The concept of fallacy is empty

Abstract

Do model-based approaches to reasoning have a stake in accounting for errors of reasoning? If mainstream logic is anything to go on, a theory of bad reasoning is wholly subsumed by a theory of good reasoning, with the former construed as the complement of the latter. In an older tradition (e.g., Mill's System of Logic), errors are best considered as a stand-alone component of any psychologically real approach to logic. Such is the assumption of this essay. Historically, logic's almost exclusive preoccupation with error is to be found in what it may chance to say about fallacies. In the tradition that has come down to us since Aristotle, fallacies are errors of reasoning that are attractive, widely-distributed enough to be called "universal", and difficult to correct, that is, possessed of signi.cant levels of incorrigibility. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.