The Cunctator wrote:
On 11/11/03 4:35 PM, "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:
For one, slippery slope arguments are fallacies too.
Not always. Some people might convincingly argue, for example, that setting a precedent of banning people for a particular infraction may make it easier and easier to ban them for other infractions. I think that's a legitimate concern.
That's an inductive argument, not a slippery slope argument.
All inductive arguments are fallacies, in the rigorous sense. Only deductive arguments are rigorously valid.
Although they are fallacies, that does not mean that inductive arguments should be ignored. They simply need to be recognized as such--that there is necessarily an element of uncertainty about the conclusion.
Not under the standard definition of "fallacy". An inductive argument that claimed to be absolute proof would be a logical fallacy, but an argument that claims inductive *evidence* is not a fallacy. If it were, nearly all work done in science would be fallacious, as it relies on repeatability of experiments, which is an inductive claim (it is logically conceivable that an experiment that has been repeated successfully 500,000 times is actually wrong, and you've just gotten lucky that many times: but it's not particularly likely).
There _is_ a branch of philosophy that refers to inductive arguments in general as fallacious, first formulated in its present form (as far as I know) by David Hume's with his famous "problem of induction". However, Hume's attack on induction is not universally regarded as conclusive, especially as the epistemological question of what constitutes proper justification for a proposition is a hotly debated one.
-Mark