Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information. We call this mistake the Abstraction Fallacy. Tracing the causal origins of abstraction reveals that symbolic computation is not an intrinsic physical process. Instead, it is a mapmaker-dependent description. It requires an active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite (...) set of meaningful states. Consequently, we do not need a complete, finalized theory of consciousness to assess AI sentience—a demand that simply pushes the question beyond near-term resolution and deepens the AI welfare trap. What we actually need is a rigorous ontology of computation. The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality). Establishing this ontological boundary shows why algorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience. Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture. Ultimately, this framework offers a physically grounded refutation of computational functionalism to resolve the current uncertainty surrounding AI consciousness. (shrink)

The fallacy fallacy is either the misdiagnosis of fallacy or the supposition that the conclusion of a fallacy must be a falsehood. This paper explores the relevance of these and related errors of reasoning for the appraisal of arguments, especially within virtue theories of argumentation. In particular, the fallacy fallacy exemplifies the Owl of Minerva problem, whereby tools devised to understand a norm make possible new ways of violating the norm. Fallacies are such tools and so are vices. Hence (...) a similar problem arises with argumentative vices. Fortunately, both instances of the problem have a common remedy. (shrink)

This paper examines two symmetrical fallacies that shape much of the discourse on nondual experience. The first does not consist simply in giving nondual experience a metaphysical interpretation. Rather, it consists in treating a transformation of the experiential field—especially the suspension of the subject–object distinction and the weakening of perspectival self-centering—as if it directly disclosed an ontologically independent point, ground, or nucleus, often articulated in terms of supreme or cosmic consciousness. The second fallacy consists in adopting such an ontology (...) and then speaking as if it were grounded in one’s own realization, thereby implicitly occupying an epistemic position for which one’s own experience provides no sufficient warrant. What begins as a metaphysical interpretation of an indeterminate experiential field is reintroduced into discourse as if it carried the authority of realization. Both fallacies arise from a common source: the indeterminate character of nondual experience. Introducing the concept of pre-subjective openness, the paper argues that this experiential field is phenomenologically compelling yet ontologically underdetermined. It can support multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations, none of which is uniquely warranted by the experience itself. The central thesis is that nondual experience does not justify ontological closure, and that maintaining the distinction between experience, interpretation, and epistemic authority is essential if epistemic inflation is to be avoided. A metaphysical interpretation may be meaningful or even existentially powerful, but it remains responsible only insofar as it acknowledges its own interpretive status rather than presenting itself as directly delivered by experience. (shrink)

A leading theoretical framework for naturalistic explanation of mind holds that we explain the mind by positing progressively "stupider" capacities ("homunculi") until the mind is "discharged" by means of capacities that are not intelligent at all. The so-called homuncular fallacy involves violating this procedure by positing the same capacities at subpersonal levels. I argue that the homuncular fallacy is not a fallacy, and that modern-day homunculi are idle posits. I propose an alternative view of what naturalism requires that reflects how (...) the cognitive sciences are actually integrating mind and matter. (shrink)

The paper argues that the two best known formal logical fallacies, namely denying the antecedent (DA) and affirming the consequent (AC) are not just basic and simple errors, which prove human irrationality, but rather informational shortcuts, which may provide a quick and dirty way of extracting useful information from the environment. DA and AC are shown to be degraded versions of Bayes’ theorem, once this is stripped of some of its probabilities. The less the probabilities count, the closer these (...) fallacies become to a reasoning that is not only informationally useful but also logically valid. (shrink)

Robert Kimball, in “What’s Wrong with Argumentum Ad Baculum?” (Argumentation, 2006) argues that dialogue-based models of rational argumentation do not satisfactorily account for what is objectionable about more malicious uses of threats encountered in some ad baculum arguments. We review the dialogue-based approach to argumentum ad baculum, and show how it can offer more than Kimball thinks for analyzing such threat arguments and ad baculum fallacies.

Contemporary research on artificial intelligence and consciousness exhibits three structurally distinct fallacies whose combined operation produces a discipline that uses the vocabulary of consciousness while no longer engaging consciousness as an explanandum. Hard Conflation bundles the functional and phenomenal aspects of consciousness under a single term, generating apparent intractability from functional disagreement. Concept Hollowing preserves the term "consciousness" while replacing what made consciousness a meaningful concept with something methodologically tractable. The Stolen Concept, in the sense developed by Rand, uses (...) claims about phenomenal consciousness while denying or undermining the foundations that gave phenomenal consciousness its referential content. Together these fallacies produce the pragmatic pivot characteristic of the contemporary field: the phenomenal question is declared intractable, research is redirected to the perception of AI consciousness, and the original explanandum is preserved nominally while being abandoned operationally. The paper develops each fallacy formally, traces its operation in Comșa (2026) as a worked example, and shows how the apparent intractability dissolves once consciousness is treated as axiomatic rather than as something to be derived from functional architecture. The Unified Axioconscious Field Theory developed in prior work by the present author provides one such structural framework. The paper closes by tracing the cultural stakes: as the vocabulary of consciousness is captured to fit AI systems, the original phenomenal-anchored sense drops out of the working vocabulary of the culture, and humans come to understand themselves through the hollowed concepts. (shrink)

Robert Kimball, in “What’s Wrong with ArgumentumAd Baculum?” (Argumentation, 2006) argues that dialogue-based models of rational argumentation do not satisfactorily account for what is objectionable about more malicious uses of threats encountered in some ad baculum arguments. We review the dialogue-based approach to argumentum ad baculum, and show how it can offer more than Kimball thinks for analyzing such threat arguments and ad baculum fallacies.

Fallacies are often treated either as simple logical errors or as tactical tools to win debates and legitimize indefensible political positions. Curiously, despite their real-world impact, they are usuallytaught in an apolitical, stylized light. Historically, however, the study of fallacies has been driven by a pursuit of justice. It stems from concerns over paid deceptive narratives used to maintain power,foreign interference in political sovereignty, and unethical reasoning that causes human suffering. Our exchange unpacks myths in this exact spirit: (...) to disrupt the moral guise of a logic that sustains ongoing colonialism in the Palestinian territories. Approaching Ilan Pappe’s Ten Myths about Israel as an effort to debunk the sophistical premises of Israel’s settler-colonial project, this discussion extracts nine key themes from Pappe’s critique of Zionist discourse. Finally, it expands upon a phenomenon termed "live colonialism.". (shrink)

Presuppositions are at the same time a crucial and almost neglected dimension of arguments and fallacies. Arguments involve different types of presuppositions, which can be used for manipulative purposes in distinct ways. However, what are presuppositions? What is their dialectical function? Why and how can they be dangerous? This paper intends to address these questions by developing the pragmatic approaches to presupposition from a dialectical perspective. The use of presuppositions will be analyzed in terms of presumptive conclusions concerning the (...) interlocutor’s acceptance of a proposition, which can be assessed as reasonable or unacceptable. Their dialectical function is described in terms of dark side commitments attributed to a collective "voice" representing what is commonly shared. For this reason, they count as attempts to include the presupposed contents into the hearer’s commitment store, which in some circumstances can reverse the burden of proof. The different manipulative strategies grounded on controversial presuppositions will be examined by showing the distinct roles that the latter play and the relationship between the degrees of presuppositional implicitness and the speaker’s burden of retraction. (shrink)

Connecting research and production, art research represents a breaking of the barrier between creation and academia. However, there is also a contradiction contained in this kind of research deriving from its methods, since the process of art-based practice must, by its very nature, involve the subjectivity of the artist. I use my own studies as the research object to discuss this issue, and this article presents the problems I encountered during my artistic practice and research of ambiguous roles. This paper (...) has two main points of focus. First, I explore how the fallacy of self-referentiality is presented in paintings and films, and, second, I draw on my short film practice during my master’s study period to explain how the shots present a continuum in relation to the “absent one” and produce interface effects. However, the second point is not necessarily the result of the first one. This kind of connection and contradiction between practice and cognition in the process of art research is that I will analyse and discuss here. (shrink)

This paper explains a fallacy that often arises in theorizing about human minds. I call it the Factual Belief Fallacy. The Fallacy, roughly, involves drawing conclusions about human psychology that improperly ignore the large backgrounds of mostly accurate factual beliefs people have. The Factual Belief Fallacy has led to significant mistakes in both philosophy of mind and cognitive science of religion. Avoiding it helps us better see the difference between factual belief and religious credence; seeing that difference in turn enables (...) us to pose interesting normative questions about various mental states labeled “belief.”. (shrink)

The conjunction fallacy is the well-documented reasoning error on which people rate a conjunction A∧B as more probable than one of its conjuncts, A. Many explanations appeal to the fact that B has a high probability in the given scenarios, but Katya Tentori and collaborators have challenged such approaches. They report experiments suggesting that degree of confirmation—rather than probability—is the central determinant of the conjunction fallacy. In this paper, we have two goals. First, we address a confound in Tentori et (...) al.’s experiments: they failed to control for the fact that in their stimuli where B is confirmed, it is also conversationally relevant in the sense that it fits with the topic or question under discussion. Conversely, when B has a high probability but is not confirmed, it is conversationally irrelevant. Consequently, it is possible that conversational relevance, rather than confirmation, is responsible for the differences they found between confirmed and probable hypotheses. Second, inspired by recent theoretical work, we aim to give the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that this type of conversational relevance on its own—independently of degree of confirmation—can be an important factor in the conjunction fallacy. We report on two experiments that vary Tentori et al.’s design by making B relevant without changing its degree of probability or confirmation. We found that doing so increases the rate of the conjunction fallacy, suggesting that relevance plays an important role in the conjunction fallacy. (shrink)

In this article, we address fallacious analogical reasoning and the Metaphoric Fallacy to a Deductive Inference (MFDI), recently discussed by B. Lightbody and M. Berman (2010). We claim that the authors’ proposal to introduce a new fallacy is only partly justified. We also argue that, in some relevant cases, fallacious analogical reasoning involving metaphors is only affected by the use of quaternio terminorum.

Aphantasia, namely the inability to voluntarily form visual mental imagery, does not, counterintuitively, impair the affected from successfully performing mental imagery tasks. One way of explaining this finding is to posit that aphantasics, despite their claim to the contrary, can form visual imagery, a position here referred to as aphantasia skepticism. This article outlines and rejects two types of aphantasia skepticism and argues that the position results from what is coined the visualizer’s fallacy, namely the false belief that visual mental (...) imagery is necessary to carry out mental imagery tasks. Furthermore, it is argued that the visualizer’s fallacy and the resulting aphantasia skepticism are not only potentially harmful to aphantasics but may also lead to an impoverished view of the dynamics of cognition in general. -/- . (shrink)

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortable handmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed the inverse conjunction fallacy. Not only did people often express a belief in the more general statement but not in the (...) more specific, but also when they accepted both beliefs, they were inclined to give greater confidence to the more general. It is argued that this effect underlies a number of other demonstrations of fallacious reasoning, particularly in category-based induction. Alternative accounts of the phenomenon are evaluated, and it is concluded that the effect is best interpreted in terms of intensional reasoning [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.. Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293-315.]. (shrink)

Many philosophers appeal to the “fallacy of approximation”, or “problem of second best”. However, despite the pervasiveness of such appeals, there has been only a single attempt to provide a systematic account of what the fallacy is. We identify the shortcomings of this account and propose a better one in its place. Our account not only captures all the contexts in which approximation-based reasoning occurs but also systematically explains the several different ways in which it can be in error.

In 1990 Robert Lickliter and Thomas Berry identified the phylogeny fallacy, an empirically untenable dichotomy between proximate and evolutionary causation, which locates proximate causes in the decoding of ‘ genetic programs’, and evolutionary causes in the historical events that shaped these programs. More recently, Lickliter and Hunter Honeycutt argued that Evolutionary Psychologists commit this fallacy, and they proposed an alternative research program for evolutionary psychology. For these authors the phylogeny fallacy is the proximate/evolutionary distinction itself, which they argue constitutes a (...) misunderstanding of development, and its role in the evolutionary process. In this article I argue that the phylogeny fallacy should be relocated to an error of reasoning that this causal framework sustains: the conflation of proximate and evolutionary explanation. Having identified this empirically neutral form of the phylogeny fallacy, I identify its mirror image, the ontogeny fallacy. Through the lens of these fallacies I attempt to solve several outstanding problems in the debate that ensued from Lickliter and Honeycutt’s provocative article. (shrink)

One of the most important challenges for political theory is to identify the extent to which corporations should be facilitated and restricted in law. By way of background to that challenge, we need to develop a view about the nature and potential of corporations and corporate bodies in general. This chapter discusses two fallacies that we should avoid in this exercise. One, a claim popular among economists, that corporate bodies are not really agents at all. The other, a claim (...) associated with US jurisprudence, that not only are they agents, they are persons whose rights call in the same way as the rights of individual persons for legal recognition and protection. (shrink)

This report treats the user’s title “Dhamapada” as referring to the Dhammapada, a verse collection in the Pali Buddhist canon. The working English text is F. Max Müller’s public-domain translation, available as Project Gutenberg eBook 2017 and on Wikisource. Project Gutenberg identifies the eBook as public domain in the United States, and the Wikisource edition presents the Müller translation by numbered verses. The source URLs are listed in Section 6. The Dhammapada is not a treatise in formal logic. It is (...) a compact religious and ethical text made of aphorisms, images, contrasts, exhortations, and soteriological claims. Therefore, this analysis does not claim that the text is simply “bad reasoning.” Rather, it asks a narrower question: Which claims or implied inferences in the Dhammapada would resemble recognized logical fallacies if they were read as literal argumentative proofs rather than as poetic, religious, ascetic, or practical teaching? The result is an inventory of fallacy-candidates. Each item is formalized as an argumentative pattern and then evaluated. Some entries are genuine fallacy risks under a modern critical-reasoning standard; others are borderline because they function mainly as poetry, religious pedagogy, or deliberate moral redefinition. (shrink)

Most contractualist ethical theories have a subjunctivist structure. This means that they attempt to make sense of right and wrong in terms of a set of principles which would be accepted in some idealized, non-actual circumstances. This makes these views vulnerable to the so-called conditional fallacy objection. The moral principles that are appropriate for the idealized circumstances fail to give a correct account of what is right and wrong in the ordinary situations. This chapter uses two versions of contractualism to (...) illustrate this problem: Nicholas Southwood’s and a standard contractualist theory inspired by T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism. It then develops a version of Scanlon’s view that can avoid the problem. This solution is based on the idea that we also need to compare different inculcation elements of moral codes in the contractualist framework. This idea also provides a new solution to the problem of at what level of social acceptance should principles be compared. (shrink)

The notion that business organizations are akin to Aristotelian political communities has been a central feature of research into virtue ethics in business. In this article, I begin by outlining this “community thesis” and go on to argue that psychological research into the “just world fallacy” presents it with a significant challenge. The just world fallacy undermines our ability to implement an Aristotelian conception of justice, to each as he or she is due, and imperils the relational equality required for (...) shared participation in communities. In the final section, I offer a description of what Aristotelian community might look like within organizations, and some suggestions about how it may be possible to resist the challenge posed by the just world fallacy. (shrink)

This paper documents a specific logical error in academic gatekeeping: treating the validity of logical arguments as if it were a competitive relative metric rather than a binary property. On January 7, 2026, the philosophy journal Analysis rejected a three-step argument challenging the justification for mind-independent material reality, stating "the paper's argument isn't as strong as those of other recent submissions." This rejection commits what I term the Comparative Validity Fallacy: attempting to refute a logical argument not by identifying flaws (...) in its reasoning, but by claiming unnamed alternatives are "stronger." The journal simultaneously claimed to have evaluated the argument's strength while preemptively refusing all correspondence about that evaluation. This paper demonstrates why such rejections are logically incoherent, examines the impossibility of the journal's position, and situates this case within a documented pattern of philosophy journals making evaluation claims they refuse to defend when confronted with foundational challenges. (shrink)

Conceptions of fallacies suggested by philosophers vary significantly. Often these contributions are little more than lists, only sometimes approaching a fully-developed theory of fallacy. Where there is a clear understanding of what is meant by the term fallacy, the problem of how to identify them in discourse remains, often leading to a conflation of descriptive and evaluative analyses. We present a two-tier procedure that strictly distinguishes the descriptive and normative dimensions of identifying fallacies. The combination of the descriptive (...) Argument Type Identification Procedure (ATIP), which enables the characterization of an argument in terms of the Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA), and the evaluative Comprehensive Assessment Procedure for Natural Argumentation (CAPNA), provides a basis for systematic, repeatable, and explainable argument acceptability judgements. We explain how this two-tier procedure overcomes some of the difficulties of fallacy identification and categorization and list several other advantages that a procedural approach to fallacies brings. (shrink)

The heart of Aristotelian Logic is the square of opposition. This study engaged on further [re]investigation and meta-logical analysis of the validity of the square of opposition. Further, in this paper, it has been modestly established, with greater clarity, the exposition of the strengths, more than the presentation of the defects, loopholes and weaknesses, of the Aristotelian Logic in a descriptive and speculative manner. The unconcealment of the breakdown of the square of opposition marked a rupture and the opening of (...) avenues of alternative reasoning. The critical and analytical exposition of the loopholes of the square of opposition led to a realization that things around us could have been and still be different; and there could have been better alternative reasoning than what we have called, adopted, and worshipped [Greek] logic. Results show that the downfall of the oppositional relationships in the square of opposition provided a proof of the logical illusion of Aristotle or the loophole of Traditional Logic. The laws of opposition, that have been considered the measures of logically deductive inferences, are practically almost totally logical deceptions. By implication, if the laws of subcontrariety, contrariety, and subalternation [and may be contradiction] have collapsed, the square of opposition has also collapsed; hence, Aristotle‟s square of opposition is a fallacy. This means that the square of opposition has errors and in itself an error. (shrink)

The rapid normalization of generative artificial intelligence has produced two distinct epistemic problems that are routinely conflated. The first is a problem of quality: language models can generate false, derivative, vacuous, or stylistically polished but epistemically poor material at enormous scale. The second is a problem of judgment: the causal provenance of a text is increasingly treated as a substitute for evaluating its propositional content. This paper argues that the latter practice, when the label “AI-generated” or “AI-assisted” is used to (...) reject a claim, argument, or intellectual artifact without content-responsive evaluation, instantiates the genetic fallacy at institutional scale. I first distinguish truth, warranted credence, authorship, and policy compliance, showing that provenance may rationally affect prior confidence or trigger additional scrutiny without thereby refuting a proposition. I then analyze AI-text detection and automated content moderation as forms of probabilistic classification that become epistemically illegitimate when converted directly into adverse adjudication. Empirical work on machine-generated-text detectors demonstrates substantial vulnerability to false positives, distribution shift, linguistic bias, and adversarial evasion, while the literature on automation bias and algorithmic accountability shows why nominal “human oversight” is inadequate when humans merely ratify machine outputs. I argue for a principle of human answerability: tools may be causal contributors to error, but responsibility for consequential epistemic decisions remains with the persons and institutions that design, deploy, supervise, and rely upon them. Finally, I propose six norms for legitimate epistemic governance in the age of generative AI: provenance modesty, content-responsive refutation, proportionality, contestability, auditability, and human answerability. The central danger is not that machines can produce bad arguments. Bad arguments can be answered. The deeper danger is that automated systems can acquire authority over which arguments are permitted to receive an answer at all. (shrink)

A widely accepted claim about counterfactuals is that they differ from strict conditionals, that is, there is no adequate representation of them as sentences of the form   . To justify this claim, Stalnaker and Lewis have argued that some fallacious inferences would turn out valid if counterfactuals were so represented. However, their argument has a flaw, as it rests on a questionable assumption about the relation between surface grammar and logical form. Without that assumption, no consequence of the (...) alleged kind is obtained, hence the claim may be rejected. (shrink)

Alexander Lerchner's "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness" (2026) offers a compelling critique of computational functionalism by arguing that computation is a mapmaker-dependent description rather than an intrinsic physical process. This paper does not dispute Lerchner's conclusions but demonstrates that his central insights find a deeper metaphysical grounding within the Dual-Closure Framework developed in the author's prior work (2025–2026). It is argued that Lerchner's notion of the "mapmaker" can be more fully understood when interpreted in (...) light of two conditions identified by the Dual-Closure Law of Authentic Feeling: existential vulnerability and non-duplicability. While Lerchner's argument can be formulated independently, the Dual-Closure Framework provides a broader metaphysical account within which the Abstraction Fallacy can be more deeply explained and extended. This integration also allows the implications of Lerchner's critique to be developed beyond the philosophy of mind into questions of normativity, jurisprudence, and artificial intelligence alignment. (shrink)

The expression conditional fallacy identifies a family of arguments deemed to entail odd and false consequences for notions defined in terms of counterfactuals. The antirealist notion of truth is typically defined in terms of what a rational enquirer or a community of rational enquirers would believe if they were suitably informed. This notion is deemed to entail, via the conditional fallacy, odd and false propositions, for example that there necessarily exists a rational enquirer. If these consequences do indeed follow from (...) the antirealist notion of truth, alethic antirealism should probably be rejected. In this paper we analyse the conditional fallacy from a semantic (i.e. model-theoretic) point of view. This allows us to identify with precision the philosophical commitments that ground the validity of this type of argument. We show that the conditional fallacy arguments against alethic antirealism are valid only if controversial metaphysical assumptions are accepted. We suggest that the antirealist is not committed to the conditional fallacy because she is not committed to some of these assumptions. (shrink)

: According to Kant, the arguments of rational psychology are formal fallacies that he calls transcendental paralogisms. It remains heavily debated whether there actually is any formal error in the inferences Kant presents: according to Grier and Allison, they are deductively invalid syllogisms, whereas Bennett, Ameriks, and Van Cleve deny that they are formal fallacies. I advance an interpretation that reconciles these extremes: transcendental paralogisms are sound in general logic but constitute formal fallacies in transcendental logic. By (...) formalising the paralogistic inference, I will pinpoint the error as an illegitimate existential presupposition. Since - unlike transcendental logic - general logic abstracts from all objects, this error can only be detected in transcendental logic. (shrink)

In this article I explore two accounts of the Fallacy of Many Questions made famous by the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" The accounts are from the works of Lennart Aqvist and Noel Belnap, and the two authors differ in their accounts of the fallacy. Then I give my own account based on understanding a facet of erotetic logic, i. e., the logic of questions.

Racism is often treated as a moral failure, a cultural artifact, or a historical inheritance. Structurally, it is something much simpler and much more revealing: Racism is a category error. It assigns causal power to a non‑causal property. This paper shows why racism collapses under even minimal structural scrutiny.

According to the Standard Definition ‘a fallacious argument, as almost every account from Aristotle onwards tells you, is one that seems to be valid but is not so’ ( Hamblin 1970 : 12). Scholars take this definition to be problematic in part because ‘appearances can vary from person to person, thus making the same argument a fallacy for the one who is taken in by the appearance, and not a fallacy for the one who sees past the appearances’ ( Hansen (...) 2020 : §4.2). We argue that Aristotle's treatment of fallacy is not subjective in the way that critics of the Standard Definition allege. (shrink)

Persuasive technologies can adopt several strategies to change the attitudes and behaviors of their users. In this work we present some empirical results stemming from the hypothesis - firstly formulated in [3] - that there is a strong connection between some well known cognitive biases reducible to fallacious argumentative schemata and some of the most common persuasion strategies adopted within digital technologies. In particular, we will report how both framing and fallacious-reducible mechanisms are nowadays used to design web and mobile (...) technologies in domains ranging from e-commerce [4] and news recommendations [1] to the jihadist propaganda. We will also show how and to what extent such persuasive strategies have an impact on nudging the choices of the users in digital environments. (shrink)

In this article, the concept of moralistic fallacy introduced by B. D. Davis is elaborated on in more detail. The main features of this fallacy are discussed, and its general form is presented. The moralistic fallacy might have some undesirable outcomes. Some of them might even be in direct conflict to the original moral position. If this occurs, it is possible to characterize it as a paradox of moralistic fallacy. The possibility of this paradox provides a further reason not to (...) prevent any scientific inquiries and not to depict any knowledge as dangerous. (shrink)

Entry point: Free Will Without Metaphysical Magic (++++ ≠ +++=) -/- Many modern debates treat causal explanation as if it displaces responsibility: as neuroscience, psychology, incentives, trauma, and “systems” explain behaviour more fully, agency is assumed to shrink. This paper identifies that inference as the Displacement Fallacy. Resolution Theory blocks it by separating verdict-types. Explanation answers how a decision came about; attribution answers where deliberation closed into action—where evaluation resolved into commitment within an integrated agent or sponsoring chain. Explanation can (...) become arbitrarily detailed without ever summing into authorship, because authorship is not a causal remainder but a closure verdict in a control architecture. Fixing this interface dissolves familiar confusions across free will, addiction and compulsion, institutional failure, and AI ethics: bypass remains rare, most impairment is distortion with mitigation, and “the system did it” stops functioning as a responsibility solvent. The result is a responsibility framework stable under determinism that scales from persons to institutions and artificial systems. (shrink)

In recent years Fodor has repeatedly argued that nothing epistemic can be essential to, or constitutive of, any concept. This holds in virtue of a constraint which Fodor dubs the Compositionality Constraint. I show that Fodor's argument is fallacious because it rests on an ambiguity.

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the Stoic treatment of fallacies that are based on lexical ambiguities. It provides a detailed analysis of the relevant passages, lays bare textual and interpretative difficulties, explores what the Stoic view on the matter implies for their theory of language, and compares their view with Aristotle’s. In the paper I aim to show that, for the Stoics, fallacies of ambiguity are complexes of propositions and sentences and thus straddle the realms of meaning (which is (...) the domain of logic) and of linguistic expressions (which is the domain of linguistics), but also involve a pragmatic element; that the Stoics believe that the premises of the fallacies, when uttered, have only one meaning and are true, and thus should be conceded; that hence there is no need for a mental process of disambiguation in the listeners; that Aristotle, by contrast, appears to assume that the premises always have all their meanings, and accordingly recommends that the listeners explicitly disambiguate them, which presupposes a process of mental disambiguation. I proffer two readings of the Stoic advice that we ‘be silent’ when confronted with a fallacy of ambiguity in dialectical discourse, and explicate how each leads to an overall consistent interpretation of the textual evidence. Finally, I demonstrate that the method advocated by the Stoics works in all cases of fallacies of lexical ambiguity. (shrink)

Global poverty, hunger, and lack of access to save water raise problems of how to organize human society so that everyone's needs can be met. Philanthropic proposals, such as Peter Singer's and Peter Unger's, are based on a false analogy to duties of rescue and encourage philanthropic responses, thus closing the discourse to discussion of the causes and remedies of poverty. Radical criticism of capitalist social structures are put off the table, and this is a profound error.

Objective correlates—behavioral, functional, and neural—provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance on these correlates should not lead to the ‘fallacy of misplaced objectivity’: the assumption that only objective properties should and can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is intrinsically— its subjective properties—not just what we can do with it extrinsically. And it must be explained; otherwise the way experience feels would turn out to be magical (...) rather than physical. We argue that it is possible to account for subjective properties objectively once we move beyond cognitive functions and realize what experience is and how it is structured. Drawing on integrated information theory, we show how an objective science of the subjective can account, in strictly physical terms, for both the essential properties of every experience and the specific properties that make particular experiences feel the way they do. (shrink)

Traditional fallacy theory offers extensive catalogs but no unified account of why fallacies fail or how they relate to one another. This article proposes a structural alternative: a fallacy is a violation of the architecture of reasoning. Building on the analysis developed in earlier articles of this series—which derived five laws of logic from the conditions of existence and articulated six domains through which valid reasoning must pass—we show that fallacies can be systematically classified by the architectural feature (...) they violate. Five types of violation exhaust the logical space: (1) violations of the conditions that make reasoning possible, where manipulation or coercion substitutes for argument; (2) violations within specific domains, where recognition, clarification, framework selection, comparison, inference, or reflection fails; (3) violations of sequence, where reasoning proceeds backward, circularly, or with inverted roles; (4) syndromes, where systemic distortions pervade the entire reasoning process; and (5) context-dependent methods, where approaches like appeal to tradition are valid in some contexts and fallacious in others. This architectural approach yields three results. First, fallacies become locatable: diagnosis identifies where in the architecture failure occurred. Second, fallacies become explicable: each error traces to violation of a specific principle. Third, the classification is complete: the five types correspond to the structural features of reasoning as such. The article develops Types 1, 3, 4, and 5 in detail; a companion article (Article 5) provides systematic treatment of Type 2, which comprises 105 domain violations across the six domains of reasoning. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the effects of motivational biases on the way people reason and debate in everyday life. Unlike heuristics and cognitive biases, motivational biases are typically caused by the influence of a desire or an emotion on the cognitive processes involved in judgmental and inferential reasoning. In line with the ‘motivational’ account of irrationality, I argue that these biases are the cause of a number of fallacies that ordinary arguers commit unintentionally, particularly when the commitment to a (...) given viewpoint is very strong. Drawing on recent work in argumentation theory and psychology, I show that there are privileged links between specific types of biases and specific types of fallacies. This analysis provides further support to the idea that people’s tendency to arrive at desired conclusions hinges on their ability to construct plausible justifications for those conclusions. I suggest that this effort to rationalize biased views is the reason why unintentional fallacies tend to be persuasive. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Tyler Burge's non-reductive view of testiomonial knowledge cannot adeqautrely discriminate between fallacious ad vericumdium appeals to expet testimony and legitimate appeals to authority.

Many philosophical arguments proceed by selecting a limited set of properties from a complex concept, conducting reasoning using only those properties, and then returning the result to the original concept. This paper argues that such reasoning often commits a structural error: the argument proves claims only about an abstract entity defined by the selected properties, not about the original object itself. I call this error the Mask Fallacy. Once an argument replaces an object with an abstraction defined by a subset (...) of its properties, the reasoning becomes logically closed over that abstraction. The conclusion therefore applies only to the masked entity. Returning the result to the original object is unjustified unless the argument is re-established with respect to the full set of properties. The paper formulates this principle formally and shows how it undermines several well-known philosophical arguments. (shrink)

The paper builds on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and on findings from psycholinguistics, to develop and defend ordinary language analysis (OLA) as practiced in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. That attack on sense-datum theories of perception focuses on the argument from illusion. Through a case-study on this paradoxical argument, the present paper argues for a form of OLA which is psychologically informed, seeks to expose epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in paradoxical arguments, and is immune to the main (...) objections to ordinary language philosophising, including those arising from the semantic/pragmatics distinction: A key project in current experimental philosophy is to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us determine what warrant thinkers have for accepting them. Psycholinguistic work on the role of stereotypes in verb-comprehension has shown that intuitive judgments can be generated by automatic cognitive processes that duplicate both semantic and pragmatic inferences and are shaped by dominant uses of words. For systematic reasons, philosophers are prone to unwittingly deviate from such dominant uses. Where this happens, they are liable to automatically infer unwarranted conclusions that strike them as intuitively compelling. OLA helps us to determine those dominant uses, to identify unwitting deviations from them, and thus to expose unwarranted intuitions – e.g., in the premises of paradoxical arguments. Ordinary language does not determine the bounds of sense but shapes our leaps of thought. The paper shows how this enables its ‘Austinian’ analysis to contribute to a novel, epistemic, resolution of philosophical paradoxes and problems. (shrink)

Aristotle determines eristic argument as argument which either operates upon the basis of acceptable premisses (endoxa) and merely give the impression of being deductive, or argument which truly is deductive but operates upon the basis of premisses which seem to be acceptable, but are not (or, again, argument which uses both of these mechanisms). I attempt to understand what Aristotle has in mind when he says that someone is deceived into accepting premisses which seem to be acceptable but which are (...) really not, and how this disqualifies such arguments from being dialectical. In the first section of the paper I interpret Aristotle’s notion of endoxa in terms of a relational concept of acceptability. Real Índoxa are propositions which are accepted by a qualified group or individual. False endoxa may also be accepted by someone or some group, and may even be true, but they are used to serve the purposes of eristical argumentation, which departs from certain standards of dialectical argumentation articulated in the notion of endoxa as a norm for premiss-acceptance. In particular, eristic arguments may even be valid in the sense of a syllogismos while still failing to be proper dialectical arguments. In the second part of the paper I consider how this can be, in examining certain types of fallacies in the Sophistical Refutations and the relationship between fallacious argumentation and false endoxa. (shrink)

This paper identifies and formally characterizes a previously unnamed cognitive mechanism we term The Bicycle Fallacy: the systematic extrapolation from genuine small-scale personal verification successes to an unwarranted assumption that correspondence-based knowledge validation operates identically at civilizational scale. When an individual repairs a bicycle, cooks a meal, or navigates an unfamiliar route, they complete a closed epistemic loop — claim, action, result, personal confirmation. The fallacy occurs when the confidence generated by hundreds of such iterations is silently extended to domains (...) — pharmaceutical efficacy, climate modelling, geopolitical causation — where the personal verification loop is structurally unavailable. The Bicycle Fallacy is not a simple error of overgeneralization but a categorical confusion between two fundamentally distinct epistemic modes: closed-loop personal verification and open-loop institutional trust. Its most consequential property is its invisibility: both modes feel, from the inside, identical. Modern human beings continue to experience knowledge psychologically as if they inhabited a world of potential personal verifiability, even as civilization has crossed the threshold of irreducible epistemic distribution — a threshold beyond which no single mind can reconstruct, even in principle, the full chain of justification behind the claims it is asked to hold. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which (...) one can identify bad or invalid types of reasoning, abstracting away from the specific content and dialectical context. Such shortcuts for debunking arguments are tempting, but alas, the promise is hardly if ever fulfilled. Different strands of research on the pragmatics of argumentation, probabilistic reasoning and ecological rationality have shown that almost every known type of fallacy is a close neighbor to sound inferences or acceptable moves in a debate. Nonetheless, the kernel idea of a fallacy as an erroneous type of argument is still retained by most authors. We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life. On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are sophisticated enough to capture real-life complexities, they can no longer be held up as an effective tool for discriminating good and bad forms of reasoning. As we bring our schematic “fallacies” in touch with reality, we seem to lose grip on normative questions. Even approaches that do not rely on argumentation schemes to identify fallacies fail to escape the Fallacy Fork, and run up against their own version of it. (shrink)

In his message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications (January 24, 2026), Pope Leo XIV advances a substantive philosophical position on artificial intelligence: that human faces and voices are sacred, constitutive of personhood, and that their simulation by AI systems represents an intrinsic threat to human dignity and communication. This paper subjects that position to systematic philosophical scrutiny along three lines of argument. First, the papal account rests on an essentialist ontology of personhood — the view that personhood (...) is constituted by specific biological features — which is philosophically untenable and normatively exclusionary, particularly with respect to people with disabilities whose communication does not conform to the presupposed biological norm. Notably, the message explicitly disavows biochemical reductionism, yet structurally reinstates it by tying personhood's expression exclusively to unaltered biological interfaces; this internal contradiction sharpens rather than dissolves the critique. Drawing on Eva Feder Kittay's relational account of personhood (2019), I argue that personhood is constituted through relationships, not biological substrates. I further examine Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the visage — and a genuinely Levinasian passage in the papal text itself — as the most philosophically serious reconstruction available to the Pope's position, and argue that even this stronger reading does not support the biological privilege the message ultimately requires. Second, the privileging of face-to-face communication over technologically mediated forms reproduces the metaphysics of presence that Jacques Derrida identified as a foundational error of Western philosophy. Third, the theological grounding of the argument commits the naturalistic fallacy as identified by David Hume and G.E. Moore: it attempts to derive normative conclusions about how communication ought to be structured from descriptive claims about how it is biologically constituted — with the unintended consequence of delegitimizing assistive technologies that serve some of the most vulnerable members of human society. A philosophically crucial distinction, which the papal text systematically obscures, separates the simulation of a human agent (deepfakes, deceptive bots) from the synthesis of a communicative medium for a human agent (speech prosthetics, AAC systems); conflating these categories is what renders the papal framework unable to draw the ethical lines it most needs to draw. The paper concludes by sketching a philosophically defensible alternative grounded in Jürgen Habermas's communicative rationality and Amartya Sen's capabilities approach, arguing that the ethical evaluation of AI communication should turn not on biological medium but on whether systems support or undermine genuine communicative agency and relational flourishing. (shrink)

The Fallacy of Language Language was once humanity’s greatest instrument for preserving knowledge, transmitting truth, and building civilization. Today, it has become one of the primary engines of confusion, manipulation, fragmentation, and symbolic collapse. In The Fallacy of Language, Part 9 of The Miscommunication Trilogy, “The Entropy of Communication, Vol. II,” the reader is taken on a profound exploration of the hidden instability beneath modern communication and the growing crisis of meaning in the contemporary world. Drawing from philosophy, linguistics, rhetoric, (...) psychology, law, science, fraud analysis, media studies, and political discourse, this volume investigates how language shapes not only communication but perception itself. From the deceptive power of rhetoric in ancient philosophy to the ambiguities of scientific terminology, from behavioral economics and cognitive biases to linguistic manipulation in fraud cases and public institutions, the book reveals how words are constantly used to distort, redirect, and reconstruct reality. At the center of the work lies the concept of the planned obsolescence of language—the idea that modern communication systems increasingly transform language into something disposable, unstable, accelerated, and detached from enduring meaning. In a civilization saturated by digital media, advertising, ideological conflict, algorithmic influence, and endless symbolic production, words lose permanence and become tools of reaction rather than understanding. Communication expands while comprehension declines. Through examinations of figures such as Galileo, Heisenberg, Aristotle, behavioral economists, legal linguists, and modern theorists of communication, this volume demonstrates that language is never neutral. It structures thought, shapes social systems, defines scientific knowledge, influences morality, and determines how truth itself is perceived. Yet the same language that enables civilization also carries the seeds of misunderstanding, deception, and communicative entropy. The Fallacy of Language is both a philosophical investigation and a warning about the future of human communication. It confronts the reader with urgent questions: What happens when words no longer stabilize reality? Can truth survive in an age dominated by rhetoric, media acceleration, and symbolic overload? And can civilization endure once language itself becomes fragmented and unstable? Blending intellectual history with cultural critique, this volume offers a sweeping examination of humanity’s most powerful and dangerous invention: language itself. (shrink)