Comment by AnthonyMouse
4 days ago
> Not only weak, but completely void, which is why it is an informal fallacy, and thus a fallacy
In those cases the premises wouldn't even be satisfied. It's like saying that "all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal" is a fallacy because you're disputing that Socrates is a man rather than a fictional character in Plato's writings. That doesn't make the argument a fallacy, it makes the premise in dispute and therefore the argument potentially inapplicable, which is not the same thing.
In particular, it requires you to dispute the premise rather than the form of the argument.
You'll need to take this up with the entire field of philosophy, because in literature informal fallacies are absolutely an existing and distinct class of fallacies, with the slippery slope argument being cited among them: https://iep.utm.edu/fallacy/#H2
It's not just a Wikipedia thing or me wordsmithing it into existence. As far as I'm concerned though, arguments the premises of which are not reasonable to think they apply / are complete, or are not meaningfully possible to evaluate, are decidedly fallacious - even if they're logically sound.
Here's a quote from your link:
> Arguments of this form may or may not be fallacious depending on the probabilities involved in each step.
In other words, it depends on the premises being correct. But all arguments depend on their premises being correct.
The fact that something is widely parroted doesn't mean it's correct -- that's just this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
> The fact that something is widely parroted doesn't mean it's correct
Argumentum ad populum [0] is itself an informal fallacy, as described on both of our links. What I said wasn't an argumentum ad populum anyways: we're discussing definitions, and definitions do not have truth values.
> But all arguments depend on their premises being correct
But not all incorrect premises are formulated in a reasonable manner. There are degenerate premises that have telltale signs of being misguided. These would be what make informal fallacies. In a way, you could think of them as being incorrect about the premises of what counts as sound logic.
In fact, I ran into this the other day here when while someone said something potentially true, they were also engaging in a No True Scotsman fallacy (also an informal fallacy). One of them claimed that "if it's a fallacy, it's nonsensical to call it true" - except no, that's not the point. The statement can absolutely be true in that case, it's the reasoning that didn't make sense in context. Context they were happy to deny of course, because they were not there to make people's days any better.
Similar here: the slippery slope can be true and real, it's just fallacious to default to it. Conversely [0], it is absolutely possible that people all think the same thing, are actually right, and some other thing becomes true because of it, just super uncommon, so it is fallacious to invert it.
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