Word magic
Word magic is a logical fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that an entity exists, because the word for it exists.
| Cogito ergo sum Logic and rhetoric |
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| Key articles |
| General logic |
| Bad logic |
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v - t - e |
“”Existence is not a predicate. A hundred thalers that I merely imagine have all the same predicates as a hundred real thalers. |
| —Bertrand Russell[1] |
The fallacy is a form of mistaking the map for the territory and an informal fallacy.
Explanation
There are words for God, reptoids, the NWO, unicorns, Klingons, faeries, the FSM, UFOs, the Celestial Teapot, and Bigfoot. Are all real?
gollark: Ask this aquablade11 yourself.
gollark: Oh, you mean you're annoyed by trying to map stuff onto "forum" vs "wiki" which are old definitions?
gollark: How is that related?
gollark: I have a 1.7.10 world around right now because Reika.
gollark: ^
See also
- Appeal to consequences
- Essentialism
- Etymological fallacy
- Mistaking the map for the territory
- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
- Wishful thinking
- Word magic is not to be confused with Max Tegmark's ultimate ensemble hypothesis, which holds that anything that can be mathematically defined and is computable, exists. "Word magic" does not require the concept named to be logically consistent, so it is a fallacy.
External links
- Logical Fallacy of Word Magic, SeekFind.net — unintentional examples of fallacious uses of word magic, i.e., fundamentalist Christian confusion about the difference between scientific terminology and word magic
- Word Magic, W. WARD FEARNSIDE & WILLIAM B. HOLTHER
- word magic, Philosophy in Action
- Word Magic, Logically Fallacious
References
- Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, page 265.
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