A fallacy is a misleading argument or belief based on a falsehood. If you oppose state testing in schools, you think it is a fallacy that educational quality can be measured by standardized tests.

March 5, 2023 - Here are but a few sample sentences of the word in action! She is spreading fallacies about my ice cream business, and I’m losing customers. She says there are ants in my kitchen! You’re attacking my character rather than my argument. I’m afraid that’s a logical fallacy and an ad hominem attack. I doubt you’ll be able to sway the voters with an obvious fallacy about my military record, but you go ahead and try. When you make this speech in front of the board, you have to make sure that no mistakes are made.

It is a fallacy to think that intelligent life has to be similar to humans, with our aggressive nature and difficulties in working together. ... These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

The meaning of FALLACY is a false or mistaken idea. How to use fallacy in a sentence. Did you know?

March 5, 2023 - Here are but a few sample sentences of the word in action! She is spreading fallacies about my ice cream business, and I’m losing customers. She says there are ants in my kitchen! You’re attacking my character rather than my argument. I’m afraid that’s a logical fallacy and an ad hominem attack. I doubt you’ll be able to sway the voters with an obvious fallacy about my military record, but you go ahead and try. When you make this speech in front of the board, you have to make sure that no mistakes are made.

1 week ago - It can be difficult to evaluate whether an argument is fallacious, as arguments exist along a continuum of soundness and an argument that has several stages or parts might have some sound sections and some fallacious ones. Moreover, whether a specific argument is fallacious often depends on the content rather than the form of the argument.

fallacy can be used as a noun in the sense of "Deceptive or false appearance; deceitfulness; that which misleads the eye or the mind; deception." or "An argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it is not."

Word: Fallacy · Part of Speech: Noun · Definition: A fallacy is a mistake in reasoning or thinking that leads to a false belief. It happens when someone draws a conclusion that is not correct because their logic is flawed. Usage Instructions: Use "fallacy" when discussing ideas, arguments, ...

See the fallacies of Amphiboly, Accent, and Equivocation. Amphiboly is ambiguity of syntax. Equivocation is ambiguity of semantics. Accent is ambiguity of emphasis. This is an error due to taking a grammatically ambiguous phrase in two different ways during the reasoning. ... Tests show that the dog is not part wolf, as the owner suspected.

That the world is flat was at one time a popular fallacy. ... Logic. any of various types of erroneous reasoning that render arguments logically unsound.

There are 11 meanings listed in OED's entry for the noun fallacy, four of which are labelled obsolete.

Moral Equivalence: This fallacy compares minor misdeeds with major atrocities, suggesting that both are equally immoral. That parking attendant who gave me a ticket is as bad as Hitler. In this example, the author is comparing the relatively harmless actions of a person doing their job with the horrific actions of Hitler.

Other articles where figure-of-speech ... figure-of-speech fallacy is the special case arising from confusion between the ordinary sense of a word and its metaphorical, figurative, or technical employment (example: “For the past week ...

5 days ago - A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument. All forms of human communication can contain fallacies. Because of their variety, fallacies are challenging to classify. They can be classified by their structure (formal fallacies) or content ...

April 10, 2023 - These are just a few examples of common logical fallacies (appeal to hypocrisy, appeal to ignorance, and sunk cost, respectively) we encounter in everyday speech.

The list of projects that fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy are legion. — Neil Senturia, San Diego Union-Tribune, 16 June 2025 · Part of the fun of it, in a way, is trying to find the fallacy or the hole in the dastardly scheme.

I no longer believe in happiness, because I see the fallacy of my first belief; and the examination which that induced, has shewn me the fallacy of all.

D. Division—attributing to the part what is true only of the whole. "The straw that broke the camel's back." E. Metaphor—taking a figure of speech literally or stretching it unduly. "He was as hungry as a horse, so he ate a bucket of oats." F. Accent—different stress, tone, or gesture giving a different meaning to a word. "Minute or minute steak?" "Was the priest in -censed, or in-censed ?" II. Fallacies ...

July 20, 1998 - (5) Division—the reverse of composition—occurs when the premise that a collective whole has a certain nature is improperly used to infer that a part of this whole must also be of this nature (example: in a speech that is long-winded it is presumed that every sentence is long). But this fallacy and its predecessor can be viewed as versions of equivocation, in which the distributive use of a term—i.e., its application to the elements of an aggregate (example: “the crowd,” viewed as individuals)—is confused with its collective use (“the crowd,” as a unitary whole); compare “The crowd were filing through the turnstile” with “The crowd was compressed into the space of a city block.”