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Black & White Thinking |
| Description: | ||
| The argument leaps from the falsity of one position to the truth of its contrary, without considering qualifications, middle ground, compromises, or alternative positions. | ||
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| Comments: | ||
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| A particularly important sub-category of this fallacy -- almost common enough and important enough to deserve its own name -- is the fallacy of arguing that since we cannot entirely eradicate a problem, we should therefore do nothing about it at all. This is sometimes called "making the perfect the enemy of the good." | ||
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| Examples: | ||
| We shouldn't prevent all citizens from owning guns. Hunters and gun collectors have a perfect right to own weapons. Therefore gun control laws of any kind are a bad idea." | ||
| ""My contribution to the Red Cross won't solve the problem of world hunger, so it won't do any good. I won't bother to make a contribution at all." | ||
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| Discussion: | ||
| Reasoning by process of elimination is good reasoning. The fallacy of Black and White Thinking mimics reasoning by process of elimination, but it eliminates too much too quickly, i.e. it places options out of consideration before they have truly been eliminated. | ||
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| Classification: A Fallacy of Irrelevance (a deductive fallacy of soundness with a falsehood in the major premiss) in the Middle Ground Fallacies family. | ||
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| Source: The fallacy of "overlooking an alternative" is described in the Port-Royal Logic, i.e. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, L'Art de Penser (The Art of Thinking), 1662. | ||
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Go to: WELCOME EXPLANATION of PRINCIPLES TABLE of FALLACIES EXERCISES INDEX