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Reductio ad absurdum, painting by John Pettie exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884. In logic, reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction to absurdity"), also known as argumentum ad absurdum (Latin for "argument to absurdity") or apagogical argument, is the form of argument that attempts to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction.
[88] (opposite of appeal to tradition) Appeal to poverty (argumentum ad Lazarum) – supporting a conclusion because the arguer is poor (or refuting because the arguer is wealthy). (Opposite of appeal to wealth.) [89] Appeal to tradition (argumentum ad antiquitatem) – a conclusion supported solely because it has long been held to be true. [90]
Full contraposition is the simultaneous interchange and negation of the subject and predicate, and is valid only for the type "A" and type "O" propositions of Aristotelian logic, while it is conditionally valid for "E" type propositions if a change in quantity from universal to particular is made (partial contraposition).
conclusion iff conditions. it uses sentences of the form: conclusion if conditions. to reason forwards from conditions to conclusions or backwards from conclusions to conditions. The database semantics is analogous to the legal principle expressio unius est exclusio alterius (the express mention of one thing excludes all others). Moreover, it ...
Opposition is a semantic relation in which one word has a sense or meaning that negates or, in terms of a scale, is distant from a related word. Some words lack a lexical opposite due to an accidental gap in the language's lexicon. For instance, while the word "devout" has no direct opposite, it is easy to conceptualize a scale of devoutness ...
The opposite, slothful induction, is the fallacy of denying the logical conclusion of an inductive argument, dismissing an effect as "just a coincidence" when it is very likely not. The overwhelming exception is related to the hasty generalization but works from the other end. It is a generalization that is accurate, but tags on a qualification ...
Oxymorons are words that communicate contradictions. An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction. As a rhetorical device, an oxymoron illustrates a point to communicate and reveal a paradox.
An exclamative is a sentence type in English that typically expresses a feeling or emotion, but does not use one of the other structures. It often has the form as in the examples below of [WH + Complement + Subject + Verb], but can be minor sentences (i.e. without a verb) such as [WH + Complement] How wonderful!.