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In modern usage, it has come to refer to an argument in which the premises assume the conclusion without supporting it. This makes it an example of circular reasoning. [1] [2] Some examples are: "People have known for thousands of years that the earth is round. Therefore, the earth is round." "Drugs are illegal so they must be bad for you.
An axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word ἀξίωμα ( axíōma ), meaning 'that which is thought worthy or fit' or 'that which commends itself as evident'.
Referential fallacy [45] – assuming that all words refer to existing things and that the meaning of words reside within the things they refer to, as opposed to words possibly referring to no real object (e.g.: Pegasus) or that the meaning comes from how they are used (e.g.: "nobody" was in the room).
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 ...
Arguendo is a Latin legal term meaning for the sake of argument. "Assuming, arguendo, that ..."and similar phrases are used in courtroom settings, academic legal settings, and occasionally in other domains, to designate provisional and unendorsed assumptions that will be made at the beginning of an argument in order to explore their implications.
The definition of a formal proof is intended to capture the concept of proofs as written in the practice of mathematics. The soundness of this definition amounts to the belief that a published proof can, in principle, be converted into a formal proof. However, outside the field of automated proof assistants, this is rarely done in practice.
For example, the statement "Green is the best color because it is the greenest of all colors", offers no independent reason besides the initial assumption for its conclusion. Detecting this fallacy can be difficult when a complex argument with many sub-arguments is involved, resulting in a large circle.
A different meaning of the term hypothesis is used in formal logic, to denote the antecedent of a proposition; thus in the proposition "If P, then Q", P denotes the hypothesis (or antecedent); Q can be called a consequent. P is the assumption in a (possibly counterfactual) What If question.