FALLACY • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Fallacy

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/fˈæləsi/ Listen

noun

Fallacy n. (pl. fallacies)

Deceptive or false appearance; deceitfulness; that which misleads the eye or the mind; deception. "Winning by conquest what the first man lost, By fallacy surprised."

(Logic) An argument, or apparent argument, which professes to be decisive of the matter at issue, while in reality it is not; a sophism.

Synonyms: Deception; deceit; mistake. Fallacy, Sophistry. A fallacy is an argument which professes to be decisive, but in reality is not; sophistry is also false reasoning, but of so specious and subtle a kind as to render it difficult to expose its fallacy. Many fallacies are obvious, but the evil of sophistry lies in its consummate art. "Men are apt to suffer their minds to be misled by fallacies which gratify their passions. Many persons have obscured and confounded the nature of things by their wretched sophistry; though an act be never so sinful, they will strip it of its guilt."

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Etymology of 'Fallacy'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Fallacy" Quotes from Famous Books

... and she wanted to think. Any other Sunday evening she would have told the landlady something about her motor-ride, for she and Dudley had now been in the same rooms for seven years, and it is quite a fallacy to condemn all London landladies as grasping, ...

— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page

... trying very hard not to think of Alice Greggory these days. He had come back hoping that he was in a measure "cured" of his "folly," as he termed it; but the first look into Alice Greggory's blue-gray eyes had taught him the fallacy of that idea. In that very first meeting with Alice, he feared that he had revealed his secret, for she was plainly so nervously distant and ill at ease with him that he could but construe her embarrassment and chilly dignity as ...

— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... Here the prime fallacy of his school misled him: he believed that if he had represented the types and scenes of his particular region once he had done all he could, when of course had he let imagination serve him he might have found in that microcosm as many passions ...

— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... ever had; and he was a brother of Agrippina, mother of Nero. This precious pair had a most noble and generous father, and their gentle mother was a fit mate for the great Germanicus—these things are here inserted for the edification of folks who take stock in that pleasant fallacy, the Law of Heredity, and who gleefully chase the ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... anyone, but yet bearing just the resemblance of argument which is calculated to amuse by contrast." Farther on we read again: "There are several different kind of jokes and raillery, which will be found to correspond with the different kinds of fallacy." On this we may observe that some jests, generally of the "manufactured" class, are founded on a false logical process, but in most cases the error arises more from the matter than from the form, and often from mistakes of the senses. Although ...

— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

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