this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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What do we call this, an Appeal to Balance fallacy?
False Balance or Appeal to People, which one are you referring to?
Are those like, official ones? I was making a name up
Common fallacies are well documented with generally similar names. Might be worth reading up on them so that when you label something a fallacy, you are doing so from an informed position. Labelling something a fallacy, without understanding whether it is or isn't, is a subtle form of disinformation.
That's a rather rigid view of rhetoric. I know common fallacies have been documented (mostly in infographic form) but the way that you categorize them and how you define them isn't some immutable law of the universe, and neither are their names. Collections of fallacies aren't very reliable. More official sources exist but they don't tend to name very specific fallacies.
Anyways, what really bothers me is this:
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding that I cannot allow. Something isn't a fallacy because some guy said it is; that, ironically, is an Appeal to Authority Fallacy(TM). Memorizing a list of fallacies by name does not teach you what a fallacy is and it certainly doesn't grant you understanding like you claim. The list doesn't decide what a fallacy is. A logical fallacy is simply a mistake or nonrigorous section in an argument that follows a common pattern. If you can identify the pattern, and you can identify that it's not logically sound, you can call it a fallacy. That's not disinformation just because you didn't read about it on logicalfallacies.com.