FALLACY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Fallacy

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/fˈæləsi/ Listen

noun

Fallacy n. (pl. fallacies)

Deceptive or false appearance; deceitfulness; that which misleads the eye or the mind; deception. "Winning by conquest what the first man lost, By fallacy surprised."

(Logic) An argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it is not; a sophism.

Synonyms: Deception; deceit; mistake. Fallacy, Sophistry. A fallacy is an argument which professes to be decisive, but in reality is not; sophistry is also false reasoning, but of so specious and subtle a kind as to render it difficult to expose its fallacy. Many fallacies are obvious, but the evil of sophistry lies in its consummate art. "Men are apt to suffer their minds to be misled by fallacies which gratify their passions. Many persons have obscured and confounded the nature of things by their wretched sophistry; though an act be never so sinful, they will strip it of its guilt."

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Etymology of 'Fallacy'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Fallacy" Quotes from Famous Books

... comparison between certainty of the Inconceivability Argument as applied to Theism and to mathematics shown to contain a virtual though not a formal fallacy. ...

— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... imagination soaring far above such a pettiness! Hope is very beautiful; and even fallacious hope, in such a Friedrich. The one hope that did not deceive him, was hope in his own best exertion to the very death; and no fallacy ever for a moment slackened him in that. Stand to thyself: in the wide domain of Imagination, there is no other certainty of help. No other certainty;—and yet who knows through what pettinesses Heaven ...

— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... an American Minister by Great Britain.—The Count declines delivering these objections in writing.—Mr Dana replies to these objections.—Is advised to send a memorial to the Vice Chancellor, showing the fallacy of his ...

— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various

... explanation lies, I think, in this, that Dickens was so wonderfully sensitive to that change that has come over our society, that he noticed the type of the oriental and cosmopolitan financier without even knowing that it was oriental or cosmopolitan. He had, in fact, fallen a victim to a very simple fallacy affecting this problem. Somebody said, with great wit and truth, that treason cannot prosper, because when it prospers it cannot be called treason. The same argument soothed all possible Anti-Semitism in men like Dickens. ...

— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... last professors of which had been burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously. They were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really a creditable or even glorious circumstance, that the old monk had been intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfortune was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to understand their argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael, and the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our Western civilization, ...

— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

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