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Dagon comments on The Sally-Anne fallacy - Less Wrong
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Comments (27)
I'm not sure this is a single fallacy. It's more a mix of affective fallacy (things I don't like are false) and strawmanning an argument so you can disagree with the easy part.
Mixed in with the human tribal instinct to reinforce their own conclusions rather than looking for reasons to change (confirmation bias), this leads to making the un-persuasive arguments. This is because politics isn't about policy - most people making these bad arguments aren't actually planning or even hoping to persuade. They're hoping to reinforce their position.
Hmm. Maybe I'm saying "this isn't a fallacy". It's not an actual false belief that anyone has - almost nobody has a reflective belief that this is the reason someone on the other side disagrees. It's more a bias - a mode of behavior based on heuristics and unstated goals, rather than a common reasoning falsehood.
I think you're saying that all the cases described above, could be expressed as a mix of other fallacies, therefore it's not distinct fallacy in its own right?
I think a better question is "If we think of class of mistake as a specific named fallacy, will it help us to spot errors of reasoning that we would otherwise have missed? Or alternatively, help us to talk about errors of reasoning that we've noticed."
If it can be expressed in terms of other fallacies, but these mistakes aren't immediately obvious as examples of those fallacies, then it can be worth giving them their own label as philh suggests.
Ultimately, different people will find that different tools and explanations work well for them. While two explanations might be logically equivalent, some people will find that one makes more sense to them, and some people will find that the other makes more sense.
It seems like a useful fallacy to me (so to speak), and I intend to keep an eye out for it.