The fallacy fallacy: Reject the argument not the conclusion

The Logic of Science

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post on the importance of understanding logical fallacies, and in that post, I made the following claim, “anytime that an argument contains a fallacy, that argument must be rejected.” Much to my surprise, many people took issue with this and brought up the fallacy fallacy (that’s not a typo). Some of those comments were simply pointing out the existence of the fallacy fallacy (which I actually did in the aforementioned post as well), but many of them were arguing that I was wrong or at least on shaky ground because of the fallacy fallacy. For example, one person said, “of course simply pointing out that someone’s argument is a fallacy is a fallacy in and of itself,” another said that although I was not committing a fallacy fallacy I was, “flirting with encouraging individuals to commit ‘the fallacy fallacy’” (those are exact quotes…

View original post 1,243 more words