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A superstition is "a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation" or "an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition."
The definition, in the book Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy, [37] alludes to the loss of craft skills in handling quantitative information, and to the bad practice of achieving precision in prediction (inference) only at the expenses of ignoring uncertainty in the input which was used to formulate the prediction.
Detailed discussion of these topics may be found on their main pages. These characterizations were made in the context of educating the public about questionable or potentially fraudulent or dangerous claims and practices, efforts to define the nature of science, or humorous parodies of poor scientific reasoning.
Naturalistic fallacy fallacy is a type of argument from fallacy. Straw man fallacy – refuting an argument different from the one actually under discussion, while not recognizing or acknowledging the distinction. [110] Texas sharpshooter fallacy – improperly asserting a cause to explain a cluster of data. [111]
The precise definition of magical thinking may vary subtly when used by different theorists or among different fields of study. In psychology , magical thinking is the belief that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. [ 6 ]
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science starts with a brief survey of the spread of the ideas of "cranks" and "pseudo-scientists", attacking the credulity of the popular press and the irresponsibility of publishing houses in helping to propagate these ideas.
Chardonnens says superstitions belonging to the magic category are exceedingly hermetical and ritualistic: examples include witchcraft, potions, incantations, amulets etc. [2] Chardonnens says that the observation category needs an observer, divination category needs a participant to tell what is to be observed, whereas magic requires a ...
Boudry coined the term fallacy fork. [27] For a given fallacy, one must either characterize it by means of a deductive argumentation scheme, which rarely applies (the first prong of the fork), or one must relax definitions and add nuance to take the actual intent and context of the argument into account (the other prong of the fork). [27]