News and Articles

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.

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

“Street battles have broken out between thousands of Donald Trump supporters and counter-protesters in the heart of Washington…”

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

Today′s Challenges

Today, I am writing a guest blog for www.logical-fallacy.com, which has a comprehensive list of logical fallacies alongside explanations and real-world examples. We will explore some of the most common and powerful fallacies used today and how they are used to control the narrative and endanger the advancement of society. The synchronicity with today’s events will be apparent.

The biggest obstacle we face today is divisiveness. The second biggest obstacle is misinformation, which prevents unity, and the third obstacle is logical fallacy. Logical fallacies are illegitimate arguments or irrelevant points that undermine the logic of an argument. Typically, they are identified as lacking evidence to support a claim. If we can defeat logical fallacies, we defeat misinformation. Only then can we move to overcome divisiveness.

7 November 2020 - 13 November 2020

How We Choose

We’ve selected for you the most engaging news from Twitter from Australian news agencies. The selection criteria is based on statistics of logical fallacies found in the retweets and comments.

Critical Concentration

“The Trump presidency and the 2020 election has revealed the “authoritarian fascist instincts” of the hard-left…”

The response contains approximately 49% of comments that look a lot like fallacious reasoning of any type our detector can recognise. Spread between reasoning type groups:

Definition

A Fallacy of Division is the reasoning error that occurs when one arguments or assumes that if something is true for a whole then it must also be true for some or for all of its parts.

The opposite of this fallacy is called the Fallacy of Composition, which arises when one fallaciously attributes property of some part of something to the thing as a whole.

If a system as a whole has some property that none of its constituents has (or perhaps, it has it but not as a result of some constituent having that property), this is sometimes called an emergent property of the system.