Abstract

It is frequently claimed by critical thinking and logic textbooks that people commonly commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. This paper argues that if people did commitment this fallacy with any type of regularity, then it would be easy to locate examples from news media. However, a review of the examples cited by critical thinking and logic textbooks show that it is nearly impossible to find a real instance of this logical fallacy since purported instances of the fallacy are not deductive inferences at all but are instead inferences to the best explanation.