{"id":338,"date":"2017-12-12T00:18:07","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T00:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/?p=338"},"modified":"2017-12-12T01:05:32","modified_gmt":"2017-12-12T01:05:32","slug":"fallacies-narcissan-pleonastic-and-unnatural-deceleration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/2017\/12\/12\/fallacies-narcissan-pleonastic-and-unnatural-deceleration\/","title":{"rendered":"Fallacies: Narcissan, pleonastic, and unnatural deceleration"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since February 1999, I&#8217;ve had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/pmagnus\/fallacies.html\">a web page about fallacies<\/a>. Rather than regurgitating all of the usual ones that one can find elaborated in critical thinking textbooks, I collect fallacies which an author names for just one occasion. These one-offs don&#8217;t appear on the usual lists. Authors usually do this to condemn some specific target, one who has committed not some generic error in reasoning but the specific if newly-named <em>fallacy of such-and-so<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Prompted by <a href=\"http:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2017\/12\/09\/the-fallacy-of-unnatural-deceleration\/\">John Holbo at Crooked Timber<\/a>, I&#8217;ve added three new specimens. One is coined tongue-in-cheek by Holbo himself to mock <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-illusionist\">a book review by David Bentley Hart<\/a>, and the other two are coined by Hart in his would-be hatchet job on Daniel Dennett&#8217;s book <i>From Bacteria to Bach and Back<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>One problem with Hart&#8217;s newly named fallacies is that they are not obviously mistakes. Take the <em>pleonastic fallacy<\/em> of thinking that a difference in kind might only be a tremendous difference in degree. Nature abhors a dualism,\u00a0 so there are almost always odd intermediate cases between any two things that seem utterly distinct. So it might be a productive move to insist that what seems like a binary distinction is in fact a continuum. Whether this pays off can only be settled in the details. Giving a name to it and calling it a fallacy adopts the pretense that we know how those details will work out.<\/p>\n<p>This is the akin to Holbo&#8217;s response to Hart, perhaps, except that I made an argument where he provides ridicule. Holbo quotes a sentence which, when I read it at <em>Crooked Timber<\/em>, I thought must have been parody: &#8220;In every case, most of his argument consists in a small set of simple logical errors.&#8221; So here the line between mockery and fair reporting is a fine one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since February 1999, I&#8217;ve had a web page about fallacies. Rather than regurgitating all of the usual ones that one can find elaborated in critical thinking textbooks, I collect fallacies which an author names for just one occasion. These one-offs don&#8217;t appear on the usual lists. Authors usually do this to condemn some specific target, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/2017\/12\/12\/fallacies-narcissan-pleonastic-and-unnatural-deceleration\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Fallacies: Narcissan, pleonastic, and unnatural deceleration&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-link-dump","tag-fallacies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7PjAo-5s","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions\/340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fecundity.com\/nfw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}