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fallacy| In literary criticism, either of two approaches held to be errors by certain critics. The New Criticism movement in the USA held that a literary text could be criticized legitimately only in terms of its internal structures. Two followers of this tradition, W K Wimsatt and Monroe C Beardsley, argued 1954 that it was mistaken to interpret literature in terms of its emotional effects (affective fallacy) or in terms of the intentions of the author (intentional fallacy). |
fallacy| In philosophy, a type of mistake in reasoning or inference (deduction or conclusion drawn from what has been implied). In Aristotelian logic (syllogism) and in modern formal logic, there are rules for detecting and preventing fallacies, and ensuring that an inference is valid. |
| Fallacies in everyday reasoning can be less easy to detect. Begging the question is a fallacy that occurs when one of the premises of an argument could not be known to be true unless the conclusion were first assumed to be true. Other fallacies include fallacies of ambiguity; of arguing against a person, rather than against what the person says; and of arguing that something is true simply because there is no evidence against it. |
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| ? Mentioned in | | ? References in classic literature |
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| The secret of it lies in a fallacy, For, assuming that if one thing is or becomes, a second is or becomes, men imagine that, if the second is, the first likewise is or becomes. To one imbued from infancy with the fascinating fallacy that all men are born equal, unquestioning submission to authority is not easily mastered, and the American volunteer soldier in his "green and salad days" is among the worst known. The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and unnecessary-- these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato. |