Vocabulary Word
Word: fallacious
Definition: false; based on a fallacy; misleading; N. fallacy: false idea or notion; false reasoning; Ex. popular fallacy; Ex. fallacy of the argument
Definition: false; based on a fallacy; misleading; N. fallacy: false idea or notion; false reasoning; Ex. popular fallacy; Ex. fallacy of the argument
Sentences Containing 'fallacious'
``Alas,''said Edmond, smiling,``these are the treasures the cardinal has left; and the good abbe, seeing in a dream these glittering walls, has indulged in fallacious hopes.''
Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people already half-bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us.
Such comparisons, however, between the profit and expense of new projects are commonly very fallacious; and in nothing more so than in agriculture.
In examining those arguments, they were necessarily led to consider the difference between a probable and a demonstrative argument, between a fallacious and a conclusive one; and logic, or the science of the general principles of good and bad reasoning, necessarily arose out of the observations which a scrutiny of this kind gave occasion to; though, in its origin, posterior both to physics and to ethics, it was commonly taught, not indeed in all, but in the greater part of the ancient schools of philosophy, previously to either of those sciences.
I shall add, for a further confirmation of the foregoing theory, that, as this operation of the mind, by which we infer like effects from like causes, and _vice versa_, is so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures, it is not probable, that it could be trusted to the fallacious deductions of our reason, which is slow in its operations; appears not, in any degree, during the first years of infancy; and at best is, in every age and period of human life, extremely liable to error and mistake.
We comprehend in this case a hundred other experiences and observations, concerning the _usual_ figure and members of that species of animal, without which this method of argument must be considered as fallacious and sophistical.
It recommends an universal doubt, not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties; of whose veracity, say they, we must assure ourselves, by a chain of reasoning, deduced from some original principle, which cannot possibly be fallacious or deceitful.
Here he seems to have ample matter of triumph; while he justly insists, that all our evidence for any matter of fact, which lies beyond the testimony of sense or memory, is derived entirely from the relation of cause and effect; that we have no other idea of this relation than that of two objects, which have been frequently _conjoined_ together; that we have no argument to convince us, that objects, which have, in our experience, been frequently conjoined, will likewise, in other instances, be conjoined in the same manner; and that nothing leads us to this inference but custom or a certain instinct of our nature; which it is indeed difficult to resist, but which, like other instincts, may be fallacious and deceitful.
We have turned our attention to that experiment, on the suggestion of my family, and we find it fallacious.'
This was small consolation, but Miss Mills wouldn't encourage fallacious hopes.
'Madam,' returned Mr. Micawber, 'it was the dream of my youth, and the fallacious aspiration of my riper years.'
And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that species also is declining.
Thomas Sowell in his book "Knowledge and Decisions" presents several arguments as examples of the animistic fallacy:
Sowell repeatedly dismisses the necessity that order comes from design, and notes that fallacious animistic arguments tend to provide explanations that require comparatively little time to implement.