Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A false notion.
- n. A statement or an argument based on a false or invalid inference.
- n. Incorrectness of reasoning or belief; erroneousness.
- n. The quality of being deceptive.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Deceptiveness; deception; deceit; deceitfulness; that which is erroneous, false, or deceptive; that which misleads; mistake.
- n. Specifically— A false syllogism; an invalid argumentation; a proposed reasoning which, professing to deduce a necessary conclusion, reaches one which may be false though the premises are true, or which, professing to be probable, infers something that is really not probable, or wants the kind of probability assigned to it. A fallacy is either a sophism or a paralogism, according as the deceit is intentional or not. But the word paralogism is also used to signify a purely logical fallacy—that is, a formal fallacy, or a direct violation of the canons of syllogism. Logicians enumerate as many different kinds of formal fallacy as they give of canons of syllogism, from four to eight. See below.
- n. The fallacy of accident, arising when a syllogism is made to conclude that, because a given predicate may be truly affirmed of a given subject, the same predicate may be truly affirmed respecting all the accidents of that subject.
- n. The fallacy of speech respective and speech absolute, occurring when a proposition is affirmed with a qualification or limitation in the premises, but virtually without the qualification in the conclusion.
- n. The fallacy of irrelevant conclusion, or ignoration of the elench, occurring when the disputant, professing to contradict the thesis, advances another proposition which contradicts it in appearance but not in reality.
- n. The fallacy of the consequent, or non sequitur, an argument from consequent to antecedent, which may really be a good probable argument.
- n. Begging the question, or the petitio principii, a syllogism, valid in itself, but in which that is affirmed as a premise which no man who doubts the conclusion would admit.
- n. The fallacy of false cause, arising when, in making a reductio ad absurdum, besides the proposition to be refuted, some other false premise is introduced.
- n. The fallacy of many interrogations in which two or more questions are so proposed that they appear to be but one: as, “Have you lost your horns?” a question which implies that you had horns.
Wiktionary
- n. Deceptive or false appearance; deceitfulness; that which misleads the eye or the mind; deception.
- n. An argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it is not.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. Deceptive or false appearance; deceitfulness; that which misleads the eye or the mind; deception.
- n. An argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it is not; a sophism.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a misconception resulting from incorrect reasoning
Etymologies
- Alteration of Middle English fallace, from Old French, from Latin fallācia, deceit, from fallāx, fallāc-, deceitful, from fallere, to deceive.
Examples
“The main fallacy is that the tax does not acknowledge the largely static nature of short term energy demand.”
Oil: Marginal vs. Average Cost, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“A subset of this fallacy is the pervasive view that securities trading is a zero-sum game.”
Exuberance, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
“The worst of the fallacy is the assumption that “worth” means only economic value, without any other factor interfering, and, as you note, that “worth” based on economic value in the current cultural environment somehow trumps any other consideration.”
“The most common manifestation of this fallacy is the assumption that the artist begins with material that has already a recognized status, moral, philosophic, historical, or whatever, and then renders it more palatable by emotional seasoning and imaginative dressing.”
“Franken also talks about what he calls the fallacy of liberal bias in the media which is interesting given my recent blog posts about that very issue.”
“When you say it like that, the fallacy is almost self-evident; we hardly need spell out the reductio ad absurdum.”
“And yet in this idea there lies a fallacy, and the fallacy is the belief that in this modern world there is any such thing as independence.”
“Another major fallacy is that the science is tracking or lead by the politics. 100% untrue and suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science.”
“Kornbelt888: A fallacy is "an argument which provides poor reasoning in support of its conclusion.”
“A fallacy is "an argument which provides poor reasoning in support of its conclusion.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘fallacy’.
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Eesily missspellable words
absence, abundance, accessible, accidentally, acclaim, accommodate, accomplish, accordion, accumulate, achievement, acquaintance, across and 420 more...
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Psychology
Chapter 1
rigorous, occurrence, maze, divers, intellectual, expansion, all in all, sensation, introspection, radical, orientation, nurture and 174 more...
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Words that sound dirty but aren't.
When you want to be pedantic AND childish.
titular, masticate, condiment, titmouse, penal, formication, social intercourse, assassination, cacophony, lucubrate, rectify, banal and 117 more...
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general search words
words when I found them in the articles
benign, pantomime, deregulation, regressive, morose, staid, mercurial, temperament, ludicrous, fallacy, discord, afloat and 17 more...
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Words to make you sound smart
duality, hence, inference, deduce, juxtapose, mundane, gregarious, plight, esoteric, austere, encompass, subsidize and 17 more...
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Terms for AP Lit
This list is designed to be a reference for my AP Lit. students
symbolism, archetype, polysyndeton, ellipsis, anaphora, diction, asyndeton, chiasmus, syntax, oxymoron, logos, fallacy and 28 more...

ruzuzu "5. The fallacy of irrelevant conclusion, or ignoration of the elench, occurring when the disputant, professing to contradict the thesis, advances another proposition which contradicts it in appearance but not in reality."
--Century Dictionary
Sep 28, 2010
kewpid There ain't no fallacy like a logical fallacy Sep 19, 2007