Sunday, April 29, 2007

fallacy question

Is omitting important facts about a product considered a fallacy? How would you define that?

3 comments:

SharkySpy said...

I believe it falls under "Exclusion Fallacy" on Professor Crandall's list of fallacies

BC said...

It depends. Exclusion's likely. But there's a difference between being misinformed or ignorant, which isn't necessarily intrinsically fallacious, and deliberately omitting information that would change the results.

For instance, if I try to predict whether it will rain in Wichita Falls on June 30th, 2015, I will omit most of the relevant information, but that's because I don't have that information. On the other hand, if I say smoking won't kill people because 30 people didn't get cancer in the study, I should really mention the other 120 people in the study.

ladybug said...

hmmm...thanx. That's kind of a hard one to prove cuz you would really need to have the study available. Well, ok that's something to think about...