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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