Different types of Fallacies

Logical Analysis
It has often been noted that philosophy and science express two very different types of
attitude of the human mind. The scientific mind searches for knowledge, i.e., for propositions which are
true, which agree with reality. On a high level, it rises to the construction of a theory which connects the
scattered and in their isolation unintelligible facts and in this way explains them. But the philosopher
cannot be satisfied with this. The very nature of knowledge and truth becomes problematic to him; he
would like to get down to the deeper meaning of what the scientist does. Now what can be gained
through philosophy is an increase in inner clarity. The results of philosophical reflection are not
propositions but the clarification of propositions. Wherever real progress has been made in the history
of philosophy, it resided not so much in the results as in the attitude to the questions: in what was
regarded as a problem, or alternatively, in what was recognized as a falsely formulated question and
excluded as such. Thus when Hume showed in his famous critique of the concept of causality that we
only perceive the succession of events and never an inner bond that ties them together, the permanent
gain from his reflection did not reside in a philosophical proposition - an axiom around which other
propositions cluster as around a crystal of truth - but in the clarification of the sense of causal
propositions; and hence not in an increase in the number of propositions but rather in its diminution: in
the disposal of all that baggage of seeming truths and imagined knowledge that trailed behind that false
idea. Hume analysed the concept of causality; and in this sense, philosophy can be called the logical
analysis of our thoughts.

a trend in modern analytic philosophy which maintains that the problem of philosophy is the
logical analysis of the language of science using instruments of modern formal (mathematical) logic. The
emergence and development of the philosophy of logical analysis was due to the increased interest in
logical and methodological problems that has been characteristic of 20th-century science and was
related to the intensified mathematization of science and to the development of methods of
formalization.

However, the detailed investigation of logical problems in science was related by the philosophy
of logical analysis to a positivist negation of the significance of philosophy as a world view. The
fundamental ideas of the philosophy of logical analysis were first formulated by B. Russell. Russell
advanced the thesis that any scientifically meaningful philosophical problem is essentially one of formal
logic. The ideas of the philosophy of logical analysis were also developed in L. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
logi-co-philosophicus and received their full expression in the logical positivism of the Vienna circle.
Beginning in the 1930’s, a number of other groups of philosophers and individual philosophers, such as
the logical pragmatists W. Quine, N. Goodman, and A. Pap (USA), K. Popper (Great Britain), and K.
Ajdukiewicz, J. Łukasiewicz, and T. Kotarbiński (Poland), became adherents of the philosophy of logical
analysis.
 Conceptual Analysis
Conceptual analysis is undergoing a revival in philosophy, and much of the credit goes to
Frank Jackson. Jackson argues that conceptual analysis is needed as an integral component of so-called
serious metaphysics and that it also does explanatory work in accounting for such phenomena as
categorization, meaning change, communication, and linguistic understanding. He even goes so far as to
argue that opponents of conceptual analysis are implicitly committed to it in practice. We show that he
is wrong on all of these points and that his case for conceptual analysis doesn't succeed. At the same
time, we argue that the sorts of intuitions that figure in conceptual analysis may still have a significant
role to play in philosophy. So naturalists needn't disregard intuitions altogether.

The basic idea is that questions like 'What is knowledge?', 'What is justice?', or 'What is truth?' can be
answered solely on the basis of one's grasp of the relevant concepts.

The primary reason for using conceptual analysis is to understand the meaning of an idea or concept.
The secondary reason is to determine how that idea or concept relates to other philosophical problems.
A good example of this is in Plato’s Republic, where he analyzes the concept of justice in context to the
ideal state.

Although conceptual analysis is primarily used by philosophers with regard to abstract ideas, this type of
analysis is of great importance for all other academic disciplines. The notion that a precise definition is
first and foremost necessary in the analysis of any idea or concept, before any investigation into its
meaning and relationship to other ideas and concepts, is what generates understanding and the
expansion of knowledge for any subject area. Understanding philosophical concepts is paramount to
understanding religion, the arts, and the natural and social sciences.
 Deconstruction
Although deconstruction has roots in Martin Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion, to
deconstruct is not to destroy. Deconstruction is always a double movement of simultaneous affirmation
and undoing. It started out as a way of reading the history of metaphysics in Heidegger and Jacques
Derrida, but was soon applied to the interpretation of literary, religious, and legal texts as well as
philosophical ones, and was adopted by several French feminist theorists as a way of making clearer the
deep male bias embedded in the European intellectual tradition.

To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural “fault lines” created by the
ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations
or contradictions that make the text possible. For example, in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida deconstructs
Socrates’ criticism of the written word, arguing that it not only suffers from internal inconsistencies
because of the analogy Socrates himself makes between memory and writing, but also stands in stark
contrast to the fact that his ideas come to us only through the written word he disparaged (D 61-
171). The double movement here is one of tracing this tension in Plato’s text, and in the traditional
reading of that text, while at the same time acknowledging the fundamental ways in which our
understanding of the world is dependent on Socrates’ attitude toward the written word. Derrida points
out similar contradictions in philosophical discussions of a preface (by G. W. F. Hegel, D 1-69) and a
picture frame (by Immanuel Kant, TP 17-147), which are simultaneously inside and outside the
respective works under consideration.

Since the distinction between what is inside the text (or painting) and what is outside can itself
be deconstructed according to the same principles, deconstruction is, like Destruktion, an historicizing
movement that opens texts to the conditions of their production, their con-text in a very broad sense,
including not only the historical circumstances and tradition from which they arose, but also the
conventions and nuances of the language in which they were written and the details of their authors’
lives. This generates an effectively infinite complexity in texts that makes any deconstructive reading
necessarily partial and preliminary.

this method useful in specific situations. I think it’s value is that it allows a thinker to challenge their own
cultural preconceptions and thus gain a somewhat more objective point of view. What it does not do is
prove an argument incorrect, since it simply points out that there is reason to doubt that it is. While I
can say that a given definition is culturally specific, or that it serves to reinforce power dynamics, that
does not mean that the definition is not the best one. Nor does it prove that the argument which flows
from that definition is invalid.
 Public Intellectual
The two public intellectuals who I just mentioned – Sartre and Russell – typically addressed a
broader audience well beyond the formal setup of the university structure. As a matter of fact, Sartre
never held an academic position as such; he was a high school teacher for a while until the mid-1940s
when he decided that he could live off his royalties. Russell had to resign his fellowship at Trinity College
Cambridge because of his stance towards the First World War and subsequently taught sporadically at
universities in the States until that was cut short too because of his political stances. In sum, in what
follows, I am talking about this broader engagement, often political.

public intellectuals, are constantly involved in various forms of positioning and crucially that new
societal conditions encourage novel forms of positioning whilst discouraging

The advantage of this more restrictive notion is that it allows me to identify more clearly who counts as
a philosopher. Of course, the discipline of philosophy, and the training provided within it, differs from
society to society and it also changes over time. This means that some of the people I will be talking
about, in particular Sartre and Russell, might prima facie not have much in common.

Sartre came to public prominence just after the liberation. He was known beforehand but mainly to a
specialized public. Between middle of 1944 and the end of 1945 Sartre made a meteoric rise and
managed to turn his dense philosophy into a digestible product for a mass-audience. The autumn of
1945 was particularly crucial. Later portrayed as the ‘existentialist offensive’, it was during this period,
September and October of 1945, that Sartre turned himself into a public figure. The publication of the
two volumes of L’Age de la Raison, the launch of his flagship journal Les Temps Modernes and his
famous public lecture L’Existentialisme est un humanisme – all contributed to his new persona as a
public figure. But becoming famous as an intellectual does not make you a public intellectual. To be a
public intellectual, you also need to be able to engage with broader issues of societal significance well
beyond your specialized expertise. Sartre managed to do this straight away.

what kind of public intellectual was Sartre? He was what I call an ‘authoritative’ public intellectual. 7
They rely on high cultural capital acquired from being trained in a high-profile discipline like philosophy
and from being brought up in a very privileged background.

Sartre was the archetypal authoritative public intellectual.

Authoritative public intellectuals thrive in a very particular setting. They thrive in societies in which a
significant section of the population value intellectual life and in which nevertheless the cultural and
intellectual capital is concentrated within a small elite. They thrive in a hierarchical educational context,
with ‘hierarchical’ referring to a clear distinction not only between elite institutions and other higher
education establishments but also between high and low status disciplines. They can exist
independently of academic appointments because of independent resources, gained from family wealth
or successful exploitation of the media of the time (book-writing and print journalism in the first half of
the 20th Century, broadcasting in the 2nd half and beyond). They tend to surface when the academic
setting is more amorphous, with limited specialisation, and especially when the social sciences are
poorly professionalised. It is in this very specific context that authoritative public intellectuals like Sartre
and Russell have a field day. Steeped in a high profile disciple like philosophy and mathematics and with
the confidence of the right habitus and an elite education, they can speak to a wide range of social and
political issues without being criticised for dilettantism. The early part of the twentieth century,
especially in parts of Europe, fits this ideal type remarkably well. It was the era of the philosopher as
public intellectual.

Philosophy as Dialogue
Father of the philosophy of dialogue is Martin Buber, Dialogue assumes a conversation and a
necessity to listen to the other. The 20th century changed the approach to a dialogue due to the
philosophy of dialogue discussed in the present article. Its creator, 'father' Martin Buber indicated
that a real discovery of a true 'I' lies in the encounter with 'You', and 'I' does not exist without a
relation with 'You'. According to Buber the dialogue constitutes the basis of Philosophy in general
due to the fact that it is the only effective form of communication in contrast to one-sided expression
of opinions. Man can enter into a monologue relation with reality 'I-It', in which there is a lack of a
dialogue, or in a dialogue relation 'I-You'. Whatever occurs between people is a sphere of mutual
'confrontation' and constitutes the foundations of dialogism. A dialogue should be built not based on
searching for unity and common truths but on axiological experience of otherness. A dialogue
becomes the aim for this philosophy. Encounter and dialogue constitute a starting point and principle
of any philosophizing.

one who engages in dialogue must employ the other methods listed here in order to
conduct the conversation. However, this approach to philosophy is very engaging for me. While
any written paper is usually a part of a greater discourse, I think that spoken dialogue is much
more effective in giving life to ideas. The usefulness of this approach is that it brings a
philosopher into contact with many ideas in a short period of time, especially when there are
more than two opinions being argued. It also creates, in my experience, a community mentality
in which those of different viewpoints are engaged in real conversation for the common goal of
truth seeking. In other words, people discuss to work out a problem together, rather than in
isolation. The down side of dialogue, is that I find it much easier to commit logical fallacies
myself or overlook those of others, since I do not have as much time to construct the argument,
and rhetoric often mixes unintentionally with reasoning. Since most philosophy courses at SLU
are discussion based, I have used this approach heavily in all my courses bur reasoning.
 Comparative- Constructive
Comparative philosophy—sometimes called "cross-cultural philosophy"—is a subfield of philosophy in
which philosophers work on problems by intentionally setting into dialogue various sources from across
cultural, linguistic, and philosophical streams. The ambition and challenge of comparative philosophy is
to include all the philosophies of global humanity in its vision of what is constituted by philosophy.

This approach distinguishes comparative philosophy from several other approaches to philosophy. First,
comparative philosophy is distinct from both area studies philosophy (in which philosophers investigate
topics in particular cultural traditions, for example, Confucianism) and world philosophy (in which
philosophers construct a philosophical system based on the fullness of global traditions of thought).
Second, comparative philosophy differs from more traditional philosophy in which ideas are compared
among thinkers within a particular tradition; comparative philosophy intentionally compares the ideas
of thinkers of very different traditions, especially culturally distinct traditions.

With the unique approach of comparative philosophy also comes unique difficulties and challenges that
are not as characteristic of doing philosophy within a particular tradition. Difficulties to be avoided
include descriptive chauvinism (recreating another tradition in the image of one’s own), normative
skepticism (merely narrating or describing the views of different philosophers and traditions, suspending
all judgment about their adequacy), incommensurability (the inability to find the common ground
among traditions needed as a basis for comparison), and perennialism (failure to realize that
philosophical traditions evolve, that they are not perennial in the sense of being monolithic or static).
Furthermore, since comparative philosophy involves an approach that is not dominant in academic
philosophy, it has been somewhat neglected by the mainstream of the profession. However,
comparative philosophy is fairly early in its developmental stages.

This is a very useful method for creating new ideas, which are extremely important to the
process of truth seeking. The only course that I have ever used this approach in is Modern
Philosophy, since few of my courses have actually asked me to generate new ideas, rather than
simply responding to old ones.

Constructivism is a philosophy of learning founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our

the job of philosophers is to do some kind of idea construction. This is most often applied to ethics
(moral philosophy) and social/political philosophy, where the idea is that philosophers should have the
job of building new ideas rather than just observing and analyzing the ideas that already exist in society.
 Comparative- Descriptive analysis

Descriptive, This is a valuable learning tool, since we often come to understand concepts in relations to
what we already know. So if someone understands the social contract of Rousseau, you be better able
to explain the subtleties of Hobbes’ argument by comparison. However, I do not much care for this
approach since it does not really generate any new knowledge, and though it is a fast-track to
understanding, it does not seem to do anything that could not be accomplished by careful reading of
original texts.