The blaze of her splendors: Suggestions about revitalizing fallacy theory

Criticisms of fallacy theory have been lodged from many different directions. In this paper, I consider the classic criticism of incompleteness by DeMorgan, Finocchiaro's claim that fallacies probably exist only in the mind of the interpreter, McPeck's claim that fallacies are at best context-dependent and Paul's complaints about the teaching of fallacies. I seek not merely to defend fallacy theory against unfair criticisms but also to learn from the criticisms what can be done in order to make fallacy theory a viable theory of criticism. I argue that this will involve several changes: rethinking of the nature of fallacy; addressing some theoretical issues; and presenting fallacy theory in a more rigorous fashion. The paper concludes with reflections on how Quine's ontological advice about the resolution of ontological disputes might be applied to the issue of whether or not there are fallacies.     

Locke and Whately on the Argumentum ad Hominem

This is an exploration of what Locke and Whately said about the Argumentatum ad Hominem, especially in the context of what they said about the other ad arguments, and with a view to ascertaining whether what they said lends support to the understanding of this argument implicit in Johnstone's thesis that all valid philosophical arguments are ad hominem. It is concluded that this support is forthcoming insofar as Locke and Whately had in mind an argument concerned with principles.The essay ends with a brief reformulation of Johnstone's generalization regarding philosophical arguments.     

When Is Genetic Reasoning Not Fallacious?

Attempts to evaluate a belief or argument on the basis of its cause or origin are usually condemned as committing the genetic fallacy. However, I sketch a number of cases in which causal or historical factors are logically relevant to evaluating a belief, including an interesting abductive form that reasons from the best explanation for the existence of a belief to its likely truth. Such arguments are also susceptible to refutation by genetic reasoning that may come very close to the standard examples given of supposedly fallacious genetic reasoning.     

Six types of fallaciousness: Toward a realistic theory of logical criticism

I begin by formulating the problem of the nature of fallacy in terms of the logic of the negative evaluation of argument, that is, in terms of a theory of logical criticism; here I discuss several features of my approach and several advantages vis-à-vis other approaches; a main feature of my approach is the concern to avoid both formalist and empiricist excesses. I then define six types of fallaciousness, labeled formal, explanatory, presuppositional, positive, semantical, and persuasive; they all involve arguments whose conclusion may be said not to follow from the premises, that is, they involve the logical evaluation of relationships among propositions. I also provide a set of data consisting of four historical cases or nine specific instances of fallacious arguments; these all pertain to the Copernican controversy about the earth's motion in the seventeenth century. I end with a discussion of further problems and inquiries that deserve attention.     

Non-monotonicity and Informal Reasoning: Comment on Ferguson (2003)

In this paper, it is argued that Ferguson’s (2003, Argumentation 17, 335–346) recent proposal to reconcile monotonic logic with defeasibility has three counterintuitive consequences. First, the conclusions that can be derived from his new rule of inference are vacuous, a point that as already made against default logics when there are conflicting defaults. Second, his proposal requires a procedural “hack” to the break the symmetry between the disjuncts of the tautological conclusions to which his proposal leads. Third, Ferguson’s proposal amounts to arguing that all everyday inferences are sound by definition. It is concluded that the informal logic response to defeasibility, that an account of the context in which inferences are sound or unsound is required, still stands. It is also observed that another possible response is given by Bayesian probability theory (Oaksford and Chater, in press, Bayesian Rationality: The Probabilistic Approach to Human Reasoning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK; Hahn and Oaksford, in press, Synthese).     

Fallacies in probability judgments for conjunctions and disjunctions of everyday events

The conjunction fallacy occurs when people judge a conjunction B‐and‐A as more probable than a constituent B, contrary to probability theory's ‘conjunction rule’ that a conjunction cannot be more probable than either constituent. Many studies have demonstrated this fallacy in people's reasoning about various experimental materials. Gigerenzer objects that from a ‘frequentist’ standpoint probability theory is not valid for these materials, and so failure to follow the conjunction rule is not a fallacy. This paper describes three experiments showing that the conjunction fallacy occurs as consistently for conjunctions where frequentist probability theory is valid (conjunctions of everyday weather events) as for other conjunctions. These experiments also demonstrate a reliable correlation between the occurrence of the conjunction fallacy and the disjunction fallacy (which arises when a disjunction B‐or‐A is judged less probable than a constituent B). This supports a probability theory + random variation account of probabilistic reasoning. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The ad Hominem argument as an informal fallacy

This article outlines criteria for the evaluation of the argumentum ad hominem (argument against the person, or personal attack in argument) that is traditionally a part of the curriculum in informal logic. The argument is shown to be a kind of criticism which works by shifting the burden of proof in dialogue through citing a pragmatic inconsistency in an arguer's position. Several specific cases of ad hominem argumentation which pose interesting problems in analyzing this type of criticism are studied.     

Reasoned use of expertise in argumentation

This article evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of arguments based on appeals to expertise. The intersection of two areas is explored: (i) the traditional argumentum ad verecundiam (literally, appeal to modesty, but characteristically the appeal to the authority of expert judgment) in informal logic, and (ii) the uses of expert systems in artificial intelligence. The article identifies a model of practical reasoning that underlies the logic of expert systems and the model of argument appropriate for the informal logic of the argumentum ad verecundiam.     

A critique of Tversky and Kahneman's distinction between fallacy and misunderstanding

Tversky and Kahneman explain cognitive errors in terms of either misunderstanding or fallacy , but have failed to define these concepts. Therefore, they are unable to derive strict diagnostic criteria for distinguishing between them. The lack of conceptual clarification also has prevented them from recognizing the circular relationship between understanding and logicality. Diagnosis of understanding presupposes logicality, and diagnosis of logicality presupposes understanding. This circularity follows when understanding is defined as grasping what is and is not logically implied by a given expression as intended, and when fallacy is defined as logical error. Alternative definitions are discussed and rejected. Tversky and Kahneman fail to realize that one cannot explain and understand what is genuinely illogical, and that, therefore, errors must always be regarded as failure to understand, that is, as logical inference from erroneous premises.     

Decision-makers are resilient in the face of social exclusion

A growing body of evidence suggests that social exclusion impairs people's capacity for active deliberation and logical reasoning. Building on this finding and on the postulate from the dual-process theory that analytical thinking is essential in order to make good judgements and decisions, we hypothesized that social exclusion will alter judgement and choice behaviour. We tested this hypothesis in three experiments in which social exclusion was manipulated using the Cyberball paradigm, an online ball-tossing game in which participants either received the ball a fair number of times or were excluded by the other two players. We focused on a range of tasks designed to be sensitive to participants’ ability to engage in analytical thinking and careful deliberation, including the cognitive reflection test (Experiment 1) and a set of anchoring, intertemporal preference, disjunction, and confidence tasks (experiments 2 and 3). Our results unanimously failed to support the hypothesis that social exclusion influences people's judgements and decision-making. We discuss the implications of our findings for social exclusion theory.     

Causal conjunction fallacies: The roles of causal strength and mental resources

In two experiments we tested the prediction derived from Tversky and Kahneman's (1983) work on the causal conjunction fallacy that the strength of the causal connection between constituent events directly affects the magnitude of the causal conjunction fallacy. We also explored whether any effects of perceived causal strength were due to graded output from heuristic Type 1 reasoning processes or the result of analytic Type 2 reasoning processes. As predicted, Experiment 1 demonstrated that fallacy rates were higher for strongly than for weakly related conjunctions. Weakly related conjunctions in turn attracted higher rates of fallacious responding than did unrelated conjunctions. Experiment 2 showed that a concurrent memory load increased rates of fallacious responding for strongly related but not for weakly related conjunctions. We interpret these results as showing that manipulations of the strength of the perceived causal relationship between the conjuncts result in graded output from heuristic reasoning process and that additional mental resources are required to suppress strong heuristic output.     

In the beginning was the doing: the premises of the practical syllogism

If practical reasoning deserves its name, its form must be different from that of ordinary (theoretical) reasoning. A few have thought that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action, rather than a mental state. I argue here that if the conclusion is an action, then so too is one of the premises. You might reason your way from doing one thing to doing another: from browsing journal abstracts to reading a particular journal article. I motivate this by sympathetically re-examining Hume's claim that a conclusion about what ought to be done follows only from an argument one of whose premises is likewise about what ought to be done.     

Tracing the Boundaries of Motivated Reasoning: How Deliberative Minipublics Can Improve Voter Knowledge

A large body of work shows that reasoning motivated by partisan cues and prior attitudes leads to unreflective decisions and disparities in empirical beliefs across groups. Surprisingly little research, however, has tested the limits of motivated reasoning. We argue that the publicly circulated findings of deliberative minipublics can spark a more reflective motivation in voters when these bodies provide policy-relevant factual information. To test that proposition, we conducted a survey experiment using information generated by one such minipublic during an election. Results showed that exposure to the minipublic's findings improved the accuracy of voters' empirical beliefs regarding a ballot proposition on the regulation of genetically modified seeds. This treatment effect transcended voters' partisan identities and prior environmental attitudes. In some instances, the respondents showing the greatest knowledge gains were those who a directional motivated-reasoning account would have expected to resist the treatment most effectively, owing to party identity or prior attitudes.     

The Independence of Practical Ethics

After criticizing three common conceptions of therelationship between practical ethics and ethical theory, analternative modeled on Aristotle's conception of the relationshipbetween rhetoric and philosophical ethics is explored. Thisaccount is unique in that it neither denigrates the project ofsearching for an adequate comprehensive ethical theory norsubordinates practical ethics to that project. Because the purpose of practical ethics, on this view, is tosecure the cooperation of other persons in a way that respectstheir status as free and equal, it seeks to influence thejudgments of others by providing them with reasons that areaccessible to their own understanding. On this account, theindependence of practical ethics is rooted in an appreciation ofthe constraints that non-ideal circumstances place on the rolethat the philosophically refined premises of moral theory canplay in such public deliberations. Practical and philosophicalethics are united, not by shared theoretical frameworks orprinciples, but by the need to exercise intelligently the sameintellectual and affective capacities. They are separated, notby the particularity or generality of their starting points, butby their responsiveness to the practical problem of facilitatingsound normative deliberations among persons as we find them,under non-ideal circumstances.     

Aristotle,Akrasia, and the Place of Desire in Moral Reasoning

This paper serves both as a discussion of Henry’s (Ethical Theory Moral Practice, 5:255–270, 2002) interpretation of Aristotle on the possibility of akrasia – knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway – and an indication of the importance of desire in Aristotle’s account of moral reasoning. As I will explain, Henry’s interpretation is advantageous for the reason that it makes clear how Aristotle could have made good sense of genuine akrasia, a phenomenon that we seem to observe in the real world, while maintaining non-trivial distinctions between temperance (sôphrosunê), self-indulgence (akolasia), self-control (enkrateia) and akrasia. There are, however, some interpretive challenges that follow from Henry’s account and this paper is intended to explain and resolve those.     

双系统逃生决策的顺序替代效应

探讨当信息以不同方式呈现时双系统逃生决策的顺序替代效应。采用单因素完全随机设计,将180名被试平均分配到直觉、分析和直觉后分析三种条件下考察其逃生决策。结果表明：(1)信息直接呈现时,直觉和分析决策、以及直觉和直觉后分析决策均差异显著且趋势相同;(2)信息隐含呈现时,直觉和分析决策差异显著,但直觉和直觉后分析决策差异不显著。结论：当信息直接呈现时个体的逃生决策存在顺序替代;而当信息隐含呈现时存在反顺序替代。     

Reasoning Is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation

Theoreticians of deliberative democracy have sometimes found it hard to relate to the seemingly contradictory experimental results produced by psychologists and political scientists. We suggest that this problem may be alleviated by inserting a layer of psychological theory between the empirical results and the normative political theory. In particular, we expose the argumentative theory of reasoning that makes the observed pattern of findings more coherent. According to this theory, individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation. It predicts that when diverse opinions are discussed, group reasoning will outperform individual reasoning. It also predicts that individuals have a strong confirmation bias. When people reason either alone or with like‐minded peers, this confirmation bias leads them to reinforce their initial attitudes, explaining individual and group polarization. We suggest that the failures of reasoning are most likely to be remedied at the collective than at the individual level.