Logical Fallacies
A practical logical-fallacies reference with clear explanations, usable examples, and teaching tools.
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The mistake lies in how evidence is gathered, weighed, interpreted, or treated as sufficient.
Occurs when someone treats a failure to find expected evidence as if it counted for nothing against the claim, even in a context where the claim should leave detectable t...
Occurs when someone infers that because a particular argument for a conclusion is weak or fallacious, the conclusion itself must therefore be false.
Occurs when someone concludes that a claim is true because it has not been disproved, or false because it has not been proved.
Occurs when someone treats their inability to imagine, explain, or believe a claim as evidence that the claim must be false, or conversely true.
Occurs when a claim is treated as validated because opponents, authorities, or witnesses did not deny it, respond to it, or mention it.
Occurs when a contested claim is simply asserted, often confidently, without the evidence needed to justify it.
Occurs when someone selects only the evidence that supports a conclusion and ignores a wider body of evidence that weakens, qualifies, or reverses it.
Occurs when strong evidence for a phenomenon is rejected solely because the underlying mechanism is still incomplete, disputed, or not yet fully understood.
Occurs when someone tries to protect a claim by insisting that critics must prove the claim false instead of the claimant first supplying adequate support.
Occurs when belief is forced into crude either-or boxes even though the evidence supports a range of confidence levels rather than a single sharp threshold.
Occurs when the psychological or social effects of believing something are treated as evidence that the thing believed in actually exists or is true.
Occurs when support for a claim is borrowed from a source that is fabricated, misquoted, unqualified, anonymous in the wrong way, or otherwise not what it is presented to...
Occurs when a view is framed so every possible outcome fits it equally well, leaving no meaningful room for the claim to fail.
Occurs when a claim is treated as true because it has not been disproved, or false because it has not been proved.
Occurs when evidence for one claim is illegitimately used as if it also confirmed a second claim that merely travels alongside it.
Occurs when one or a few examples are offered as if they were enough to establish a universal claim.
Occurs when someone demands empirical evidence before rejecting a concept that is already incoherent, self-contradictory, or logically impossible on its own terms.
Occurs when someone asks for an exception to a rule or standard but does not provide a relevant reason for why the favored case should be exempt.
Occurs when each new claim is treated as if the relevant history of prior failures, hoaxes, or false alarms did not exist and should confer no default expectation at all.
Occurs when testimony is padded by unverifiable references to other alleged witnesses, creating the illusion of corroboration without actually providing independent suppo...