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Equivocation in a syllogism (a chain of reasoning) produces a fallacy of four terms (quaternio terminorum). Below is an example: Since only man [human] is rational. And no woman is a man [male]. Therefore, no woman is rational. [1] The first instance of "man" implies the entire human species, while the second implies just those who are male.
Appeals to popularity are common in commercial advertising that portrays products as desirable because they are used by many people [9] or associated with popular sentiments [18] instead of communicating the merits of the products themselves. The inverse argument, that something that is unpopular must be flawed, is also a form of this fallacy. [6]
Equivocation – using a term with more than one meaning in a statement without specifying which meaning is intended. [21] Ambiguous middle term – using a middle term with multiple meanings. [22] Definitional retreat – changing the meaning of a word when an objection is raised. [23]
In everyday reasoning, the fallacy of four terms occurs most frequently by equivocation: using the same word or phrase but with a different meaning each time, creating a fourth term even though only three distinct words are used. The resulting argument sounds like the (valid) first example above, but is in fact structured like the invalid ...
The following statements are examples of false equivalence: [3] "The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is no more harmful than when your neighbor drips some oil on the ground when changing his car's oil." The "false equivalence" is the comparison between things differing by many orders of magnitude: [ 3 ] Deepwater Horizon spilled 210 million US gal ...
The Albany Regency is one example of this, as it featured several politicians and newspapers in the state of New York, all with the shared goal of supporting the presidential administration of ...
Christopher Tindale presents, as an example, the following passage from a draft of a bill (HCR 74) considered by the Louisiana State Legislature in 2001: [15] Whereas, the writings of Charles Darwin , the father of evolution, promoted the justification of racism, and his books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man postulate a ...
[3] [6] [7] [8] They are of special interest to the field of formal logic but they can only account for a small number of the known fallacies, for example, for affirming the consequent or denying the antecedent. Many other fallacies used in natural language, e.g. in advertising or in politics, involve informal fallacies.