(n.) Deceptive or false appearance; deceitfulness; that which misleads the eye or the mind; deception.
(n.) An argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it is not; a sophism.
Example Sentences:
(1) In March, the Tories reappointed their trusty old attack dogs, M&C Saatchi, to work alongside the lead agency, Euro RSCG, and M&C Saatchi's chief executive, David Kershaw, wasted no time in setting out his stall, saying: "It's a fallacy that online has replaced offline in terms of media communications."
(2) Once availed of the fallacy that athletes are role models, there’s a certain purity that feels almost quaint in an era of athlete as brand.
(3) It's a fallacy, because there is no such thing as 'the people'.
(4) In 2 experiments, representativeness was pitted against probability combination to determine the contributions of each to the fallacy.
(5) It is argued that Western science reductionist approaches to the classification of "mass hysteria" treat it as an entity to be discovered transculturally, and in their self-fulfilling search for universals systematically exclude what does not fit within the autonomous parameters of its Western-biased culture model, exemplifying what Kleinman (1977) terms a "category fallacy."
(6) Attempts have been made to avoid the fallacies with the introduction of quadrilateral and Wits analyses.
(7) Greater efforts to verify the characteristics of apparently discordant pairs than to verify those of apparently concordant pairs can result in the 'unequal ascertainment' fallacy.
(8) It's pure ad hominem (in the classic sense of the logical fallacy): "who is "Cornell [ sic ] West" to think that anything he says should be even listened to by "national security professionals"?
(9) For example, the fallacy is committed when a study contains the conclusion that TV advertising increases preference for sugar-based foods, but the reader later believes that the study concluded that TV advertising should be controlled.
(10) Typically, people get honours for their charity work, and I've never even agreed with that, since it tends to mean donations, which tend to proceed from wealth, and all it does is lock down and make flesh the fallacy that rich people are more honourable than everyone else.
(11) In our response, we place special emphasis on the fallacy of using nondiscriminating similarities between groups (e.g., suicidal ideation) as a basis for positing disease homogeneity.
(12) This is a good example of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc – “after this, therefore because of this” – fallacy.
(13) The author discusses the fallacy in the orthodox interpretation of Wolff's law, and suggests that a "resolution length restriction" be imposed on the trajectorial theory to avoid interpretations that lead to the fallacy.
(14) Simulation can validate a proposed policy, uncover fallacies of a proposal, or determine the sensitivity of the response to a policy change.
(15) being involved is the idea – and it is a core capitalist idea – that if you provide people with perfect information about a market you will be able to make perfect decisions, which is just fallacious in the context of higher education.
(16) The Lib Dem deputy leader, Simon Hughes, told the BBC that the no camp had conducted a "fundamentally fallacious campaign" which would affect the coalition.
(17) It is fallacious to assume that the conditions were worse in the past as it is fallacious to assume that they were better.
(18) Of course the polarisation of old and young rests on a fallacy, if not a downright lie: that all young people possess perfect skin and gleaming hair, have non-stop sex, are bursting with energy and are never lonely.
(19) Amniotomy followed by oxytocin infusion is advocated to simulate the progress of normal labour unless this is evident from an early stage.Oxytocin, the dose of which is limited only by foetal distress, cannot be used effectively unless three popular fallacies are rejected.
(20) While the error of indulging in fantasies such as the " Twitter revolution " and the collapsing Islamic Republic may be understandable, I wonder if the flawed logic that allowed for such fallacies is.
Sophism
Definition:
(n.) The doctrine or mode of reasoning practiced by a sophist; hence, any fallacy designed to deceive.
Example Sentences:
(1) It blamed "confrontation maniacs" for "[making their] servants of conservative media let loose a whole string of sophism intended to hatch all sorts of dastardly wicked plots and float misinformation".