Monday, June 1, 2009

Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies

One of my hobbies is logic. The web site http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html shows a chart titled “The Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies”. It lists the various frequently used fallacies with links to an explanation of each one.

One example (one that I had never heard of before): is “The Hitler Card” which is a subset of the “Guilt by Association” fallacy. The “Hitler Card” fallacy is summarized in this way: A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler. That is certainly true enough. The fact that Hitler believed that the sky is blue does not make it a different color.

Creationists are fond of this logical fallacy. They say that evolution must be wrong because Hitler believed in evolution. There's actually more evidence that Hitler did not believe that humans evolved from apes, but even if the claim about Hitler was true, that hardly qualifies as falsifying scientific evidence against evolution.

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