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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • So that’s where you want the goal posts now?

    I specifically agreed that reducto ad absurdum isn’t inherently a fallacy in the first sentence of my first reply to you.

    And that’s my whole point

    It is now that your original point that “there’s no such thing as a reducto ad absurdum fallacy” has been shot to pieces 🙄

    People use the term in a muddy way that takes away from a tool.

    That’s the case with almost every tool of every kind that people have access to.

    Especially in the case of language, people are constantly using it wrong, and while I genuinely applaud your intention of projecting a useful tool from being dulled by misuse, the battle is an uphill one to begin with.

    Don’t make it even worse by misstating your position and then defending that mistake like it’s the Korean border.



  • You’re fundamentally ignoring or misunderstanding what a fallacy is. Here’s the dictionary definition:

    Note that, by any of those 3 definitions, the argument that it’s absurd to take Ben & Jerry’s freedom of speech seriously because Trump is a fallacy.

    Just likely a slippery slope argument is valid when a certain course of action legitimately leads to increasingly negative outcomes (such as for example treating Trump as a serious candidate in the first place in 2015), a usually valid argument technique is fallacious when used fallaciously.

    And in case you still believe that nothing can be a fallacy without having the word “fallacy” in the opening paragraph of Wikipedia, I invite you to look up “hyperbole” and “slippery slope” there.



  • Reducto ad absurdum is not a logical fallacy

    Not inherently, no, but it is when used fallaciously. Like in this case.

    Just like deliberate hyperbole is not a fallacy when used skillfully and transparently to underscore a point, it’s the context and the delivery that decides whether something is a valid reducto ad absurdum argument or a reducto ad absurdum fallacy.

    In case you forgot while I was elaborating: this is a case of the latter.

    People on the Internet mess this up all the time

    Yeah, you’re doing it right now.

    I don’t think OP is right–there’s lots of different layers to issues like this that can be explored–but not because of that

    You’re sorta right about that: the way they expressed their wrongheaded opinion isn’t the cause of them being wrong, merely a symptom.