Tuesday, May 2, 2017

This is no butterfly . . . This is a potato chip

From the always wonderful Charles Schulz.

Click to enlarge.

A premise leads to a conclusion, the premise is disproved, but the conclusion is repurposed as a predicate to the new premise. It is an odd formulation but shows up with surprising frequency. I don't know what this form of fallacy is called but it is an interesting one.

1 comment:

  1. My father, Julius Kovesi, was a philosopher at the University of Western Australia, and loved this fallacy too. He wrote a paper about it and coined the phrase 'the potato chip fallacy'!

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