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Don’T Worry, Be Gappy! On The Unproblematic Gappiness Of Alleged Fallacies, Fabio Paglieri

OSSA Conference Archive

The history of fallacy theory is long, distinguished and, admittedly, checkered. I offer a bird eye view on it, with the aim of contrasting the standard conception of fallacies as attractive and universal errors that are hard to eradicate (section 1) with the contemporary preoccupation with “non-fallacious fallacies”, that is, arguments that fit the bill of one of the traditional fallacies but are actually respectable enough to be used in appropriate contexts (section 2). Godden and Zenker have recently argued that reinterpreting alleged fallacies as non-fallacious arguments requires supplementing the textual material with something else, e.g. probability distributions, pragmatic considerations, …