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The Harry Potter fallacy

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  1. lou
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    The “discursive hygiene” picture of fallacy theory sees fallacies as mistakes that a good arguer will avoid. Indeed, armed with a new toolbox of Latin names for fallacies, eager students all too often delight in spotting fallacies in the wild, shouting out their Latin names (ad hominem!; secundum quid!) as if they were magic spells. This is what Scott Aikin and John Casey, in their delightful book Straw Man Arguments, call the Harry Potter fallacy: the “troublesome practice of invoking fallacy names in place of substantive discussion”.

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