News and Articles

Definition

argumentum ad antiquitatem or Appeal to Tradition - Believing something is right just because it’s been done around for a really long time.

other names

• Appeal to Antiquity
• Appeal to Common Practice

An appeal to tradition essentially makes two assumptions that are not necessarily true:

The old way of thinking was proven correct when introduced, i.e. since the old way of thinking was prevalent, it was necessarily correct.

In reality, this may be false—the tradition might be entirely based on incorrect grounds.

How We Choose

We’ve selected the top most engaging news articles on Twitter from Australian news media. The selection criteria are based on logical fallacies statistics found in the retweets and comments.

Critical Concentration

“Labor’s Kristina Keneally says the rise of right-wing extremism needs to be examined through a parliamentary inquiry to evaluate Australia’s readiness to confronting the challenge…”

The response contains approximately 35% of comments that look a lot like fallacious reasoning of any type our detector can recognise. Spread between reasoning type groups:

How We Choose

We’ve selected the top most engaging news articles on Twitter from Australian news media. The selection criteria are based on logical fallacies statistics found in the retweets and comments.

Critical Concentration

“One rule for SAS, another for Dan Andrews - If we want the truth from our military about how people were killed in Afghanistan, we must also demand it from our political leaders about why people died in Victoria…”

How We Choose

We’ve selected the top most engaging news articles on Twitter from Australian news media. The selection criteria are based on logical fallacies statistics found in the retweets and comments.

Critical Concentration

“Far-right militants in Europe and the US are increasingly forming global links and using the coronavirus pandemic to attract anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists to their cause…”

The response contains approximately 40% of comments that look a lot like fallacious reasoning of any type our detector can recognise. Spread between reasoning type groups:

Definition

False Analogy, also called Faulty Analogy, is an informal logical fallacy in inductive reasoning. It’s a part of Generalizations Fallacies group. It usually occurs when someone applies or assumes that if two things or events have similarities in one or more respects, they are similar in other properties too. Still, the things or events are substantially different, and those similarities can not be extrapolated to other properties.

This logical fallacy is widespread, because real-world parallels are always limited; the differences between things can often overpower their similarities. Sometimes person providing such an argument is not aware of such difference, but very frequently, if aware, they ignore it outright.