Is fallacious logic really bad...or even wrong?

I figure that since the "Yack fest" is the only general sub-forum I can find I will put this here and if a "serious general forum" exists that I havnt been able to find (in the many many subforums we have) a mod can move it.

Is a fallacy bad? People use fallacious logic all the time to influence others. Moreover, sometimes it feels really arbitrary what gets labeled as a fallacy.

The Gold Mean Fallacy: Compromise is bad. This was true in say...how Nazi Germany tried to defend against an invasion in France. Two plans were proposed, Hitler gave each plan half the needed resources to properly implement (Who knows if it would have made a difference) but...but on the other hand this means that "give some money to charity" is bad whereas either "give all your money to charity" or "Never give money altruisticly" is correct. Or the complaint that journalism is lackluster due to trying to always shoot between two oppossing views...as opposed to being blatantly biased all the time.

Or what about the Slippery Slope (principiis obsta)? Arguing that is gay marriege is allowed we will soon be marrying our own dead great grandmothers is absurd, regardless of what side of the issue you are on. And yet if it somehow came to pass then what are we to say? It is tempting to claim it will never come to pass. Let me take something that it is fashionable to pin conspiracies and ridicule nowdays and make an example. If I started an organization to protest unclean (environmentally) products or services and got many followers maybe we would want to do something. Lets say we enacted a one day boycott of buisnesses that are un-green. If someone claimed I was going to be dragging those buisness owners out in the streets and murdering them they would come across as a loon using this fallacy. Now lets jumb back to Nazi's. Those of you who remember that the first widespread anti-jewish action (It was fashionable to blame and ridicule jews at that time in Germany) that the Nazi party enacted was a one-day boycott get a cookie. At the time anyone who claimed the Holocaust was coming would come across as a little off. Especially given how poorly the "euthenasia" forced on the mentally ill and old was first recieved in Germany. He would be right however.

Is a fallacy just logic someone arbitrarily decided was bad because, taken after the fact, it ends up being false most of the time? Is it still a fallacy if it is proven true in a given case?

Also, http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1994 At what point does "correct" logic become "stupid" logic? SMBC is using absurdity for humor but they may well have a point.

We have On-Topic Conversations if you would like it put in a more 'serious' subforum, to use your terminology.

If you would like, I could request a movement to that part of the forum.

If I reading this stuff right, the Golden Means Fallacy is not compromise is bad, its the opposite; Compromise is the one and only way.

And as you pointed out, compromise doesn't always work. It can even lead to disaster.

" At what point does "correct" logic become "stupid" logic?"

As the comic shows, when applied incorrectly.

edited 12th May '12 6:57:04 PM by Parable

The Golden Mean Fallacy, or more properly Argument to Moderation. To quote Wikipedia (rather than dig out my textbook, which I seem to have missplaced) "is a logical fallacy which asserts that given two positions there exists a compromise between them which must be correct."

My example of Hitler giving two defenses half the funding is an example of it being bad. Another would be, to make one up on the spot, giving gay people a newly created "half-marriage" as the best solution to the yes/no option. Note that California has Civil Unions, which are like marriage, but with less rights.

My comment "Compromise is bad" was a summation of how people apply this fallacy to the arguments of others. "Why not find a middle ground?" (says the dirty fallacious idiot) "Because compromising is false logic" (Says the educated debater)

And I am in no way supprised that "On-Topic" was passed up if I was looking for "General".

edited 12th May '12 7:22:29 PM by Stormthorn

You and I both showed that the Argument to Moderation is faulty. So aren't you answering your own question?

Ok...I cant find the On Topic section. Unlike most forums, this one doesnt have a clearly listed path above the link the person above gave me (Example: Tank Tops Elite Forum—-General Threads—-Are my eyes blue or aqua?) and, more startlingly, I cannot seem to find it from the "All Forums" link.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/topics.php

Am I just that bad at finding it? Where is it listed on that page? And yes, I would prefer this moved to the phantom-zone.

Edit: WHOOT! I located it finally. Its way down on the bottom left under "Real-ish." I still have no idea why those naming conventions, but no longer do i fumble in the dark, thirsting only for the light of knowledge.

edited 12th May '12 7:28:25 PM by Stormthorn

It's in the bottom left side of the main page.

Somehow you ninja'd my edit after i found it on my own after a third review of that "All forums" page (and also after six weeks of daily posting).

Fallacies are arguments made without proper logic applied, not things someone arbitrarily decided are wrong.

• Slippery Slope is fallacious because it states that the worst possible scenario is the certain outcome of a decision. If Gay Marriage is legal then horses will begin eating each other. If Obama is elected then he'll turn over control of the country to Bin Laden (I actually heard this one). If you don't get Direct TV you'll end up reenacting scenes from Platoon with Charlie Sheen. While the stated outcome may happen, it's not 100% certain that it will happen.
• Golden Means states that the truth lies somewhere between two extremes. It does when the choice is something like "Eat everything you see vs never eat anything ever again". But if the choice is something like "Kill a kitten vs Don't kill a kitten" there's really only one answer.
  • Put simply, sometimes there is room for compromise, sometimes there isn't. So Golden Means is only half fallacious.

edited 12th May '12 8:07:22 PM by Malph

Thread migration from YF to OTC accomplished.

There is such a thing as Fallacy Fallacy, where the idea that someone is incorrect for using fallacious logic. While there is a correlation between fallacious logic and falseness, they can be removed from one another.

For instance, if I say 2^2 is four because you can rearrange the letters to make it so, that's wrong logic but a correct solution.

But fallacious logic is much more likely to lead to a false conclusion, just as much as correct logic working off of bad data is more likely to be false.

There's also the Fallacy Fallacy Fallacy, which (I think) is the idea that someone is correct because an opponent jumped on a logical fallacy in the opposing side's logic. Probably wrong on that, though.

A personal philosophy I have is "Everyone has the right to be Right for the Wrong Reasons".

In other words, let's take a guy who is racist and a family of Korean immigrants moves into his insular, all-white neighborhood. The rest of the community embraces them and shows great appreciation for diversity. Everyone in the community treats them with respect and often invites them over to socialize. But this guy treats the family with suspicion and refuses to get to know them at all, simply because they're Korean.

So one day, most of the community winds up robbed. It turns out that the Korean family were a bunch of crooks, and they preyed upon the insular community's Positive Discrimination and desire to be welcoming to a minority family to case their homes.

This guy winds up spared because he's a racist bigot, which means he was right to suspect the Korean family (because they were Con Artists), but for the wrong reasons (simply because of their race). So in other words, merely being false or fallacious isn't reason enough to discredit a person, but that doesn't mean you can't make value judgements on their reasoning. Being right doesn't make him less of a racist asshole or the unfortunate victims any more wrong for being welcoming to minorities.

edited 12th May '12 8:15:32 PM by KingZeal

Fallacious logic is bad, because with logic you want to be rigorous.

Fallacious reasoning... it depends.

Golden mean reasoning is valid if you can actually demonstrate that 1) each of the extremes has a desirable quality and you're trying to get the best of both worlds, and 2) there's a significant harm to not include each side.

Likewise, slippery slope reasoning makes sense when there's reason to believe that it's part of a bigger pattern. It's application of consistency.

Both of these examples are reasoning that also rely on some other basic assumption. It's fine for the arguer to assert this supporting assumption, and it's fine for the listeners to disagree with that assumption and present a good response.

Now, it's a fallacy when you don't take that step to clearly present that supporting assumption. That's when the listeners call out that the reasoning is invalid. But unless the person using the "fallacy" is really being naive and taking for granted the listeners will agree with the reasoning, I don't think it's necessary for those listeners to call it fallacy. That too is bad reasoning. If you think it's a fallacy, you have to present a proper argument yourself.

You seem to be misunderstanding the "fallacy" part of Golden Mean fallacy. It doesn't mean that compromise is bad, or that there isn't some happy medium to find. It means that someone is looking for a compromise in a situation where a compromise would be detrimental or impossible. If someone stole your stuff, you're not going to be satisfied if they simply give half of it back so that you both have stuff. You're going to want all your fucking stuff back. There are cases in which there is a clear wrong action, or a side that should not be granted the things they desire.

The Golden Means fallacy comes in when people refuse to see that someone actually is in the wrong. Or simply just on the side that doesn't deserve to win or whatever. Following the Golden Means fallacy means that sometimes you are going to risk getting absolutely nothing accomplished while you look for the supposedly perfect solution.

Where is Tomu, the slayer of the Golden Mean fallacy when we need him?

The reason it's a bad thing..here's an example. Take the question, what is 5+5. One side says that the answer is 10, and the other side says the answer is 20. So the answer is obviously 15, right? That's not the way it works. Or at least it's not the way it should work.

I actually think the slippery slope argument is less problematic, to be honest, where the problem isn't so much about avoiding the debate, it's simply a mistaken part of the debate. It's fair and often useful to look at base principles and apply them to other situations. This can be seen as a slippery slope. The problem is when we don't get the base principles...either our own or others..correct. But at least there's some sort of debate and useful conversation going on.

The Golden Mean fallacy doesn't even allow for that.

Slippery slopes are ingrained enough in the human psyche that they can't be called entirely fallacious in human affairs. Just make certain you're invoking foot-in-the-door psychology and not inevitability, and you're on pretty firm ground.

Fallacies are faulty logic. The conclusion does not follow from the premises. If you can support the conclusion with other evidence, that's fine, but that has nothing to do with the original fallacy. This original topic of this thread seems to misunderstand basic logic.

"A, therefore B" implies "not B, therefore not A". What about "B, therefore A" then? Is that also true? Who the fuck knows? It's indeterminate from the data we have. It'd be a fallacy to say it was implied, but fallacies can't tell you what's true, simply what doesn't follow.

edited 13th May '12 8:48:11 AM by Clarste

Yep. The point of calling something a fallacy is that the logic is incorrect. The person has not proven their point, so if they're trying to get you to agree with something you're not buying, they're going to have to modify or find another argument.

But if the point of the conversation is not logical persuasion, or there's an obvious reason (perhaps unstated) why in this particular case the point is valid and not fallacious... well, yeah.

edited 13th May '12 9:31:15 AM by TheGirlWithPointyEars

"Is fallacious logic really bad...or even wrong?"

Generally yes. That's why it's called fallacious.

edited 13th May '12 10:25:15 AM by KaiserMazoku

Fallacious logic is only wrong when used fallaciously.

Take the golden mean argument that's already been brought up. One side says black, one side says white, so the logic holds that "gray" is the correct answer. That's not always true — sometimes the answer is, in fact, black or white, and the opposite side is simply wrong. But it's not always wrong either — sometimes the answer is gray.

What's wrong is saying "you say white and you say black, therefore the answer is gray because you say white and you say black". If you have an independent argument for gray, then the golden mean fallacy doesn't apply. If you have an argument for gray the depends on the fact that it's a blending of black and white, then you're using golden mean logic, but it's not automatically a fallacy.

Fallacious logic is always bad, though not always wrong.

Well, yes, because "fallacious" means "bad". But arguments commonly cited as fallacious (eg, golden mean, slippery slope) aren't always fallacious. An argument cannot, in an of itself, be fallacious — it can only be applied fallaciously.

Fallacious doesn't mean bad. It just means misleading.

For example, it's theorized that humans are predisposed toward superstition because it was how we as a species survived despite being physically weaker than most creatures. If we see a bush move, we assume it's possessed by some evil spirit and run. This was important for our ancestors, because making no assumption at all could mean we get eaten by the tiger behind said bush.

We're talking about logic here though. Even using the loose common definition of logic, there's the assumption that there's some kind of standard of correctness that's being held up to. Because the statement is logical, the conclusion is supported. If the conclusion is supported by completely unrelated evidence, the original statement doesn't magically become logical.

Fallacies are just there to remind us why certain forms of reasoning are often not as valid as they seem. They aren't inherently completely meaningless forms of reasoning.

edited 13th May '12 12:35:55 PM by HiddenFacedMatt