HB AT section 2.10 Flashcards
Middle Ages:
In teaching, dialectic (now including logic) was considered part of the trivium: the three of the seven liberal arts that were related to language (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric).
Renaissance:
Humanist scholars revived the tradition of dialectic in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., as the art of conducting a discussion rather than as the art of reasoning.
19th Century:
The discipline of logic transformed into a purely formal discipline, in which reasoning was studied without taking the context of a discussion into account. In philosophical writings of this period, the term dialectic mainly refers to the processes of transformation in ideas, history, and society, as described by Fichte, Hegel, and Marx.
20th Century:
Different interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of fallacies as being either a logical or a dialectical approach are reflected in the modern approaches to fallacies. In most twentieth-century textbooks, fallacies are conceived as mistakes in reasoning rather than as unreasonable discussion moves and thus as an object of study for logic rather than dialectic.
An argument can be incorrect on four accounts
- Inconclusiveness
- Irrelevant conclusion
- Wrong method
- False premise
sophistic refutation
An alleged refutation may either be based on a non-deductive argument (which seems to be deductive) or have a wrong conclusion (which seems to be the required conclusion) or have a premise of the wrong kind (which premise, however, seems alright).
There are two kinds of sophistical refutations
- those that depend on the “use of language” (6)
their deceptive value is based on the formulation, the fallacies arise because language can have more than one meaning, thus, there arise problems in the interpretation
a) utterance corresponds to two (or more) other sentences
b) the sentence is ambiguous - those that do not depend on the “use of language” (7)
Equivocation:
using ambiguous words, in which the Answerer and Questioner both understand the word differently
Amphiboly:
using an ambiguous sentence
Composition:
language dependent fallacy, concerned with the grouping of words (shifting from the composed to the divided
Division:
language dependent fallacy, concerned with the grouping of words (shifting from the divided to the composed)
Accent
pronouncing a word with a difference of pitch, to give it another meaning, or pronouncing a word sloppily so that the Answerer mistakes it for another word
Form of Expression:
ambiguity on the level of morphemes; an illegitimate reading of the word’s category (i.e. a verb as a noun)
Accident:
fallacy of false deduction
Secundum Quid:
“fallacy of saying things with or without adding a qualification” –> later: completely changed meaning: hasty generalization
Ignoratio Elenchi:
the fallacy of presenting an argument that seems to be a refutation of the Answerer’s thesis but actually violates one of the conditions of the definition of refutation (later: arguments with an irrelevant conclusion)
Consequent:
includes the fallacy of asserting the consequent but also denying the antecedent, universally generalized versions of these two fallacies, and in general any conversion of the relation of consequence
Begging the Question:
the case of a premise being identical, or equivalent by substitution of synonyms, to the conclusion. It may also be that there is some other relation of equivalence, or that the premise expresses a special case of what the conclusion universally asserts, or conversely that the conclusion expresses a special case of what the premise universally asserts, or that the premise asserts a conjunctive part of the conclusion
Non-Cause:
It refers to a fallacious use of a reductio ad absurdum (or ad impossibile) argument in which (1) an impossibility is derived from a number of conceded premises, but (2) the wrong premise is blamed for yielding the impossibility and consequently denied.
Many Questions:
hiding one question in another to elicit a favourable answer
