Epidemiology of Fallacies

  1. Duarte, Antonio
Revista:
Argumentation

ISSN: 0920-427X,  1572-8374

Any de publicació: 2024

Volum: 38

Pàgines: 329-347

Tipus: Article

DOI: 10.1007/S10503-024-09634-Z GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAccés obert editor

Altres publicacions en: Argumentation

Resum

In this paper I apply the epidemiological model of the spread of beliefs and how they become cultural representations to the field of fallacies. The model suggests that beliefs tend to replicate as a virus does in a potential epidemic, and those strains that are dominant in a given socio-cultural sphere become cultural representations. My ultimate aim is to denounce the fact that some presumptive argumentation schemes are widely applied as definitive arguments, but turn out to be instances of common and traditional fallacies. Moreover, some such fallacies have managed to colonise the human mind and become cultural representations in society today. Adopting the approach I advocate here, we could say that the fallacy has become a belief, which has then managed to replicate like a virus, and finally the fallacy has become a cultural representation. One of the great harms that results from this process is that it is very difficult to open up effective lines of argument that expose the fallacious nature of these new and perverse cultural representations.

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