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Namakando

I would like to submit two potentially new fallacies

I've conferred with GPT so I know that my suggestions aren't fully captured by existing fallacies.

Messiah Fallacy: Assuming that truth can only be spoken or discovered by certain exceptional individuals, and discounting true statements from others solely because of who they are. This is clearly incorrect because almost everyone can say "Two plus two equals four.".

Schoolboy Fallacy: Rejecting an expert’s accurate claim because it contradicts one’s limited prior learning, and using that contradiction to unjustly downgrade the expert’s credibility. It goes like this, in school kids learn that one can not take the square root of a negative number. One day a schoolboy encounters a mathematics professor and the schoolboy knows that the person is a mathematics professor. The professor says, "One can take the square root of a negative number.", the schoolboy responeds, "No one can't, I thought you're a professor, you should know better.". This does two incorrect things, it incorrectly "falsifies" the professors claim and it incorrectly makes the professor less of an authority from the perspective of the schoolboy.

asked on Saturday, Aug 09, 2025 07:59:15 AM by Namakando

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Answers

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TrappedPrior (RotE)
3

I think these are already covered by existing fallacies, no?

Messiah Fallacy ...

This is the genetic fallacy.

Schoolboy Fallacy ...

This could be several fallacies: the appeal to common belief,  appeal to complexity, or appeal to intuition, depending on how it's justified.
answered on Saturday, Aug 09, 2025 05:31:36 PM by TrappedPrior (RotE)

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Namakando writes:

Yes, the Messiah Fallacy does seem to be a specific case of the genetic fallacy where. Maybe it's still a useful addition because it assumes the specific context, that only members of a select group have access to the truth and that everyone else doesn't.

I don't agree that the Schoolboy Fallacy is the appeal to common belief, because the schoolboy doesn't believe what he does because others also do, he does so because he learned it that way, which can be seen as correct and just not the full picture. I don't agree that it is the appeal to complexity, because the professor doesn't explain or argue their claim. I also don't agree that it's an appeal to intuition, because the schoolboy lerned this, he's not intuiting, he could probably even explain it (in completely). To me this fallacy seems more like a misunderstanding of how to deal with someone that you consider an expert, given that you consider yourself to be a non-expert.

posted on Saturday, Aug 09, 2025 05:56:42 PM
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TrappedPrior (RotE) writes:

[To Namakando]

I don't agree that the Schoolboy Fallacy is the appeal to common belief, because the schoolboy doesn't believe what he does because others also do, he does so because he learned it that way, which can be seen as correct and just not the full picture. I don't agree that it is the appeal to complexity, because the professor doesn't explain or argue their claim. I also don't agree that it's an appeal to intuition, because the schoolboy lerned this, he's not intuiting, he could probably even explain it (in completely). To me this fallacy seems more like a misunderstanding of how to deal with someone that you consider an expert, given that you consider yourself to be a non-expert.
 

As I wrote it depends on how it is justified. In the OP, you write that the schoolboy rejects the expert's word because of their limited understanding.

That limited understanding could be based on any of the things I mentioned: common belief, complexity (because the professor's claim is more nuanced than the schoolboy's simplistic understanding), or intuition (perhaps they're rejecting the expert's version of events for being counterintuitive compared to the limited version of the concept they learnt).

[ login to reply ] posted on Sunday, Aug 10, 2025 03:55:39 AM