Tools of Apologetics 1.9.2
Logic and Fallacies of Logic
Errors And Fallacies Of Deduction — I
Making correct deductions from given premises depends upon many factors. If any of these necessary factors is missing, then, in all probability, the deduction will be wrong. Such erroneous conclusions are often called "Fallacies Of Deduction". Fallacies have been collected, studied, analyzed and classified into many categories. An acquaintance with these groups will help you to spot errors and explain them authoritatively.
It must be stressed once again that it is not the science of Logic that gives rise to these fallacies, but rather the misuse or careless use of Logic that causes error. Thankfully, the science of Logic itself provides the tools necessary to detect and analyse fallacies. In this presentation of fallacies our aim is not to turn you into expert Logicians, but into capable apologists. Consequently the attempt here is not to present fallacies in exhaustive detail. Rather, we have selected only the most frequently encountered fallacies. Once students master these, they will be able to spot fallacies even if they fall outside these categories.Errors of deduction can be divided into several categories, discussed in this and the following chapters:
Errors Of Interpretation
1-Errors Of Deduction (Errors Of Conversion-Obversion): Many times one has to convert statements from one from to another. There are strict rules governing such conversions, but if they are ignored errors of deduction or conversion-obversion happen. Let us consider the well-known statement, "Every man is mortal". Now if this is to be converted into a sentence that stresses not the "man" part but the "mortal" part, what will the new form be? The natural tendency is to say, "Every mortal is a man", but that is obviously wrong.
Every mortal needs not be a man. It could be an animal. The correct form is, "some mortals are men". In the same way, from "Every Israelite crossed the sea" one doesn’t deduce that "Everyone who crossed the sea was an Israelite". Rather, the correct deduction would be, "some of the people who crossed the sea were Israelites". Of course this "some" may be modified into "many" or "most", depending upon additional information, but such modification will first require the basic form of the deduction to be correct. The conversion of "God is Love" into "Love is God" can also be placed into this category.
2- Errors Due To Ambiguity (Amphiboly):Many words are required to construct sentences. Words are of many kinds — general or particular, broad or narrow, technical or non technical. Each one has a place and occasion for use. If a sentence is constructed using ambiguous words, the meaning will be susceptible to error. This is called error due to ambiguity. While it is an irritant in common life, it is a powerful tool in the hands of those who would like to manipulate people — politicians, propagandists, fortune-tellers, or rationalists /atheists.
Look at the following statements: "At the age of twenty-five my father shared the Gospel with me". It is ambiguous whether the father or the son was twenty-five years old when the incident took place. Or, "If you want to know all about hell, come to our church next Sunday".
The two interpretations to which these sentences lend themselves introduces the error of ambiguity. When the Bible is translated into different languages, this kind of difficulty frequently arises because no translator can check for all possible errors or all possible implications of a sentence. Further, no two languages convey the same meaning identically. Greek vocabulary has cases, tenses, voices, moods and, other factors that confer a high level of exactness that is, in many languages, not available. Consequently many translations might show errors of ambiguity here and there.
The famous quote, "thou are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church" (Matthew 16:18) comes into this category. It is difficult to translate this sentence with the same implications as found in the Greek, and it has therefore been misquoted by people to establish Peter’s apostolic superiority.
3-Fallacy of Accent: Some languages are so strict in their classification (parsing) of words that word-order or other manipulations in sentences do not make much difference in meaning. Greek and Sanskrit fall into this category. On the other hand, word-order is very important in languages like English or Hindi, for example:
You can go
Can you go
use the same three words, but the word-order has changed the meaning radically.Grammar alone is, on many occasions, not sufficient for determining meaning in these languages. This handicap can many times create havoc with meaning in these languages.
A good number of statements in such languages can be distorted by shifting the emphasis to a wrong word. For example, Lord Jesus commands His followers to love their neighbour.
Thus, whether it is by stressing the wrong word, the wrong phrase, or by quoting out of context, the shift in meaning produced is called the error of accent. This kind of error is quite common among those who misquote the Bible for attacking it.
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