Glossary

This section contains short articles on topics that are related to the fallacies listed on this site, but are not themselves fallacies.

For this reason they also don’t appear in the index of fallacies but are only listed here:

Cargo cult – Ritualized practices that imitate other practices only in their superficial form, without understanding their inner function or meaning.
Causality – A cause-effect relationship between two events or phenomena, in which one is brought about by the other.
Echo chamber – A situation in which an existing opinion is further solidified through feedback effects.
Equivocation – The use of a term (word, phrase, or logical connective) in two or more different meanings within the same argument or chain of reasoning.
- Amphiboly – An ambiguity in a statement caused by its grammatical or syntactic structure rather than by the meaning of individual words.
- Metonymy – One term is used as a substitute for another, based on an implied relationship between them.
Extension – The totality of all objects that a term refers to.
Jargon – The use of difficult technical terms in order to confuse and/or to self-elevate by presenting yourself as particularly well-educated.
Intension – The set of associated meanings, connotations, and contextual information that come with how a term refers to its extension.
Goodhart’s law – A reminder that statistical measures lose their value as measures once they become targets that people optimize for.
Groupthink – A situation in which opinions have become so much entrenched within a group that they are no longer questioned or checked against reality.
Reification – turning something (abstraction, idea, human being, etc.) into a “thing”.
Simulacrum – A replica or simulation that reproduces the appearance of the original but is disconnected from its inner function or meaning.
Tautology – A proposition that is necessarily true in all possible circumstances, independent of external facts.