glossing over which meaning is intended at a particular time).[21]

Ambiguous middle term – a common ambiguity in syllogisms in which the middle term is equivocated.[22]

Definitional retreat – changing the meaning of a word to deal with an objection raised against the original wording.[1]

Motte-and-bailey fallacy – the arguer conflates two positions with similar properties, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey").[23] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position.[24][25] This fallacy has been described as the inverse of the straw man, in "replacing a weak position with a strong position to better defend it" rather than "replacing a strong position with a weak position to better attack it".[26]

Fallacy of accent – a specific type of ambiguity that arises when the meaning of a sentence is changed by placing an unusual prosodic stress, or when, in a written passage, it is left unclear which word the emphasis was supposed to fall on.

Persuasive definition – a form of stipulative definition which purports to describe the "true" or "commonly accepted" meaning of a term, while in reality stipulating an uncommon or altered use.

(See also the if-by-whiskey fallacy, below)

Ecological fallacy – inferences about the nature of specific individuals are based solely upon aggregate statistics collected for the group to which those individuals belong.[27]

Etymological fallacy – reasoning that the original or historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its actual present-day usage.[28]

Fallacy of composition – assuming that something true of part of a whole must also be true of the whole.[29]

Fallacy of division – assuming that something true of a thing must also be true of all or some of its parts.[30]

False attribution – an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument.

Fallacy of quoting out of context (contextotomy, contextomy; quotation mining) – refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning.[31]

False authority (single authority) – using an expert of dubious credentials or using only one opinion to sell a product or idea. Related to the appeal to authority.

False dilemma (false dichotomy, fallacy of bifurcation, black-or-white fallacy) – two alternative statements are held to be the only possible options when in reality there are more.[32]

False equivalence – describing a situation of logical and apparent equivalence, when in fact there is none.

Feedback fallacy - in the context of performance appraisal, the belief in the accuracy of feedback, despite evidence that feedback is subject to large systematic errors due to the idiosyncratic rater effect.[33]

Historian's fallacy – the assumption that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and had the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision.[34] (Not to be confused with presentism, which is a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas, such as moral standards, are projected into the past.)

Historical fallacy – a set of considerations is thought to hold good only because a completed process is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result.[35]

Baconian fallacy - using pieces of historical evidence without the aid of specific methods, hypotheses, or theories in an attempt to make a general truth about the past. Commits historians "to the pursuit of an impossible object by an impracticable method".[36]

Homunculus fallacy – a "middle-man" is used for explanation; this sometimes leads to regressive middle-men. Explains without actually explaining the real nature of a function or a process. Instead, it explains the concept in terms of the concept itself, without first defining or explaining the original concept. Explaining thought as something produced by a little thinker, a sort of homunculus inside the head, merely explains it as another kind of thinking (as different but the same).[37]

Inflation of conflict – arguing that if experts of a field of knowledge disagree on a certain point, the experts must know nothing, and therefore no conclusion can be reached, or that the legitimacy of their entire field is put to question.[38]

>>8510432

>>8510427

If-by-whiskey – an argument that supports both sides of an issue by using terms that are selectively emotionally sensitive.

Incomplete comparison – insufficient information is provided to make a complete comparison.

Inconsistent comparison – different methods of comparison are used, leaving a false impression of the whole comparison.

Intentionality fallacy – the insistence that the ultimate meaning of an expression must be consistent with the intention of the person from whom the communication originated (e.g. a work of fiction that is widely received as a blatant allegory must necessarily not be regarded as such if the author intended it not to be so.)[39]

Lump of labour fallacy – the misconception that there is a fixed amount of work to be done within an economy, which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs.[40]

Kettle logic – using multiple, jointly inconsistent arguments to defend a position.[dubious – discuss]

Ludic fallacy – the belief that the outcomes of non-regulated random occurrences can be encapsulated by a statistic; a failure to take into account that unknown unknowns have a role in determining the probability of events taking place.[41]

McNamara fallacy (quantitative fallacy) – making a decision based only on quantitative observations, discounting all other considerations.

Mind projection fallacy – subjective judgments are "projected" to be inherent properties of an object, rather than being related to personal perceptions of that object.

Moralistic fallacy – inferring factual conclusions from purely evaluative premises in violation of fact–value distinction. For instance, inferring is from ought is an instance of moralistic fallacy. Moralistic fallacy is the inverse of naturalistic fallacy defined below.

Moving the goalposts (raising the bar) – argument in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded.

Nirvana fallacy (perfect-solution fallacy) – solutions to problems are rejected because they are not perfect.

>>8510432

>Baconian fallacy - using pieces of historical evidence without the aid of specific methods, hypotheses, or theories in an attempt to make a general truth about the past. Commits historians "to the pursuit of an impossible object by an impracticable method".

Proof by assertion – a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction; sometimes confused with argument from repetition (argumentum ad infinitum, argumentum ad nauseam)

Prosecutor's fallacy – a low probability of false matches does not mean a low probability of some false match being found.

Proving too much – using a form of argument that, if it were valid, could be used to reach an additional, invalid conclusion.

Psychologist's fallacy – an observer presupposes the objectivity of their own perspective when analyzing a behavioral event.

Referential fallacy[42] – assuming all words refer to existing things and that the meaning of words reside within the things they refer to, as opposed to words possibly referring to no real object or that the meaning of words often comes from how they are used.

Reification (concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) – a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating as a "real thing" something that is not a real thing, but merely an idea.

Retrospective determinism – the argument that because an event has occurred under some circumstance, the circumstance must have made its occurrence inevitable.

Slippery slope (thin edge of the wedge, camel's nose) – asserting that a relatively small first step inevitably leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant impact/event that should not happen, thus the first step should not happen. It is, in its essence, an appeal to probability fallacy.[43]

Special pleading – a proponent of a position attempts to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule or principle without justifying the exemption.

>>8510473

>>8510441

>If-by-whiskey – an argument that supports both sides of an issue by using terms that are selectively emotionally sensitive.

The label if-by-whiskey refers to a 1952 speech by Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat, Jr., a young lawmaker from the U.S. state of Mississippi, on the subject of whether Mississippi should continue to prohibit (which it did until 1966) or finally legalize alcoholic beverages:[3]

My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, here is how I feel about whiskey:

If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

The American columnist William Safire popularized the term in his column in The New York Times, but wrongly attributed it to Florida Governor Fuller Warren.[4] He corrected this reference in his book Safire's Political Dictionary, on page 337.[1]

Logorrhea is characterized by the constant need to talk.[1] Occasionally, patients suffering from logorrhea may produce speech with normal prosody and a slightly fast speech rate. [2]Other related symptoms include the use of neologisms (new words without clear derivation, i.e. hipidomateous for hippopotamus), words that bear no apparent meaning, and, in some extreme cases, the creation of new words and morphosyntactic constructions.[3] From the "stream of unchecked nonsense often under pressure and the lack of self-correction” that the patient may exhibit, and their circumlocution (the ability to talk around missing words) we may conclude that they are unaware of the grammatical errors they are making[4].

Examples of Logorrhea

When a clinician says, "tell me what to do with a comb", to a patient who is suffering from Wernicke’s aphasia which produces the symptom of logorrhea, the patient may respond:

“What do I do with a comb … what I do with a comb. Well a comb is a utensil or some such thing that can be used for arranging and rearranging the hair on the head both by men and by women. One could also make music with it by putting a piece of paper behind and blowing through it. Sometimes it could be used in art – in sculpture, for example, to make a series of lines in soft clay. It's usually made of plastic and usually black, although it comes in other colors. It is carried in the pocket or until it's needed, when it is taken out and used, then put back in the pocket. Is that what you had in mind?”[5]

In this case the patient maintains proper grammar and does not exhibit any signs of neologisms. However, the patient does use an overabundance of speech in responding to the clinician, as most people would simply respond, “I use a comb to brush my hair.”

In a more extreme version of logorrhea aphasia, a clinician asks the patient what brought them to the hospital. The patient responds:

“Is this some of the work that we work as we did before? … All right … From when wine [why] I'm here. What’s wrong with me because I … was myself until the taenz took something about the time between me and my regular time in that time and they took the time in that time here and that’s when the the time took around here and saw me around in it’s started with me no time and I bekan [began] work of nothing else that's the way the doctor find me that way…” [6]

In this example, the patient's aphasia is much more severe. Not only is this a case of logorrhea, but this includes neologisms and a loss of proper sentence structure.

Causes

Logorrhea has been shown to be associated with traumatic brain injuries in the frontal lobe[7] as well as with lesions in the thalamus[8][9] and the ascending reticular inhibitory system[10] and has been associated with aphasia.[11] Logorrhea can also result from a variety of psychiatric and neurological disorders[10] including tachypsychia,[12] mania,[13] hyperactivity,[14] catatonia,[15] and schizophrenia.[16]

Aphasias

Wernicke's Aphasia, amongst other aphasias, are often associated with logorrhea. Aphasia refers to the neurological disruption of language that occurs as a consequence of brain disfunction. For a patient to truly have an aphasia, they cannot have been diagnosed with any other medical condition that may affect their cognition.[citation needed] Logorrhea is a common symptom of Wernicke's Aphasia, along with circumlocution, paraphasias, and neologisms. Often a patient with aphasia may present all of these symptoms at one time.

Treatment

Excessive talking may be a symptom of an underlying illness and should be addressed by a medical provider if combined with hyperactivity or symptoms of mental illness, such as hallucinations.[17] Treatment of logorrhea depends on its underlying disorder, if any. Antipsychotics are often used, and lithium is a common supplement given to manic patients.[18] For patients with lesions of the brain, attempting to correct their errors may upset and anger the patients, since the language center of their brain may not be able to process that what they are saying is incorrect and wordy.[citation needed]

>>8510497

PAPER DRAGONS LIVE IN PAPER CASTLES

United States

The phrase "states' rights", literally referring to powers of individual state governments in the United States, was described in 2007 by David Greenberg in Slate as "code words" for institutionalized segregation and racism.[24] States' rights was the banner under which groups like the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties argued in 1955 against school desegregation.[25] In 1981, former Republican Party strategist Lee Atwater, when giving an anonymous interview discussing Nixon's Southern Strategy, said:[26][27][28]

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now, you're talking about cutting taxes. And all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Atwater was contrasting this with Ronald Reagan's campaign, which he felt "was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference." However, Ian Haney López, an American law professor and author of the 2014 book Dog Whistle Politics, described Reagan as "blowing a dog whistle" when the candidate told stories about "Cadillac-driving 'welfare queens' and 'strapping young bucks' buying T-bone steaks with food stamps" while he was campaigning for the presidency.[29][30][31] He argues that such rhetoric pushes middle-class white Americans to vote against their economic self-interest in order to punish "undeserving minorities" who, they believe, are receiving too much public assistance at their expense. According to López, conservative middle-class whites, convinced by powerful economic interests that minorities are the enemy, supported politicians who promised to curb illegal immigration and crack down on crime but inadvertently also voted for policies that favor the extremely rich, such as slashing taxes for top income brackets, giving corporations more regulatory control over industry and financial markets, union busting, cutting pensions for future public employees, reducing funding for public schools, and retrenching the social welfare state. He argues that these same voters cannot link rising inequality which has impacted their lives to the policy agendas they support, which resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1% of the population since the 1980s.[32][33]

Journalist Craig Unger wrote that President George W. Bush and Karl Rove used coded "dog-whistle" language in political campaigning, delivering one message to the overall electorate while at the same time delivering quite a different message to a targeted evangelical Christian political base.[34] William Safire, in Safire's Political Dictionary, offered the example of Bush's criticism during the 2004 presidential campaign of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision denying the U.S. citizenship of any African American. To most listeners the criticism seemed innocuous, Safire wrote, but "sharp-eared observers" understood the remark to be a pointed reminder that Supreme Court decisions can be reversed, and a signal that, if re-elected, Bush might nominate to the Supreme Court a justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade.[1] This view is echoed in a 2004 Los Angeles Times article by Peter Wallsten.[35]

During the 2008 Democratic primaries, writer Enid Lynette Logan criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign's reliance on code words and innuendo seemingly designed to frame Barack Obama's race as problematic, saying Obama was characterized by the Clinton campaign and its prominent supporters as anti-white due to his association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as able to attract only black votes, as anti-patriotic, a drug user, possibly a drug seller, and married to an angry, ungrateful black woman.[36]

In 2012, journalist Soledad O'Brien used the phrase "dog whistle" to describe Tea Party Express representative Amy Kremer's accusation that Obama "does not love America".[37]

Also in that election cycle, Obama's campaign ran an ad in Ohio that said Mitt Romney was "not one of us".[38] The ad, which Washington Post journalist Karen Tumulty said "echoes a slogan that has been used as a racial code over at least the past half-century".[39]

During the 2014 Republican senate primary in Mississippi, a scandal emerged with politicians accused of attempting to influence the public by using such code words as "food stamps".[40][41] Senator Ted Cruz called for an investigation,[42] saying that "the ads they ran were racially-charged false attacks".[43]

During the 2016 presidential election campaign and on a number of occasions throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has been accused of using racial and anti-Semitic "dog whistling" techniques by politicians and major news outlets.[44][45][46][47][48]

According to William Safire, the term "dog whistle" in reference to politics may have been derived from its use in the field of opinion polling. Safire quotes Richard Morin, director of polling for The Washington Post, as writing in 1988, "subtle changes in question-wording sometimes produce remarkably different results … researchers call this the 'Dog Whistle Effect': Respondents hear something in the question that researchers do not".[1] He speculates that campaign workers adapted the phrase from political pollsters.[1]

In her 2006 book, Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia, academic Amanda Lohrey writes that the goal of the dog-whistle is to appeal to the greatest possible number of electors while alienating the smallest possible number. She uses as an example politicians choosing broadly appealing words such as "family values", which have extra resonance for Christians, while avoiding overt Christian moralizing that might be a turn-off for non-Christian voters.[2]

Australian political theorist Robert E. Goodin argues that the problem with dog-whistling is that it undermines democracy, because if voters have different understandings of what they were supporting during a campaign, the fact that they were seeming to support the same thing is "democratically meaningless" and does not give the dog-whistler a policy mandate.[3]

Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the population of the general public at large while also simultaneously having an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. The analogy is to a dog whistle, whose ultrasonic tone is heard by dogs but inaudible to humans.

The term is often confused with code words used in some specialist professions, but can be distinguished in that dog-whistling is specific to the political realm, and the messaging referred to as the dog-whistle has an understandable meaning for a general audience, rather than being incomprehensible.[verification needed]

>>8510677

Also in that election cycle, Obama's campaign ran an ad in Ohio that said Mitt Romney was "not one of us".[38] The ad, which Washington Post journalist Karen Tumulty said "echoes a slogan that has been used as a racial code over at least the past half-century".[39]

During the 2014 Republican senate primary in Mississippi, a scandal emerged with politicians accused of attempting to influence the public by using such code words as "food stamps".[40][41] Senator Ted Cruz called for an investigation,[42] saying that "the ads they ran were racially-charged false attacks".[43]

During the 2016 presidential election campaign and on a number of occasions throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has been accused of using racial and anti-Semitic "dog whistling" techniques by politicians and major news outlets.[44][45][46][47][48]

According to William Safire, the term "dog whistle" in reference to politics may have been derived from its use in the field of opinion polling. Safire quotes Richard Morin, director of polling for The Washington Post, as writing in 1988, "subtle changes in question-wording sometimes produce remarkably different results … researchers call this the 'Dog Whistle Effect': Respondents hear something in the question that researchers do not".[1] He speculates that campaign workers adapted the phrase from political pollsters.[1]

In her 2006 book, Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia, academic Amanda Lohrey writes that the goal of the dog-whistle is to appeal to the greatest possible number of electors while alienating the smallest possible number. She uses as an example politicians choosing broadly appealing words such as "family values", which have extra resonance for Christians, while avoiding overt Christian moralizing that might be a turn-off for non-Christian voters.[2]

Australian political theorist Robert E. Goodin argues that the problem with dog-whistling is that it undermines democracy, because if voters have different understandings of what they were supporting during a campaign, the fact that they were seeming to support the same thing is "democratically meaningless" and does not give the dog-whistler a policy mandate.[3]

Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the population of the general public at large while also simultaneously having an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. The analogy is to a dog whistle, whose ultrasonic tone is heard by dogs but inaudible to humans.

The term is often confused with code words used in some specialist professions, but can be distinguished in that dog-whistling is specific to the political realm, and the messaging referred to as the dog-whistle has an understandable meaning for a general audience, rather than being incomprehensible.[verification needed]

A word salad, or schizophasia, is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases",[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The term schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia.[2] The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

>>8510997

Word salad may describe a symptom of neurological or psychiatric conditions in which a person attempts to communicate an idea, but words and phrases that may appear to be random and unrelated come out in an incoherent sequence instead. Often, the person is unaware that he or she did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia,[3] as well as after anoxic brain injury. In schizophrenia it is also referred to as schizophasia.[2] Clang associations are especially characteristic of mania, as seen in bipolar disorder, as a somewhat more severe variation of flight of ideas. In extreme mania, the patient's speech may become incoherent, with associations markedly loosened, thus presenting as a veritable word salad.

It may be present as:

Clanging, a speech pattern that follows rhyming and other sound associations rather than meaning

Graphorrhea, a written version of word salad that is more rarely seen than logorrhea in people with schizophrenia.[4]

Logorrhea, a mental condition characterized by excessive talking (incoherent and compulsive)

Receptive aphasia,[5] fluent in speech but without making sense, often a result of a stroke or other brain injury

>>8511028

>>8510997

Word salad can be generated by a computer program for entertainment purposes by inserting randomly chosen words of the same type (nouns, adjectives, etc.) into template sentences with missing words, a game similar to Mad Libs. The video game company Maxis, in their seminal SimCity 2000, used this technique to create an in-game "newspaper" for entertainment; the columns were composed by taking a vague story-structure, and using randomization, inserted various nouns, adjectives, and verbs to generate seemingly unique stories.

Another way of generating meaningless text is mojibake, also called Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") in German, in which an assortment of seemingly random text is generated through character encoding incompatibility in which one set of characters are replaced by another, though the effect is more effective in languages where each character represents a word, such as Chinese.

More serious attempts to automatically produce nonsense stem from Claude Shannon's seminal paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication from 1948[6] where progressively more convincing nonsense is generated first by choosing letters and spaces randomly, then according to the frequency with which each character appears in some sample of text, then respecting the likelihood that the chosen letter appears after the preceding one or two in the sample text, and then applying similar techniques to whole words. Its most convincing nonsense is generated by second-order word approximation, in which words are chosen by a random function weighted to the likeliness that each word follows the preceding one in normal text:

The Head And In Frontal Attack On An English Writer That The Character Of This Point Is Therefore Another Method For The Letters That The Time Of Who Ever Told The Problem For An Unexpected.

Markov chains can be used to generate random but somewhat human-looking sentences. This is used in some chat-bots, especially on IRC-networks.

Nonsensical phrasing can also be generated for more malicious reasons, such as the Bayesian poisoning used to counter Bayesian spam filters by using a string of words which have a high probability of being collocated in English, but with no concern for whether the sentence makes sense grammatically or logically.