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SilentCal comments on The Sally-Anne fallacy - Less Wrong Discussion

27 Post author: philh 11 April 2016 01:06PM

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Comment author: SilentCal 11 April 2016 06:02:44PM 1 point [-]

Glad to have this term. I do think there's a non-fallacious, superficially similar argument that goes something like this:

"X leads to Y. This is obvious, and the only way you could doubt it would be some sort of motivated reasoning--motivated by something other than preventing Y. Therefore, if you don't think X leads to Y, you aren't very motivated to prevent Y."

It's philosophically valid, but requires some very strong claims. I also suspect it's prone to causing circular reasoning, where you've 'proven' that no one who cares about Y thinks X doesn't lead to Y and then use that belief to discredit new arguments that X doesn't lead to Y.