Slouching Towards Oblivion

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Logical Fallacy #2 - False Cause




There's a good number of sub-headings under False Cause (aka: Questionable Cause).
I grabbed this one from Wikipedia just cuz it's my fave:
Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: "after this, therefore because of this") is a logical fallacy (of the questionable cause variety) that states "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened to simply post hoc. It is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc (correlation does not imply causation), in which two things or events occur simultaneously or the chronological ordering is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because temporal sequence appears to be integral to causality. The fallacy lies in coming to a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors that might rule out the connection.

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