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The historical fallacy is a logical fallacy originally described by philosopher John Dewey in The Psychological Review in 1896. Most simply put, the fallacy occurs when a person believes that results occur only because of the process taken to obtain them.
In literary and historical analysis, presentism is a term for the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. [1]
In the field of military history, historians sometimes use what is known as the "fog of war technique" in hopes of avoiding the historian's fallacy. In this approach, the actions and decisions of the historical subject (such as a military commander) are evaluated primarily on the basis of what that person knew at the time, and not on future ...
Etymological fallacy – assuming that the original or historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its actual present-day usage. [ 28 ] Fallacy of composition – assuming that something true of part of a whole must also be true of the whole.
A close relative/variant of the appeal to tradition is the argument from inertia or appeal to inertia (sometimes called "Stay the Course"), which states a mistaken status quo, potentially related to existing customs be maintained for its own sake, usually because making a change would require admission of fault in the mistake or because correcting the mistake would require extraordinary effort ...
[citation needed] When the initial step is not demonstrably likely to result in the claimed effects, this is called the slippery slope fallacy. This is a type of informal fallacy , and is a subset of continuum fallacy , in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B.
The result of conflating concepts may give rise to fallacies and ambiguity, including the fallacy of four terms in a categorical syllogism. For example, the word "bat" has at least two distinct meanings: a flying animal, and a piece of sporting equipment (such as a baseball bat or cricket bat).
Anti-intentionalism maintains that a work's meaning is entirely determined by linguistic and literary conventions and rejects the relevance of authorial intent. [3] Anti-intentionalism began with the work of William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley when they coauthored the seminal paper The Intentional Fallacy in 1946. [3]