Are logical Fallacies good heuristics?

Post Reply New Topic

Of course they are by definition bad arguments.
But are they useful rules of thumb? In particular the genetic fallacy and Appeal to authority.
If the source is was been reliably ridiculous or insightful historically should a person begin with idea that they are wrong or right?

Which ones and when?

Yes and no ? Mainly no. I may hit and miss in this intricate question, but I can maybe say that being critical and firm is an ideal when handling those situations, and this includes the ideal of being logical, but you don't have to be logical to have good points, a lot of truth need to avoid logic to have its full potential. This in the most advanced questions and subjects, that challenges human understanding.

Some of the informal fallacies are, as a few of them are valid forms of inductive reasoning. So, appealing to an authority is a good heuristic. Valuing the person's character traits is a good heuristic. And so on and so forth.

Not all of them are beneficial, as some are blatant efforts to win, or characterized only by sloppiness. I'm definitely not going to break it down too much.

The appeal to popularity works most of the time, as long as you are using a group of people who can be expected to accurately judge whether something is "good".

Anthropomorphic climate change is supported by 99.9% of climate scientists.
Most fans of cinema prefer The Matrix to Cars 2.

One should be careful to note that a "fallacy" does not necessarily mean that the conclusion is false. It merely means that there is a logical gap between explanans and explanandum.

Abductive reasoning is a logical fallacy, but "works" quite frequently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

Your examples are wrong. The first one is a justified appeal to authority. In the second one, one of the criteria which determine what is a good movie is popularity in the first place -- especially since what makes a good movie is subjetive.

Appeal to popularity is more : "The War on Terror is a good policy because the opinion polls I have here say that 70% of the population agree with it."

Of course it does not work for making an argument. But if we could not guess and check I don't think there would be much science.

Last edited by JakobVirgil on 23 Sep 2012, 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This argument is a fallacy :/

Which Fallacy? What argument?
I did not intend to beg the question would this * fix it.

I suppose they are closer to appeals to authority than popularity.

Best practices could be seen as a kind of appeal to tradition.

In my personal decision making I often use Appeal To Authority as a helpful heuristic. The trick is in picking who to consider an authority. Authorities often don't all agree on something so figuring out which one to listen to when I don't have the educational background (or smarts ) to assess all the facts myself becomes pretty tricky.

When choosing which authority I will listen to when making important decisions, I attempt to figure out what reasoning process they used when coming to a conclusion. When they write published articles, can I spot logical fallacies they are using to steer me in a direction I shouldn't go? The internet helps a lot with this because the webiverse is full of people spotlighting the logical fallacies of authorities who have published articles.

Appeal to authority is not necessarily a fallacy in itself. The fallacy arrises mainly when the authority is not a good one -- for example, quoting a neurobiologist's opinion on economic policy.

Another problem maybe be, from an rhetorical point of view, not to say what the authority actually says. Just stating: "Scientist X, a specialist on subject A, says this and that on subject A" may not be very interesting when the audience doesn't know why. It is always better to summarize the argument. However, if the authority is valid, this is more a problem of bad argumentative technique than of faulty reasonning, and it doesn't stand up very well if there is a debate between authorities.

Reasoning from a phenominon to its cause is not fallacious. How else do we find out what causes what? However such reasoning, like all kinds of induction is not guaranteed to produce a true conclusion.

ruveyn

However, abductive reasoning goes from a phenomenon to a likely cause, not a logically necessary one.

I encountered the following example of abductive reasoning. The "the lawn is wet" and "it rained last night" example in the Wiki is also nice.

A. A small child is sitting on the ground, crying.
B. A woman comes along, picks up and comforts the child.
C. That women is the child's mother.

Such an argument is a logical fallacy (C does not follow from A and B), but in many instances, the one comforting a crying child will be the mother of the child, likely because the observer has prior empirical knowledge about the relationships between crying children and women which is not present in A or B.

But if the child was present in a day care facility, the abductive reasoning would be less likely to succeed, as the woman would be more likely to be an employee of the facility. If the woman was quite old or quite young, respectively, this could also influence the probabilty of her being a grandmother or a babysitter, for instance...

In essence, an abductive argument could be rephrased as a statistical one (C. There is an X percent probability that the woman is the child's mother). The strength of abduction, however, derives from the fact that it allows the observer to quickly form a hypothesis without collecting large amounts of data (like DNA-testing both the woman and child and waiting for the result).

As such, it can be very useful in the context of discovery, to use Popper's term (that of hypothesis generation), but less so in the context of justification.

Discrimination is - in many ways - the systematic use of abductive reasoning. Population X might have a greater frequency of undesirable trait Y (a criminal record, listens to pop music, etc.) so an abductive assumption could be that all members of population X possess trait Y. This is clearly discriminating against those not posseing the undesirable trait Y (no criminal record, listens to rock music, etc.), but the observer (for instance an employer) doesn't need to conduct widespread surveys, run background checks, etc. to evaluate each population X candidate. I he/she has access to a an alternative population Z with a lower frequency of trait Y than population X, then he can simply ignore population X entirely.

So abductive reasoning can indeed be a good heuristic, but it can also lead to problems down the road...

Only God knows necessary causes. All humans can manage is hypothesizing likely causes. And if humans come up with ten possible causes all consistent with the evidence at hand then they will pick the cause that is most plausible (a subjective judgment) or the cause that is most tractable for the mathematics available.

Necessary causes are a philosophical will of the wisp. No one has ever proven an empirically established causes as a necessary cause. Necessary causes or for philosophers and other producers of effluent. Likely causes that fit the evidence are for engineers and scientists who actually do something useful for the rest of us.

ruveyn