Quantifying Aristotle’s Fallacies

Evangelos Athanassopoulos and Michael Gr. Voskoglou
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Evangelos Athanassopoulos: Independent Researcher, Giannakopoulou 39, 27300 Gastouni, Greece
Michael Gr. Voskoglou: Department of Applied Mathematics, Graduate Technological Educational Institute of Western Greece, 22334 Patras, Greece

Mathematics, 2020, vol. 8, issue 9, 1-10

Abstract: Fallacies are logically false statements which are often considered to be true. In the “Sophistical Refutations”, the last of his six works on Logic, Aristotle identified the first thirteen of today’s many known fallacies and divided them into linguistic and non-linguistic ones. A serious problem with fallacies is that, due to their bivalent texture, they can under certain conditions disorient the nonexpert. It is, therefore, very useful to quantify each fallacy by determining the “gravity” of its consequences. This is the target of the present work, where for historical and practical reasons—the fallacies are too many to deal with all of them—our attention is restricted to Aristotle’s fallacies only. However, the tools (Probability, Statistics and Fuzzy Logic) and the methods that we use for quantifying Aristotle’s fallacies could be also used for quantifying any other fallacy, which gives the required generality to our study.

Keywords: logical fallacies; Aristotle’s fallacies; probability; statistical literacy; critical thinking; fuzzy logic (FL) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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