Topic: Relevance
Arguments whose premises do not genuinely support the conclusion: they appeal to sources, popularity, tradition, association, or similar cases, attack the person instead of the claim, or silently presuppose what they claim to prove.
| Fallacy | Trigger – look for … |
|---|---|
| Fallacy-fallacy | An invalid or refuted argument for a claim is used as evidence that the claim itself is false (conflating bad reasoning with a false conclusion). |
| Appeal to authority | A claim is supported or rejected mainly because of the source’s status or expertise, rather than the evidence itself. |
| Appeal to a false authority | The cited source is not a valid authority for the claim: no relevant expertise, anonymous/unverifiable, misquoted, fabricated, or from a field where the claim is contested. |
| Appeal to tradition | A practice or belief defended primarily because it is old, customary, or “the way things have always been done” – duration used as proof of correctness. |
| Bandwagon fallacy | A position supported or rejected primarily because many people hold it, do it, or find it popular – majority size used as evidence of truth. |
| Honour by association | Credibility or acceptance granted solely through positive association with a respected person, brand, or institution – no independent evaluation of the thing itself. |
| False analogy | A property of one thing is transferred to another based on their similarity in other respects, without establishing that this specific property follows from those shared features. |
| Petitio principii | A premise silently assumes the conclusion, often by restating it in different words, changing scope, or relying on an unexamined assumption that is itself in dispute. |
| Appeal to consequences | A factual claim is argued to be true or false from the consequences it would have if it were true or false (“if X is true, bad things follow – so X is false”; “if X were false, good things would follow – so X is true”). |
| Wishful thinking | Accepting a claim as true, or treating weak evidence as decisive, simply because truth of the claim is desirable. |
| Arrival fallacy | A current problem is dismissed or deferred based on an expected future event that has little factual basis for resolving it. Special form of “wishful thinking”. |
#END.