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Topic: Continuum fallacy

	Logical Fallacy: Slippery Slope
		This type of argument is by no means invariably fallacious, but the strength of the argument is inversely proportional to the number of steps between A and Z, and directly proportional to the causal strength of the connections between adjacent steps.
		A differs from Z by a continuum of insignificant changes, and there is no non-arbitrary place at which a sharp line between the two can be drawn.
		This continuum is the "slope", and it is the lack of a non-arbitrary line between hairiness and baldness that makes it "slippery".
	www.fallacyfiles.org /slipslop.html (1541 words)

	Encyclopedia: Emergent behavior (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds or school of fish are readily understandable examples, and it is typical that the mechanisms governing the flock or school are harder to grasp than the behaviour of individual birds or fish.
		This helps to explain why, for instance, the number of ways of packing boxes into a truck increases exponentially with the number of boxes and why the fallacy of division is a fallacy.
		In some theories of particle physics, even such basic structures as mass, space, and time are viewed as emergent phenomena, arising from more fundamental concepts such as the Higgs boson or strings.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Emergent-behavior (1645 words)

	[No title]
		This fallacy is especially devastating in the realm of political discussion, where its use renders impossible the task of discriminating among distinctly different groups of people.
		I often challenge those who commit this fallacy to eliminate from their discussion vocabulary all general collective terms, and each time they want to use such a term to use instead a precisely delimiting description of the group the term is intended to subsume.
		A similar fallacy is that of equating opposites by substituting nonessentials for their essential characteristics.
	www.rkba.org /libertarian/king/Fallacies (5368 words)

	A List of Fallacies
		Specifically, a fallacy is a violation of one of the rules of constructing a good argument.
		Fallacy of the Continuum -- Assuming that small differences in a sequence of things are insignificant or that supposed contraries, connected by intermediate small differences, are really very much the same.
		The force of the fallacy lies in the impression created that some veiled claim is true, although no relevant evidence is presented to support such a view.
	www.nocturne.org /~jason/fallacies.html (2096 words)

	The Fourteen Scientific Fallacies in in Swedenborg's AC 5084--Implications for Science Education
		In a prior article on the existence of scientific revelations in the Word[1], it was argued that science education for the NC plays an important role in one's ability to read and understand the Writings.
		According to these two fallacies of science "seeds [are] impressed with the property of reproducing themselves" and, "life has been imparted to them." The fallacious idea that seeds or genes reproduce or transmit life has led to all sorts of outlandish ideas in sociobiology.
		In current practice, elementary school children in science courses are exposed to this fallacy, and even NC children will not hear of the basis of this fallacy until several years later when the Writings are studied in detail.
	www.soc.hawaii.edu /leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/fallacies.html (3381 words)

	The Case Against Q: Fallacies at the Heart of Q
		This is an introduction to some fallacies that cause Q to be more popular than it might otherwise have been.
		We thus have a second fallacy at the root of the common acceptance of the Q theory.
		Part of the fallacy we have seen already: it is simply not the case that Luke is "totally uninfluenced by any of Matthew's substantive additions to Mark".
	www.ntgateway.com /Q/fallacy.htm (3078 words)

	Logical Fallacies in Psychology
		This fallacy, one of the fallacies of circularity, takes the form of arguments or other statements that simply assume or re-state their own truth rather than providing relevant evidence and logical arguments.
		Also known as the "either/or" fallacy or the fallacy of false choices, this fallacy takes the form of only acknowledging 2 (one of which is usually extreme) options from a continuum or other array of possibilities.
		The fallacy of the Golden Mean (or fallacy of compromise, or fallacy of moderation) takes the form of assuming that the most valid conclusion is that which accepts the best compromise between two competing positions.
	www.kspope.com /fallacies/fallacies.php (1477 words)

	Reading History Sideways
		In the forthcoming book, Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life, Arland Thornton describes reading history sideways as an approach to history that was commonly used by scholars in the past, whereby cross-sectional data were used to describe history rather than just to make static comparisons.
		Societies that were most different from Europe were used to represent what scholars believed to be the least developed end of the continuum; the rest of the world's populations were arrayed between the least and the most advanced societies.
		Arland Thornton's book Reading History Sideways: the Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life will be the topic of an author meets critic session of the annual meetings of the Population Association of America, March 30-April 1, 2006, Los Angeles.
	di.psc.isr.umich.edu /rhs-overview.html (763 words)

	From Myth to Law
		It is also important to noe that this 50,000-acre area does not have the critical mass of economic activity to support jobs, services or recreation needed by the families and, thus, every trip for every "loaf of bread" is a long one.
		This is an illustration of the Fallacy of Composition.
		Issues at the center of the continuum of physical scale that are here and now, such as human settlement patterns, are less easily addressed by science.
	www.baconsrebellion.com /Issues04/11-29/Risse.htm (5282 words)

	ChapmanCentral :: Logical fallacies and other spurious debating techniques (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		This is a quick walk through the common forms of logical fallacy, culled in part from from Nizkor and from Stephen Downes' excellent index of logical fallacies.
		Remember, the fact that a logical fallacy exists in an argument does not prove that a claim is false; the claim remains unproven either way.
		And the inability of a person to argue a case without resorting to logical fallacies does not indicate that their case is necessarily wrong (although the longer it goes on stronger the inference becomes), just as the ability to avoid them does not make someone right.
	www.chapmancentral.co.uk /web/public.nsf/documents/Logical_Fallacies (5257 words)

	Semantics 4
		The second form of the fallacy of vicious abstraction occurs when a statement is quoted inaccurately--that is, some part of a statement is omitted, thereby changing the meaning of the statement, or the statement itself is changed somewhat.
		The fallacy of amphibology (also called amphiboly) is committed by using a statement which allows two interpretations, either because of the physical grammatical structure (syntax) of the sentence, or because a word or phrase can have two possible meanings, causing the entire statement to be understood in two different ways.
		This fallacy arises when the meaning or significance of a true statement is distorted or changed because of improper emphasis upon a part of the statement or upon the whole statement.
	www.virtualsalt.com /think/semant4.htm (5491 words)

	rational-argument-glossary
		A type of fallacious argument in which the proposer of an argument is personally belittled, rather than the proposal itself (akin to playing the player rather than the ball on the sports field).
		Causal Oversimplification: A type of fallacy identified by Damer (1995), and characterised to a greater or lesser extent by oversimplification of the "causal antecedents of an event" (p188).
		Gambler's Fallacy: A type of fallacious argument in which different positions are regarded as being "hot" or "cold" in terms of probability of occurrence, because they have or have not been "running to luck" in the recent past.
	www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk /rational-argument-glossary.html (16015 words)

	Chaosmagic.Com :: The Old and New Commentaries to Liber AL (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		For instance, in the physical continuum, the eye can distinguish between the lengths of one-inch stick and a two-inch stick, but not between these which measure respectively one thousand miles and one thousand miles and on inch, though the difference in each case is equally an inch.
		However, in the case of the mathematical continuum, its character is such that we can continue indefinitely the process of division between any two mathematical expressions so-ever, without interfering in any way with the regularity of the process, or creating a condition in which two terms become indistinguishable from each other.
		The mathematical continuum, moreover, is not merely a question of series of integral numbers, but of other types of numbers, which, like integers, express relations between existing ideas, yet are not measurable in terms of that series.
	www.chaosmagic.com /occultlibrary/aleistercrowley/the-old-and-new-commentar.shtml (20854 words)

	Introduction To Activistic Atheism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		In this fallacy, the premise, the Bible's statement that God exists, derives its authority from the attempted conclusion, the existence of the God who allegedly wrote the Bible.
		A popular form of this ruse is the fallacy of negation, the notion that if we discredit one side of an argument, the observer is forced to accept the other.
		If someone describes his opponent's position in a way that sounds patently absurd (something that no one in their right mind would believe), making his own position sound too good to be true, check to see if that is the opponent's actual position.
	www.positiveatheism.org /faq/faq1114.htm (4049 words)

	internet culture
		Call this the Frame Fallacy, after the mistake of inferring from the fact that a movie is made up of discrete frames, to the conclusion that the experience of watching a movie is the experience of a series of discrete frames.
		That this is a fallacy is evident from the fact that the computer does not force the user to jump around in the manner that it enables.
		Content in the middle of the continuum from poor to good might be deemed value free in the sense that it excites no judgments of praise or condemnation with respect to this or that value; such Internet content might be described as bland.
	www.brandeis.edu /pubs/jove/HTML/V6/iculture.html (8643 words)

	Conservation Ecology: Embracing uncertainty: The interface of Bayesian statistics and cognitive psychology.
		Despite the simplicity of the mathematics involved, the "conjunction fallacy" is perhaps the most familiar and pervasive of cognitive illusions.
		In ecology, the conjunction fallacy is a concern whenever people must estimate or understand the probability of an event that depends on a series of preceding uncertain events (Ferrell 1994).
		Nonetheless, where several models are being compared, the conjunction fallacy may cause a model or hypothesis that specifies much detail (assumed parameter values) to be judged more probable than either a more general hypothesis within which it is nested, or a structurally different model with fewer assumptions.
	www.ecologyandsociety.org /vol2/iss1/art2/index.html (10364 words)

	The Guthrie-Hodge Debate: Binging the First Cause Argument into the Era of Astrophysics- Mitch Hodge & Shandon Guthrie- ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		Hodge was aiming for the fallacy of composition, one which sees an attribution from the parts to the whole.
		Guthrie has committed the fallacy of equivocation between the cause of a particular, and the cause of an abstract universal.
		Hodge surmises that the universe itself, as some sort of speculative housing for the space-time continuum itself (like his pocket to his money), is probably not finite because the universe is not the collection of space-time.
	www.examinedlifejournal.com /articles/template.php?shorttitle=goddebate&authorid=62 (9635 words)

	[No title]
		Praxeology (the science of the basic motivations, nature and consequences of human action) is a logical continuum, not a chronological one.
		The fallacy of equating an abstraction with a concrete.
		Analysis and refutation of common examples of the fallacy: "All property is theft";"I think, therefore I am"; "Who created the unvierse?"; "The acceptance of reason is an act of faith"; "The axioms of logic are arbitrary"; "How do you know that you exist?" The reasons for the prevalence of the fallacy.
	www.rkba.org /libertarian/king/full_book (16435 words)

	Birch
		Joseph Wu's other two fallacies are the 'fallacy of the Procrustean bed' based on a Chinese idiom which translates as something like 'cutting ones toes to fit the shoes.' That is, the application of ready made categories upon subject matters not necessarily suited to those categories.
		Wu's three fallacies are relevant to any number of research interests that people might have concerning Chinese ideas and practices, and though rather generalized, nevertheless are of immediate and cogent concern to any western discipline seeking to understand, by various theoretical and analytic means, phenomena not familiar to western modes of thinking reading and analysis.
		Which, in terms of Chinese opera would be to commit a major fallacy given that the notion of individual choice is quite philosophically different from those operative in the west.
	wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au /ReadingRoom/2.2/Birch.html (6298 words)

	Ming the Mechanic: Cause and Effect
		In truth we are faced by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive a motion only as isolated points without really seeing it but then infer [a motion].
		However, this is entirely uncausal, and rather has to do with an eddie in the time-space continuum where we keep bumping into each other, as I am holding onto a non-existent copy of Max's Pnohteftu.
		- there's a continuum of action in time, we cut it at some arbitrary (?) point, and we assign the word "cause" to what happens before that moment, and the word "effect" to what happens after that moment.
	www.ming.tv /flemming2.php/_d10/_v10/__show_article/_a000010-000854.htm (870 words)

	[No title]
		Subjectivist fallacy: Asserting that a claim may be true for one person but not for another.
		Genetic fallacy: Denying a claim because of its origins; includes ad hominem attacks but also includes attacks on groups, political parties, organizations, and so forth.
		Line-drawing fallacy: Requiring a precise line be drawn someplace on a scale or continuum when no such precise line can be drawn; usually occurs when a vague concept is treated like a precise one.
	www.wright.edu /~linda.farmer/phl204-commonfallacies-winter2004.doc (636 words)

	CyberSoft, Inc. - Makers of The VFind Security Toolkit, waVeAntivirus, SafeInternetEmail and Providers of Computers ...
		The mistaken idea behind the slippery slope fallacy is that when there is little or no significant difference between adjacent points on a continuum, then there is no important difference between even widely separated points on the continuum.
		The fallacy of hasty generalization consists of a generalization on the basis of an inadequate set of cases.
		The ad hominem (to the man) fallacy is where attention is shifted by attacking the integrity of person presenting the evidence instead of the evidence itself.
	www.cybersoft.com /whitepapers/archives/zoo.shtml (15575 words)

	Non-Native Educators in English Language Teaching (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		In the next chapter, Nuzhat Amin explains that Canadian ESL students believe that the ideal teacher is a male, white native speaker and that this belief has negatively affected minorities and minority teachers in Canada.
		They conclude that existing TESOL programs should examine the NS fallacy, that multidimensionality of experience and professional expertise should be emphasized, and that a course or seminar for specific issues and needs of NNSs should be added in these programs.
		Liu found that social context cues play a smaller role in the student's perceptions of their teachers' ability if a continuum is used to describe their teachers rather than an either/or dichotomy.
	www-writing.berkeley.edu /TESL-EJ/ej17/r9.html (1139 words)

	The pH Factor
		But there is another fallacy, more insidious among trained minds, which one may call the prosaic fallacy, the error of supposing that what is not, for our casual inspection, obviously endowed with a life of its own is thereby shown to be mere lifeless stuff or bare structure without inner quality.
		It is time to state the zero fallacy, which should be formulated in logic texts, but is not: with properties of which there can be varying degrees, the zero degree, or total absence, is knowable empirically only if there is a known least quantum, or finite minimum, of the property.
		Not only does this view commit the fallacy of what Bergson calls "the spatialization of time," it also does not take into account the process view that there is no such totality, but a new totality in every new moment.
	www.hyattcarter.com /the_ph_factor.htm (6461 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		Thus, the common style embodying both fallacies of thought has been quantification, or the measurement of intelligence as a single number for each person.* This book, then, is about the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for
		It arises primarily from two fallacies, eagerly (so it seems) embraced by those who wish to use tests for the maintenance of social ranks and distinctions: reification and hereditarianism.
		The hereditarian fallacy is not the simple claim that JQ is to some degree "heritable." I have no doubt that it is, though the degree has clearly been exaggerated by the most avid hereditarians.
	www.towson.edu /~sallen/COURSES/311/ESSAYS/TheMismeasureofMan.html (13049 words)

	Open and Closed Concepts and the Continuum Fallacy
		The Continuum Fallacy consists in arguing that a concept is useless or a debate is pointless because some of the key concepts in the discussion cannot be defined precisely.
		A variant of the continuum fallacy is arguing that if you can’t draw the line precisely between X and non-X, there’s no distinction at all between X and non-X. This is exemplified in the famous argument of the beard.
		People who commit the Continuum Fallacy often think they have won the argument by showing that a concept is open.
	instruct.westvalley.edu /lafave/open_and_closed_concepts1.html (1158 words)

	God (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-10)
		Similarly, if we posit an extended, empty four-dimensional space-time continuum and ask what the coordinates of a point within it are, there is no answer unless, beyond the continuum, we have appropriate scales to which we can refer the point.
		Time 1 or objective time is one dimension of the continuum, or a similar dimension within other scientific disciplines.
		But it is a logical fallacy to turn this around in order to claim that personhood implies Time 2.
	www.asa3.org /ASA/PSCF/1997/PSCF6-97Siemens.html (346 words)

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