The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life

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 (few actual instances). On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are & Maarten Boudry [email protected] Fabio Paglieri [email protected] Massimo Pigliucci [email protected] 1 Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University, St.-Pietersnieuwstraat 49, 9000 Ghent, Belgium 2 Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, Italy 3 Department of Philosophy, City College of New York, 160 Convent Av, New York, NY 10031, USA 123 Argumentation DOI 10.1007/s10503-015-9359-1 Author's personal copy