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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Fallacy And Argumentational Vice, Andrew Aberdein
Fallacy And Argumentational Vice, Andrew Aberdein
OSSA Conference Archive
If good argument is virtuous, then fallacies are vicious. Yet fallacies cannot just be identified with vices, since vices are dispositional properties of agents whereas fallacies are types of argument. Rather, if the normativity of good argumentation is explicable in terms of virtues, we should expect the wrongness of fallacies to be explicable in terms of vices. This approach is defended through case studies of several fallacies, with particular emphasis on the ad hominem.
Trust Based On Bias: Cognitive Constraints On Source-Related Fallacies, Steve Oswald, Christopher Hart
Trust Based On Bias: Cognitive Constraints On Source-Related Fallacies, Steve Oswald, Christopher Hart
OSSA Conference Archive
This paper advances a cognitive account of the rhetorical effectiveness of fallacious arguments and takes the example of source-related fallacies. Drawing on cognitive psychology and evolutionary linguistics, we claim that a fallacy enforces accessibility and epistemic cognitive constraints on argument processing targeted at preventing the addressee from spotting its fallaciousness, by managing to prevent or circumvent critical reactions. We address the evolutionary bases of biases and the way that these are exploited in fallacious argumentation.