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

Abstract

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

Argumentation Quality Assessment: Theory vs. Practice

“…For single arguments, however, all existing approaches that we are aware of assess quality in relative terms, e.g., Cabrio and Villata (2012) find accepted arguments based on attack relations, Wei et al (2016) rank arguments by their persuasiveness, and Wachsmuth et al (2017b) rank them by their relevance. Boudry et al (2015) argue that normative concepts such as fallacies rarely apply to real-life arguments and that they are too sophisticated for operationalization. Based on the idea that relative assessment is easier, Habernal and Gurevych (2016b) crowdsourced the UKPConvArg1 corpus.…”

Which argument is more convincing? Analyzing and predicting convincingness of Web arguments using bidirectional LSTM

“…A solid body of argumentation research has been devoted to the quality of arguments (Walton, 1989;Johnson and Blair, 2006), giving more profound criteria that "good" arguments should fulfill. However, the empirical evidence proving applicability of many theories falls short on everyday arguments (Boudry et al, 2015).…”

Critical Thinking

“…This should be no surprise. Outside of mathematics, deductive logic has only a small role in problem solving, and the vast majority of practical cases of “logical fallacies” concern logical principles that go beyond deductive logic (Boudry et al, ). As soon as we leave the domain of deductive logic behind us, background knowledge in empirical subject matter becomes decisive for what conclusions we can draw.…”