Sunday, February 28, 2016

Slothful Induction Fallacy

The slothful induction fallacy can be described as when “an inductive argument is denied its proper conclusion, despite strong evidence for making an inference.” In simpler terms, it occurs when someone doesn’t make a generalization after having a plethora of evidence to make one. This fallacy is also known to be the opposite of the “hasty generalization” fallacy which is where a person makes a generalization with little or insufficient evidence to do so. Some examples of this fallacy at use are if someone were to look an an animal that looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and paddles like a duck, but claims that this animal could be anything. This is an example of the slothful induction fallacy because the person should be able to declare that the animal is a duck due to all the evidence presented, but won’t accept these obvious indications. Another example would be if someone had been involved in over twenty car accidents in a period of 6 months, but denies that it was their fault in any way, and that it was just a strange coincidence. This shows the use of the slothful induction fallacy because even though evidence makes it obvious that this person had fault in these accidents, they completely disregard this information and say the accidents took place because of chance. A third example of the slothful induction fallacy in action is if a father was introduced to his son who looked exactly like him in every feature possible, and was conceived during the time that he was seeing the mother, and he still denies that he could be the father. By saying that the child could belong to anyone, he is failing to make a conclusion based on an overwhelming amount of evidence, and using the slothful induction fallacy.   



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