Talk:Fallacy

Sore throat

Denying the antecedent--draws a conclusion from premises that do not support that conclusion by assuming Not P implies Not Q on the basis that P implies Q (e.g., If I have the flu, then I have a sore throat. I do not have the flu. Therefore, I do not have a sore throat. Other illnesses may cause sore throat.)

Actually, this argument is correct. It's a necessary condition (but not a sufficient condition). In other words; if the statement "having a flue" implies "having a sore throat"; then "no sore throat" implies "no flu". Please consider changing this description. 77.56.95.2 (talk) —Preceding undated comment was added at 23:24, 18 January 2009 (UTC).

But "no flu", doesn't imply "no sore throat", so you're wrong about the argument being correct. Remnant76 (talk) 15:24, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

You were confused with P implies Q being equivalent to Not Q implies Not P. So if Q is false, P also cannot be true (since P implies Q) (e.g., If I have the flu, then I have a sore throat. I do not have a sore throat. Therefore, I do not have the flu.)
--Shannonbay (talk) 06:25, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

True, sorry for that 77.56.85.5 (talk) 15:45, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Accent

Accent, which occurs only in speaking and consists of emphasizing the wrong word in a sentence. e.g., "He is a fairly good pianist," according to the emphasis on the words, may imply praise of a beginner's progress, or an expert's deprecation of a popular hero, or it may imply that the person in question is a deplorable pianist.

Why is a citation needed here? All the statements can be logically attributed to the example given. Amnion (talk) 01:59, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Needs reworking.

This article needs work. I've done a university level course in logic that covered this material and I was having a hard time following article. I cleaned up some of the examples and provided a couple more but more are needed. I think that some of the writing is too high level for an introductory article on logical fallacies. For example in the line about connotation fallacies there is a reference to dysphemistic words and attribution fallacies. While there are links that can be followed to learn what these are they weigh down the article. I found the article a tough slog because this sort of stuff.

It would also be good for someone to go through and clean up the style and grammar.Rmawhorter (talk) 18:48, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Ambiguity

For the intent of the article and for the purpose of common understanding, I understand what is implied by ambiguous in the section Verbal Fallacies, Example 1. This ambiguity, however, struck me as being a little inappropriate in the context of the example. I could not find, in the article called Ambiguity any argument for ambiguity by multiple definitions as I feel was implied by this section. The closest I could find was ambiguity in semantics, but even this does not seem to fit. I could argue that technically all words are ambiguous, as their definitions rely on individual foreknowledge, definitions in various dictionaries (I know from recent experience, for example, that the definition for "hypocrisy" is very different in the American Heritage Dictionary from the one in the OED), translations, encyclopedias, reference texts, etc. We must agree, to avoid chaos, on some baseline correct interpretation. Therefore (perhaps in a sort of Orwellian fashion), the classification of "good" as "ambiguous" seems to be a little ambiguous itself. I vote that it be changed. Loonybin0 01:01, 2 May 2009 (UTC)