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The questionable cause—also known as causal fallacy, false cause, or non causa pro causa ("non-cause for cause" in Latin)—is a category of informal fallacies in which the cause or causes is/are incorrectly identified. In other words, it is a fallacy of reaching a conclusion that one thing caused another, simply because they are regularly ...
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for 'with this, therefore because of this'; correlation implies causation; faulty cause/effect, coincidental correlation, correlation without causation) – a faulty assumption that, because there is a correlation between two variables, one caused the other. [57]
This type of reasoning is fallacious because mere temporal succession does not establish a causal connection. It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy . A logical fallacy of the questionable cause variety, it is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc ('with this, therefore because of this'), in which two events occur ...
Example 5. A historical example of this is that Europeans in the Middle Ages believed that lice were beneficial to health since there would rarely be any lice on sick people. The reasoning was that the people got sick because the lice left. The real reason however is that lice are extremely sensitive to body temperature.
An example is a probabilistically valid instance of the formally invalid argument form of denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent. [ 12 ] Thus, "fallacious arguments usually have the deceptive appearance of being good arguments, [ 13 ] because for most fallacious instances of an argument form, a similar but non-fallacious instance ...
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Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect. The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology ; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one.
The fallacy of the single cause, also known as complex cause, causal oversimplification, [1] causal reductionism, root cause fallacy, and reduction fallacy, [2] is an informal fallacy of questionable cause that occurs when it is assumed that there is a single, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.