Thank you both for bringing these up, the name is the one problem with this otherwise excellent post. It’s been bugging me for awhile.
One idea I had looking at some of them, like the “capital punishment is murder” one, is “false double standard”, trying to point out a double standard where we already know exactly where it comes from. However I’m not sure that covers all cases of the argument. Maybe it makes sense where the argument is used against something which is already common in society, but not when the argument is used against some radical new idea, although I’d have to think more to be sure that was the difference.
I don’t think that name is very descriptive and is also hard to say.
On the other hand I like the initial example use on Wikipedia, regarding surgeons, because it’s an apolitical one that nobody actually believes.
(or at least it is today. It could be that Artistotle was writing at a time when surgery was very new and not widely accepted, and many people made derogatory comments like calling surgeons butchers. Especially considering that surgery in those days was probably super-dangerous so a lot of people would die on the operating table and the increased survival rates would be hard to see. But for the present day it works great.)
On the other hand, the Wikipedia page fails to give any indication of how prevalent the fallacy is, which political examples are probably required for, as Yvain pointed out. But the surgery one might be optimal as a replacement for the MLK example in the first section, pointing out how absurd the fallacy is, before going into political examples to show how common it is.
I’d choose something like “the fallacy of naive deduction” because it reminds me of those awful proofs that the Greeks used to write which were essentially just the premises that contained their hidden assumptions, and then extremely simple deductions which followed straightforwardly from the premises.
That name doesn’t seem to convey the full impact of the argument for me, though. Perhaps a more evocative name, similar to “the strawman fallacy”, might be more effective in terms of memetics and remembering the correct form of the argument without mixing it up with other fallacies. The well-known Reductio ad Hitlerum is a good example of this, and is actually very close to this argument AFAICT.
I’ve been playing with plays on reduction, oxidation, redox, etc., but haven’t settled on a particular one I prefer yet. The argument often feels like a “reduction” (of something like taxation to what it is in essence, aka theft, for example) to those without the ability to disentangle this, yet could be considered to do the reverse—an “oxidation” ;) - since it attempts to merge the point of contention into an overarching category that already has “known values”.
P.S. Completely agree on the main point of your comment.
I love the article, but this is a bad name for a fallacy, as it hinders neutral discussion of its relative badness compared to other fallacies.
If I could pick a name, I’d probably choose something like “tainting categorization”.
Not only that, but it is also non-descriptive.
Thank you both for bringing these up, the name is the one problem with this otherwise excellent post. It’s been bugging me for awhile. One idea I had looking at some of them, like the “capital punishment is murder” one, is “false double standard”, trying to point out a double standard where we already know exactly where it comes from. However I’m not sure that covers all cases of the argument. Maybe it makes sense where the argument is used against something which is already common in society, but not when the argument is used against some radical new idea, although I’d have to think more to be sure that was the difference.
The philosophers beat you to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_%28fallacy%29
I don’t think that name is very descriptive and is also hard to say.
On the other hand I like the initial example use on Wikipedia, regarding surgeons, because it’s an apolitical one that nobody actually believes. (or at least it is today. It could be that Artistotle was writing at a time when surgery was very new and not widely accepted, and many people made derogatory comments like calling surgeons butchers. Especially considering that surgery in those days was probably super-dangerous so a lot of people would die on the operating table and the increased survival rates would be hard to see. But for the present day it works great.)
On the other hand, the Wikipedia page fails to give any indication of how prevalent the fallacy is, which political examples are probably required for, as Yvain pointed out. But the surgery one might be optimal as a replacement for the MLK example in the first section, pointing out how absurd the fallacy is, before going into political examples to show how common it is.
I’d choose something like “the fallacy of naive deduction” because it reminds me of those awful proofs that the Greeks used to write which were essentially just the premises that contained their hidden assumptions, and then extremely simple deductions which followed straightforwardly from the premises.
Somebody else mentioned “guilt by association” as the already-common name for it.
That name doesn’t seem to convey the full impact of the argument for me, though. Perhaps a more evocative name, similar to “the strawman fallacy”, might be more effective in terms of memetics and remembering the correct form of the argument without mixing it up with other fallacies. The well-known Reductio ad Hitlerum is a good example of this, and is actually very close to this argument AFAICT.
I’ve been playing with plays on reduction, oxidation, redox, etc., but haven’t settled on a particular one I prefer yet. The argument often feels like a “reduction” (of something like taxation to what it is in essence, aka theft, for example) to those without the ability to disentangle this, yet could be considered to do the reverse—an “oxidation” ;) - since it attempts to merge the point of contention into an overarching category that already has “known values”.
P.S. Completely agree on the main point of your comment.