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Credulity is a person's willingness or ability to believe that a statement is true, especially on minimal or uncertain evidence. [1] [2] Credulity is not necessarily a belief in something that may be false: the subject of the belief may even be correct, but a credulous person will believe it without good evidence.
In the theory of sign phenomena, adapted from that of Charles Sanders Peirce, which forms the basis for much contemporary work in linguistic anthropology, the concept of context is integral to the definition of the index, one of the three classes of signs comprising Peirce's second trichotomy.
Gullibility does not appear in Noah Webster's 1817 A dictionary of the English language, [12] but it does appear in the 1830 edition of his American dictionary of the English language, where it is defined: "n. Credulity. (A low word)". [13] Both gullibility and gullible appear in the 1900 New English Dictionary. [10]
A thing is evidence for a proposition if it epistemically supports this proposition or indicates that the supported proposition is true. Evidence is empirical if it is constituted by or accessible to sensory experience. There are various competing theories about the exact definition of the terms evidence and empirical. Different fields, like ...
Circular reasoning is not a formal logical fallacy, but a pragmatic defect in an argument whereby the premises are just as much in need of proof or evidence as the conclusion. As a consequence, the argument becomes a matter of faith and fails to persuade those who don't already accept it.
For example, the proposition that water is H 2 O (if it is true): According to Kripke, this statement is both necessarily true, because water and H 2 O are the same thing, they are identical in every possible world, and truths of identity are logically necessary; and a posteriori, because it is known only through empirical investigation.
Contrast is the antonym of simile. In poetic compositions, it is common for poets to set out an elaborate contrast or elaborate simile as the argument. For example, John Donne and the metaphysical poets developed the conceit as a literary device, where an
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is an essay by Mark Twain, written as a satire of literary criticism and as a critique of the writings of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, that appeared in the July 1895 issue of North American Review. [1] [2] It draws on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.