Logic Fallacies

Nobody asked but …

I have a few candidates for inclusion in any standard list of logical fallacies:

  • The Time Bandits’ Fallacy — in this logic misstep, things are taken out of chronological sequence and set up to be causality observations.  Examples are closing the barn door when the horse is gone, pre-crime where actions are interpreted as if their only outcome could be a crime, I told you so (a special case of the cherry-picking fallacy), and if this had been done then that would have been.
  • The Unequal Converse Fallacy — wrongly regarding opposites as equally likely when in fact the probability of one is open-ended while of the other is a closed end.  True is the end of a spectrum while false is a variable condition that can only be described by the degree to which truth is or is not present.  Absolute false cannot be reached.  While true or false may be one another’s converse, they are never equal and opposite.
  • The Confluence Regression Fallacy — Where two elements come together to make a third, a false implication is that the separate elements never had unique properties but only the properties which would combine.  If sodium and chlorine come together to make salt, then they have no characteristics that were lost in the combination, the only property they have is their propensity to become salt.

Kilgore