The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fallacy \Fal"la*cy\ (f[a^]l"l[.a]*s[y^]), n.; pl. Fallacies (f[a^]l"l[.a]*s[i^]z). [OE. fallace, fallas, deception, F. fallace, fr. L. fallacia, fr. fallax deceitful, deceptive, fr. fallere to deceive. See Fail.]
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Deceptive or false appearance; deceitfulness; that which misleads the eye or the mind; deception.
Winning by conquest what the first man lost, By fallacy surprised.
--Milton. -
(Logic) An argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it is not; a sophism.
Syn: Deception; deceit; mistake.
Usage: Fallacy, Sophistry. A fallacy is an argument which professes to be decisive, but in reality is not; sophistry is also false reasoning, but of so specious and subtle a kind as to render it difficult to expose its fallacy. Many fallacies are obvious, but the evil of sophistry lies in its consummate art. ``Men are apt to suffer their minds to be misled by fallacies which gratify their passions. Many persons have obscured and confounded the nature of things by their wretched sophistry; though an act be never so sinful, they will strip it of its guilt.''
--South.
Wiktionary
n. (plural of fallacy English)
Wikipedia
- Redirect Fallacy
Usage examples of "fallacies".
It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric.
Kamin concludes that `[t]he authors repeatedly fail to distinguish between correlation and causation' - one of the fallacies of our baloney detection kit.
This is one of the fallacies in the baloney detection kit, the enumeration of favourable circumstances.
Some of the essays cover, in brief summary, the answers to the most widely spread fallacies about the economics of capitalism.
Roszak rather thoroughly confuses the two, which throws him into profound pre/trans fallacies, and this shows up in his presentation as a considerable wobbling and ambivalence (and often blatant self-contradiction) about the "Edenic" state itself.
But when I mentioned to him that I had read certain books of the Platonists, which Victorinus, sometime Professor of Rhetoric at Rome (who died a Christian, as I had been told), had translated into Latin, he congratulated me that I had not fallen upon the writings of other philosophers, which were full of fallacies and deceit, "after the rudiments of the world,"
If what is called psychical research has no other results, at least it enables us to perceive the fallacies which can impose on the credulity of common-sense.
Thus his including it among these, while his whole language shows that he himself did not really reckon it among these, is an example of the fallacies of common-sense.
But-' and he stopped as if he could see the fallacies in the theory and they disturbed him.
Lindner reported a case that later become famous in which he cured a patient by falling in with his delusions and then convincing him of the fallacies of his logic.