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Chapter 8
Formal Fallacies and
Fallacies of Language

Copyright ©2021 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
 Chapter Outline

• Define and recognize the three formal fallacies of affirming the

consequent, denying the antecedent, and the undistributed middle.
• Define and recognize the fallacies of equivocation and amphiboly.
• Define and recognize the fallacies of composition and division.
• Define and recognize the fallacies of confusing explanations with
excuses.
• Define and recognize the fallacies of confusing contraries with
contradictories.
• Define and recognize fallacies related to consistency and
inconsistency.
• Define and recognize four fallacies involved in calculating
probabilities.

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 Three Formal Fallacies

• Affirming the consequent.

• Denying the antecedent.
• Undistributed middle.

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 Affirming the Consequent 1

Clauses "P" and "Q" result in an invalid argument whenever they are
arranged in the following manner:

• If P, then Q.
• Q.
• Therefore, P.

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 Affirming the Consequent 2

"If this dog is pregnant, then it is a female.

"This dog is female."
"Therefore, this dog is pregnant."
• This is an example of an invalid argument.

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 Denying the Antecedent 1

Clauses "P" and "Q" result in an invalid argument whenever they are
arranged in the following manner:

• If P, then Q.
• Not-P.
• Therefore, not-Q.

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 Denying the Antecedent 2

"If Sandy passed the final, then she passed the course."
"Sandy did not pass the final."
"Therefore, Sandy did not pass the course."
• This is an example of an invalid argument.

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 The Undistributed Middle 1

This fallacy occurs when a speaker or writer assumes that two things are
related to a third thing, the "middle," are otherwise related to each other.

Example.
• All cats are mammals.
• All dogs are mammals.
• Therefore, all cats are dogs.

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 The Undistributed Middle 2

Schema 1.
• X has features a, b, c, et cetera.
• Y has features a, b, c, et cetera.
• Therefore, X is Y.

Schema 2.
• All Xs are Ys.
• a (some individual) is a Y.
• Therefore, a is an X.

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 The Undistributed Middle 3

Schema 3.
• X is a Z.
• Y is a Z.
• Therefore, X is a Y.

Schema 4.
• If P is true, then Q is true.
• If R is true, then Q is true.
• Therefore, if P is true, then R is true.

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 The Undistributed Middle 4

Example of schema 4.
• If Bill wins the lottery, then he’ll be happy.
• If Bill buys a new car, then he’ll be happy.
• Therefore, if Bill wins the lottery, then he’ll buy a car.

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 Equivocation

Ambiguous claims can produce a fallacy.

Example.
• "All banks are alongside rivers, and the place where I keep my money
is a bank. Therefore, the place where I keep my money is alongside a
river."
• The word bank is ambiguous and is used in two different senses in the
given example.

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 Amphiboly

The structure of a sentence causes the ambiguity rather than a single

word or phrase.

Example.
• "If you want to take the motor out of the car, I’ll sell it to you cheap."
• The pronoun "it" may refer to the car or to the motor. It is not clear. It would
be a fallacy to conclude one way or the other without more information.

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 Composition

A fallacy that occurs when a feature of the parts of something is

erroneously attributed to the whole.

Example.
• "This building is built from rectangular bricks; therefore, it must be
rectangular."

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 Confusing Fallacies: Composition versus Hasty
Generalization

Composition.
• Jumping from a fact about the individual members of a collection to a
conclusion about the members taken collectively.
• "The senators are all large. Therefore, the senate is large."

Hasty generalization.
• Jumping from a fact about an individual member of a collection to a
conclusion about every individual member of the collection.
• "Senator Brown is overweight. Therefore, all the senators are overweight."

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 Division

A fallacy that occurs when a feature of a thing, taken as a whole, is

erroneously attributed to the parts of a thing.

Example.
• "This building is circular; therefore, it must be made from circular
bricks."

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 Confusing Fallacies: Division versus Accident

Division.
• Jumping from a fact about the members of a collection taken
collectively to a conclusion about the members taken individually.
• "It is a large senate. Therefore, the senators are large."

Accident.
• Jumping from a generalization about every individual member of a
collection to a conclusion about this or that member of the collection.
• "Senators are wealthy. Therefore, Senator Brown is wealthy."

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 Confusing Explanations with Excuses

The fallacy of presuming that when someone explains how or why

something happened, he or she is either excusing or justifying what
happened.

Example.
• "I heard on the History Channel about how the weak German
economy after World War I contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler.
What’s that about? Why would the History Channel try to excuse the
Germans?"

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 Contraries and Contradictories

Contradictories: A pair of claims that are exact opposites of each other

and cannot have the same truth value.

Contraries: A pair of claims that cannot both be true but can both be
false and are not exact opposites.

Example.
• "Visitor: I understand that all the fish in this pond are carp."
• "Curator: No, quite the opposite, in fact."
• "Visitor: What? No carp?"

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 Inconsistency

An individual is inconsistent if he/she says two things that cannot be true

at the same time.
• The fact that an individual has been inconsistent does not mean that
his/her present belief is false.

Example.
• "It is raining on my window as I write this, and it is not raining on my
window as I write this."

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 Flip-Flopping

Gives no reason for thinking that a person’s current belief is defective.

• An inconsistent position is unacceptable.
• The position of an inconsistent person may depend on its merits.

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 Miscalculating Probabilities

• Incorrectly combining the probability of independent events.

• Gambler’s fallacy.
• Overlooking prior probabilities.
• Faulty inductive conversion.

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 Incorrectly Combining the Probability of Independent
Events 1

Example.
• "Bill’s chances of becoming a professional football player are about 1
in 1,000, and Hal’s chances of becoming a professional hockey player
are about 1 in 5,000. So the chance of both of them becoming
professionals in their respective sports is about 1 in 6,000."
• The conclusion is incorrect.

• The two events, Bill’s becoming a professional football player and Hal’s
becoming a professional hockey player, are independent events.

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 Incorrectly Combining the Probability of Independent
Events 2

Cannot affect the outcome of another independent event.

• To calculate the probability that independent events occur, we multiply
their individual probabilities.
• Referring to the previous example, the probability of both Hal and Bill
becoming professionals is 1/1000 times 1/5000, which is 1/5,000,000.

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 Gambler’s Fallacy

A common and seductive mistake that happens when we do not realize

that independent events really are independent.
• Independent events do not affect each other’s outcome.

Example.
• "The last three coin flips have all been heads, so the next flip is more
likely to come up tails."

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 Overlooking Prior Probabilities 1

A fallacy that occurs when someone fails to take the underlying

probabilities of an event into account.

Example.
• "Bill is the best football player in our high school, and Hal is the best
hockey player in our high school. So it appears that Bill’s chances of
becoming a professional football player and Hal’s chances of
becoming a professional football player are equally good."

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 Overlooking Prior Probabilities 2

Prior probability: True or actual proportion of something.

• The prior probability of a fair coin coming up heads when it is flipped is
one in two, or half.
• The prior probability of an unfair coin coming up heads when it is flipped is
a proportion different from half.

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 Faulty Inductive Conversion

Information about the percentage of A’s that are B’s does not by in itself
tell anything about the percentage of B’s that are A’s.
• This fallacy occurs when probabilities are calculated.

Example.
Sixty-six percent of the people who flunked the midterm ate carrots prior
to the test. Therefore, avoid carrots before taking a test.
• Proportion of carrot-eaters who did not flunk the midterm exam should
be considered as well.
• Eating carrots might be a "false alarm."

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