Thread: Logical Fallacy

Sounds like a mix of...

Fallacies of Presumption
Begin with a false (or at least unwarranted) assumption, and so fail to establish their conclusion

Self Exclusion
This is a form of the Stolen Concept fallacy. It denies itself. "Nothing makes any difference." (including this statement?)

Begging the Question / Circular Reasoning
If the conclusion is among the premises, if the assumption is made (either explicitly or not) that what is trying to be proved is already a given.

Originally Posted by thegnome54

There's this... thing that I've been toying with. I use it a lot to make 'false concessions' during arguments, and no one ever seems to notice.

Yeah I have noticed, these statements are everywhere. Sometimes I feel like breaking everybody's posts up, so to speak, and other times I'm already sure if I did it enough I'd make you all go insane.

Wow, gnome, nice topic for discussion.

I see so many logical fallacies in people's post that I actually don't bother much about them anymore. If you really take logic to it's hardcore state, you'll only consider 5% of what people say xD Sad, but true

I'm interested in the topic though. It's like that quote "The only thing we know is that we know nothing". I find it so dumb. I know a few things heh! Even in those emo blog entries "it doesn't matter now" - if it doesn't matter, why was that entry posted anyway?

Btw, does anyone know fallacies related to questions? I find them so amusing! Like, "Is this a question?" haha Into it, it's like, if you answer it positively, it is a question, so it becomes a circular. But if you answer 'no', the it becomes self-exclusive xD

gogo more on the topic plx!

You could check out Douglas Hofstadter and especially his book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. He's fairly obsessed with self-reference which is what your false concessions essentially are.

Originally Posted by Spamtek

You could check out Douglas Hofstadter and especially his book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. He's fairly obsessed with self-reference which is what your false concessions essentially are.

Greatest book ever written.

This is similar to his discussion of words Hofstadter calls "homological" and "heterological."

Homological - self-describing
Heterological - not self-describing

Of course most words fall into the second category, but there are things such as: "Pentasyllabic" and "English" and "Awkwardnessful."

Then he hits you with the paradoxical question: In which category does "Heterological" belong?

Originally Posted by thegnome54

Does anyone know a name for this 'fallacy'?

There's another!

lol Really, that was clever xD

Originally Posted by Kromoh

lol Really, that was clever xD

Was it really? Or Really, that was clever? I could go on... (but stop here).

. . .

Originally Posted by skysaw

Greatest book ever written.

I have the thing on a shelf somewhere but never got past the preface just because of the sheer magnitude of the task I'd be committing myself to if I went much further. I understand it's fairly impossible to read it and not be tranformed by the effort, like a computer scientists's Karamazov or something.

Originally Posted by Spamtek

You could check out Douglas Hofstadter and especially his book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. He's fairly obsessed with self-reference which is what your false concessions essentially are.

I was looking for that book earlier...

My school librarians had never heard of it, and informed me that no school libraries in the area had it either. My town librarians had never heard of it (!!!) and gave me similar news. Apparently no libraries at all in the entire area carry this book.

I've also had trouble finding John Montroll's "Favorite Animals in Origami", so maybe the libraries around here are just crappy.

Digging this thread up...

Originally Posted by thegnome54

I was looking for that book earlier...

My school librarians had never heard of it, and informed me that no school libraries in the area had it either. My town librarians had never heard of it (!!!) and gave me similar news. Apparently no libraries at all in the entire area carry this book.

I've also had trouble finding John Montroll's "Favorite Animals in Origami", so maybe the libraries around here are just crappy.

Gnome,

Sorry, I never saw your response.

GEB won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. It appeared on the NY Times Bestseller List in 1980. According to Google Books, it has been cited in 742 other books. Reference. It is the number one selling book on Amazon in three different categories, and likely has a few million copies in print. For a library not to carry it, worse yet not to have heard of it, is a crime!

My suggestion, order two of them online. Keep one for yourself, and donate the other to your library. It sounds like they could use a copy.

Originally Posted by skysaw

GEB won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award. It appeared on the NY Times Bestseller List in 1980. According to Google Books, it has been cited in 742 other books. Reference. It is the number one selling book on Amazon in three different categories, and likely has a few million copies in print. For a library not to carry it, worse yet not to have heard of it, is a crime!

All for an origami book? What is our society coming to...

Those are just plain old "contradictions" as far as I can tell, although there might be other terms for certain types. I'm not sure.

Contradictions: statements that by definition can never be true, as opposed to a normal statement like "It's raining out" which may or may not be true, or tautologies, which are always true by definition, like "1+1=2."