Bible Belt

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Belt 

Bible Belt
Cultural region of the United States
The area roughly considered to constitute the United States Bible Belt
Country	United States
States	Alabama  Arkansas  Georgia  Kentucky  Louisiana  Mississippi  North Carolina  Oklahoma  South Carolina  Tennessee  Texas  Virginia  West Virginia and parts of:  Florida  Illinois  Iowa  Indiana  Kansas  Missouri  New Mexico  Ohio

The Bible Belt is a region of the Southern United States in which socially conservative Christianity plays a strong role in society and politics, and church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. The region contrasts with the religiously diverse Midwest and Great Lakes, and the Mormon Corridor in Utah and southern Idaho.

Whereas the states with the highest percentage of residents identifying as non-religious are in the West and New England regions of the United States (with Vermont at 37%, ranking the highest), in the Bible Belt state of Alabama it is just 12%, and Tennessee has the highest proportion of evangelical Protestants, at 52%. The evangelical influence is strongest in northern Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, southern and western Virginia, West Virginia, the Upstate region of South Carolina, and East Texas.

The earliest known usage of the term "Bible Belt" was by American journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken, who in 1924 wrote in the Chicago Daily Tribune: "The old game, I suspect, is beginning to play out in the Bible Belt." In 1927, Mencken claimed the term as his invention. The term is now also used in other countries for regions with higher religious doctrine adoption.

In the United States

Geography

The name "Bible Belt" has been applied historically to the South and parts of the Midwest, but is more commonly identified with the South. In a 1961 study, Wilbur Zelinsky delineated the region as the area in which Protestant denominations, especially Southern Baptist, Methodist, and evangelical, are the predominant religious affiliations. The region thus defined included most of the Southern United States, including most of Texas and Oklahoma, and in the states south of the Ohio River, and extending east to include central West Virginia and Virginia, from the Shenandoah Valley southward into Southside Virginia and North Carolina. In addition, the Bible Belt covers most of Missouri and Kentucky and southern parts of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. On the other hand, areas in the South which are not considered part of the Bible Belt include heavily Catholic Southern Louisiana, central and southern Florida, which have been settled mainly by immigrants and Americans from elsewhere in the country, and overwhelmingly Hispanic South Texas. A 1978 study by Charles Heatwole identified the Bible Belt as the region dominated by 24 fundamentalist Protestant denominations, corresponding to essentially the same area mapped by Zelinsky.

According to Stephen W. Tweedie, an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University, the Bible Belt is now viewed in terms of numerical concentration of the audience for religious television. He finds two belts: one more eastern that stretches from Florida, (excluding Miami, Tampa and South Florida), through Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, the Carolinas, and into Southside Virginia; and another concentrated in Texas (excluding El Paso, and South Texas), Arkansas, Louisiana, (excluding New Orleans and Acadiana), Oklahoma, Missouri (excluding St. Louis), Kansas, and Mississippi. "[H]is research also broke the Bible Belt into two core regions, a western region and an eastern region. Tweedie's western Bible Belt was focused on a core that extended from Little Rock, Arkansas to Tulsa, Oklahoma. His eastern Bible Belt was focused on a core that included the major population centers of Virginia and North Carolina.

Bible-minded cities map

A study was commissioned by the American Bible Society to survey the importance of the Bible in the metropolitan areas of the United States. The report was based on 42,855 interviews conducted between 2005 and 2012. It determined the 10 most "Bible-minded" cities were Knoxville, Tennessee; Shreveport, Louisiana; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Springfield, Missouri; Charlotte, North Carolina; Lynchburg, Virginia; Huntsville-Decatur, Alabama; and Charleston, West Virginia.

By state

Percentage of respondents in the USA stating that religion is "Very important" or "Somewhat important" in their lives, 2014

 

Proportion of Evangelical Protestants per state in the American South

State	Baptist	Pentecostal	Restorationist	Presbyterian	Other	Total		Share indicating religion is "Very Important"
Alabama	31%	5%	3%	2%	8%	49%		77%
Arkansas	25%	5%	5%	2%	9%	46%		70%
Delaware	7%	1%	3%	1%	3%	15%		46%
Washington, D.C.	2%	1%	1%	1%	3%	8%		50%
Florida	8%	4%	2%	1%	9%	24%		53%
Georgia	21%	4%	2%	1%	10%	38%		64%
Kentucky	29%	7%	3%	1%	9%	49%		63%
Louisiana	16%	3%	1%	<1%	7%	27%		71%
Maryland	5%	3%	1%	<1%	9%	18%		50%
Mississippi	26%	4%	2%	1%	8%	41%		74%
Missouri	15%	6%	3%	1%	11%	36%		56%
North Carolina	20%	4%	1%	1%	9%	35%		62%
Oklahoma	23%	6%	4%	<1%	14%	47%		64%
South Carolina	22%	4%	1%	1%	7%	35%		69%
Tennessee	33%	4%	6%	2%	7%	52%		71%
Texas	14%	4%	2%	<1%	11%	31%		63%
Virginia	15%	5%	<1%	1%	9%	30%		60%
West Virginia	19%	7%	2%	<1%	11%	39%		64%

Other Bible Belts in the United States

In addition to the South, there is a smaller Bible Belt in West Michigan, centered on the heavily Dutch-influenced cities of Holland and Grand Rapids. Christian colleges in that region include Calvin College, Hope College, Cornerstone University, Grace Bible College, and Kuyper College. Much like the South, West Michigan is generally fiscally and socially conservative.

There is also a Bible Belt in the western suburbs of Chicago (especially in DuPage County), centered on Wheaton. Christian colleges in that region include Wheaton College, North Central College, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Elmhurst College. Christian publishing houses in that region include Good News Publishers, Intervarsity Press, and Tyndale House. Carol Stream is home to the headquarters of Christianity Today. DuPage County has historically been a fiscally and socially conservative Republican stronghold, though in recent years has become more politically moderate especially on issues of race and immigration, and in 2016 Donald Trump was the first Republican nominee for president since 1912 to get less than 40% of the vote. Many DuPage County communities which normally vote Republican did not support Donald Trump in 2016. In December 2019, shortly after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald Trump, Christianity Today published a controversial editorial calling for the removal of Trump from office, citing the need to hold him to the same standards to which they held Bill Clinton in the 1990s (who was the last Democratic nominee for president to get less than 40% of the DuPage County vote).

History

During the colonial period (1607–1776), the South was a stronghold of the Anglican church. Its transition to a stronghold of non-Anglican Protestantism occurred gradually over the next century as a series of religious revival movements, many associated with the Baptist denomination, gained great popularity in the region.

The northern colonial Bible Belt (especially New England with its Puritan heritage) frequently performed missionary work in the South. "The centre of Particular Baptist activity in early America was in the Middle Colonies. In 1707 five churches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were united to form the Philadelphia Baptist Association, and through the association they embarked upon vigorous missionary activity. By 1760 the Philadelphia association included churches located in the present states of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia; and by 1767 further multiplication of churches had necessitated the formation of two subsidiary associations, the Warren in New England and the Ketochton in Virginia. The Philadelphia association also provided leadership in organizing the Charleston Association in the Carolinas in 1751."

An influential figure was Shubal Stearns: "Shubael Stearns, a New England Separate Baptist, migrated to Sandy Creek, North Carolina, in 1755 and initiated a revival that quickly penetrated the entire Piedmont region. The churches he organized were brought together in 1758 to form the Sandy Creek Association". Stearns was brother-in-law of Daniel Marshall, who was born in Windsor, Connecticut and "is generally considered the first great Baptist leader in Georgia. He founded Kiokee Baptist Church, the oldest continuing Baptist congregation in the state". Also, Wait Palmer, of Toland, Connecticut, may have influenced African American Christianity in the South: "The Silver Bluff, South Carolina, revival was a seminal development, whose role among blacks rivalled that played by the Sandy Creek revival of the Separate Baptists, to which it was indirectly related. It was probably the same Wait Palmer who had baptized Shubal Stearns in 1751 who came to Silver Bluff in 1775, baptizing and constituting a church. Abraham Marshall, who encouraged the later offshoots, was a Separate Baptist of the Sandy Creek school. The revival at the Silver Bluff plantation of George Galphin (some twelve miles from Augusta, Georgia) had brought David George to the Afro-Baptist faith and had provided a ministry for George Liele".

According to Thomas S. Kidd, "As early as 1758, Sandy Creek missionaries helped organize a slave congregation, the Bluestone Church, on the plantation of William Byrd III, which may have been the first independently functioning African American church in North America. The church did not last long, but it reflected the Baptists' commitment to evangelizing African Americans". According to Gayraud S. Wilmore, "The preaching of New England Congregationalists such as Jonathan Edwards about the coming millennium, and his conviction that Christians were called to prepare for it, reached the slaves through the far-ranging missionary work of white evangelists such as Shubal Stearns, Wait Palmer, and Matthew Moore - all of whom left Congregationalism and became Separatist Baptist preachers in the plantation country of Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia".

Buckle

A billboard near the centre of Alabama

Several locations are occasionally referred to as "the Buckle of the Bible Belt":

• Abilene, Texas, a city of 117,000, is home to three Protestant universities: the Baptist affiliated Hardin-Simmons University, the Church of Christ's Abilene Christian University, and Methodist founded McMurry University.
• Nashville, Tennessee, sometimes referred to as "the Protestant Vatican", has over 700 churches, several seminaries, and a number of Christian schools, colleges and universities, including Belmont University, Trevecca Nazarene University, Lipscomb University, Free Will Baptist Bible College and American Baptist College. Nashville is the seat of the National Baptist Convention, USA, the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Free Will Baptists, the Gideons International, the Gospel Music Association, and Thomas Nelson, the world's largest producer of Bibles.
• Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a city where Protestant and, in particular, Southern Baptist and other evangelical Christian traditions are very prominent. Tulsa is home to Oral Roberts University, Phillips Theological Seminary, and RHEMA Bible Training College (in the suburb of Broken Arrow). A number of prominent Protestant Christians have lived or studied in Tulsa, including Joel Osteen, Kenneth E. Hagin, Carlton Pearson, Kenneth Copeland, Billy Joe Daugherty, Smokie Norful and Billy James Hargis. Tulsa is also home to a number of vibrant Mainline Protestant congregations. Some of these congregations were founded during the oil boom of the early twentieth century and their facilities are noted for striking architecture, such as the art deco Boston Avenue Methodist Church and First Presbyterian Church of Tulsa. The metropolitan area has at least four religious radio stations (KCFO, KNYD, KXOJ, & KPIM), and at least two religious TV stations (KWHB & KGEB).
• Greenville, South Carolina, is a city where many Baptist churches, particularly Independent Baptist, are located. There are more than one hundred Baptist churches in the Greenville area, as well as Bob Jones University. It also is the home of WTBI radio station which plays old-fashioned Christian music and preaching 24 hours a day.

Political and cultural context

There has been research that links evangelical Protestantism with social conservatism. In 1950, President Harry S. Truman told Catholic leaders he wanted to send an ambassador to the Vatican. Truman said the leading Democrats in Congress approved, but they warned him, "it would defeat Democratic Senators and Congressmen in the Bible Belt."

In presidential elections, the Bible Belt states of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas have voted for the Republican candidate in all elections since 1980; Oklahoma has supported the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1968, with Republicans having carried every county in the state in all presidential elections since 2004. Other Bible Belt states have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in the majority of elections since 1980, but have gone to the Democratic candidate either once or twice since then. However, with the exception of Mississippi, historical geographer Barry Vann shows that counties in the upland areas of the Appalachians and the Ozarks have a more conservative voting pattern than the counties located in the coastal plains.

Outside the United States

Australia

In Australia, the term "Bible Belt" has been used to refer to areas within individual cities, which have a high concentration of Christian residents usually centralized around a megachurch, for example:

• Formerly, the northwestern suburbs of Sydney focusing on The Hills District were traditionally known as the "bible belt", where Hillsong Church is located. Between the 2011 and 2016 census, however, the Christian population of The Hills district got reduced by 18.5% and those without a religion grew from 1 in 8 in 2006 to 1 in 5 in the 2016 census.
• The Greater Western Sydney area, typically in the City of Fairfield area, in the suburbs between Fairfield and Horsley Park, where the megachurches are St Hurmizd Church, an Assyrian Church of the East and the Apostle Chaldean Catholic Church, a Chaldean Catholic church. Other bible belts include those with high Anglo-Saxon Protestant populations found in the Sutherland Shire, parts of City of Penrith, Camden Council and the Wollondilly Shire.
• The outer-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, where CityLife Church, Crossway Baptist Church, Stairway Church and Discovery Church are located.
• The northeastern suburbs of Adelaide focusing on Paradise, Modbury and Golden Grove, where Influencers Church is located
• The southeastern region of Queensland comprising the towns of Laidley, Gatton and Toowoomba.
• The Brisbane southern suburbs of Mansfield, Springwood, Carindale and Mount Gravatt. Garden City Assembly of God church, Citipointe Church, Clark Taylor's Worship Centre, and Brisbane Hillsong are notable megachurches in this area.
• More recently, the far northern suburbs of Perth are forming this reputation, with the focus being on One Church and Globalheart in the suburbs of Merriwa and Joondalup respectively.

Toowoomba city in Queensland has long been regarded as fertile ground for Christian fundamentalist right-wing movements  that adhere to biblical literalism, particularly those within the Pentecostal and charismatic stream of Christianity. This was exemplified by the highly publicised rise and subsequent fall of Howard Carter and the Logos Foundation in the 1980s. The Logos Foundation and other similar movements that have followed it, operate in a controlling, authoritarian and almost cultish manner, contributing to their notoriety. Other similarly conservative Pentecostal churches within the city have, since that time, banded together into a loose federation known as the Toowoomba Christian Leaders' Network. (note - most traditional church denominations have their own, separate ecumenical group) This network views itself as having a divine mission to 'take the city for the Lord' and as such, endorses elements of religious right-wing political advocacy, such as the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL).

ACL's former managing director who was raised in the Logos Foundation and is a former Toowoomba City councillor is Lyle Shelton. These church groups are strongly associated with North American trends such as the New Apostolic Reformation, Dominion theology, Five-fold ministry thinking, Kingdom Now theology and revivalism. They support the achievement of a type of theocratic society where conservative and literal interpretations of the bible are the dominant drivers of government, education, the Arts, the media and entertainment. Churches involved in this group currently include the successor organization to the Logos Foundation, the Toowoomba City Church, along with the Range Christian Fellowship, Spring Street Assembly of God, Christian Outreach Centre, Hume Ridge Church of Christ, Revival Ministries of Australia Shiloh Centre, the Edge Christian Centre and many others.

Queensland, just like the American Deep South, is considered to be a major centre for not just biblical groups, but also the homeland of a disproportionate amount of Australia's right-wing and far-right leaning politicians, including but not limited to, Fraser Anning, Pauline Hanson, and Clive Palmer.

Canada

The province of Saskatchewan has been referred to as Canada's Bible Belt with a significant Catholic, Anabaptist population and other Protestants. Certain areas of Canada's east coast region, such as the province of New Brunswick, also contain significant populations of Catholic, Baptist, Anglican and United faith adherents, up to 85% overall.

Denmark

In Denmark, rural western Jutland in particular is considered to be the Bible Belt. This is due to the higher number of citizens who are associated (in this particular area) with conservative Lutheran Christian organisations such as the Church Association for the Inner Mission in Denmark, which traditionally have had a very strong resistance to abortion and LGBT rights.

Estonia

Census results show religious belief in the country is more prevalent in the east running from north to south along the border with Russia, particularly in those areas with large populations of Russian Orthodox, Estonian Orthodox and Orthodox Old Believers.

Finland

Conservative Laestadianism, a Finnish Lutheran revival, is widespread in northern (Northern Ostrobothnia and Lapland (Finland)) and central parts (Northern Savonia) of Finland.

Germany

Rural portions of Bavaria, approximately stretching from Franconia into Württemberg, constitute Germany's Bible Belt with mostly Catholics, some Lutherans and Reformed Protestants. An area in Erzgebirge in Saxony has been described also as the "Saxon Bible Belt" with a notable evangelical Protestant/Christian fundamentalist/free church community, as well as some conservative Lutheran parishes that are opposed to same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Saxony approved church resolutions regarding the issue regardless of opinions within those parishes.

Lithuania

Among its Baltic neighbors Lithuania is in general much more religious, but even in this context, Vilnius with its many churches and adjacent region (Vilnius district and Šalčininkai district municipalities) with larger number of Lithuanian Poles is the most religious region of Lithuania. Both Šalčininkai and Vilnius district municipalities by the ruling Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania – Christian Families Alliance were declared as guarded and ruled by Jesus Christ.

Mexico

In Mexico, there is what is known as the Rosary Belt (Spanish: Cinturón del Rosario). The term, created by journalist and writer Carlos Monsiváis in 1999, refers to a region comprising the states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Querétaro and, in more recent years, Zacatecas, where 90% of the population professes Roman Catholicism, which has a notable influence on local politics and society. Guanajuato, for example, is one of the most important electoral strongholds of the National Action Party, of Christian Democrat tradition, mostly inspired by the Social Doctrine of the Church, and with strong conservative ideals. It was in this region where the first uprisings against the government took place during the Cristero War, demanding an end to the persecution of Catholics in the country as a result of the promulgation of the so-called Calles Law, which restricted Catholic worship in Mexico.

Netherlands

The Bible Belt of the Netherlands (Dutch: Bijbelgordel) stretches from Zeeland, through the West-Betuwe and Veluwe, to the northern parts of the province Overijssel. In this region, orthodox Calvinists prevail.

New Zealand

In New Zealand, Mount Roskill, Auckland, contains the highest number of churches per capita in the country, and is the home of several Christian political candidates. The electorate was one of the last in the country to go "wet", in 1999, having formerly been a dry area where the selling of alcohol was prohibited.

At the 2013 New Zealand census, the Mangere–Otahuhu local board area of Auckland had the highest concentration of Christians in New Zealand, with 67.7 percent of the local board's 71,000 residents identifying as such.

In contrast to other bible belts, both areas tend to vote for left-wing candidates and are both currently represented in parliament by the governing centre-left Labour Party.

Norway

The Bible Belt of Norway is located mainly in the western and southern parts of the country, and contains numerous devout Lutherans.

Poland

South and East parts of Poland are much more religious than North and West. See Poland A and B.

Soviet Union

Before its independence, Soviet Ukraine was known as the Bible Belt of the Soviet Union, with a significant proportion of Baptists.

Sweden

The area normally called the Bible Belt of Sweden is centered on Jönköping in southern Sweden and contains numerous free churches. There are also numerous conservative Lutheran Laestadians in the Torne valley area in the far north of the country.

United Kingdom

In Northern Ireland, the area in County Antrim stretching from roughly Ballymoney to Larne and centred in the area of Ballymena is often referred to as a Bible Belt. This is because the area is heavily Protestant with a large evangelical community. From 1970 to 2010, the MP for North Antrim was Ian Paisley, a Free Presbyterian minister well known for his theological fundamentalism. The town of Ballymena, the largest town in the constituency, is often referred to as the "buckle" of the Bible Belt.

Informal fallacy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy 

Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not just due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but can also be due to their content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them. These misleading appearances are often connected to various aspects of natural language, such as ambiguous or vague expressions, or the assumption of implicit premises instead of making them explicit.

Traditionally, a great number of informal fallacies has been identified, including the fallacy of equivocation, the fallacy of amphiboly, the fallacies of composition and division, the false dilemma, the fallacy of begging the question, the ad hominem fallacy and the appeal to ignorance. There is no general agreement as to how the various fallacies are to be grouped into categories. One approach sometimes found in the literature is to distinguish between fallacies of ambiguity, which have their root in ambiguous or vague language, fallacies of presumption, which involve false or unjustified premises, and fallacies of relevance, in which the premises are not relevant to the conclusion despite appearances otherwise.

The traditional approach to fallacies has received a lot of criticism in contemporary philosophy. This criticism is often based on the argument that the alleged fallacies are not fallacious at all, or at least not in all cases. To overcome this problem, alternative approaches for conceiving arguments and fallacies have been proposed. These include the dialogical approach, which conceives arguments as moves in a dialogue-game aimed at rationally persuading the other person. This game is governed by various rules. Fallacies are defined as violations of the dialogue rules impeding the progress of the dialogue. The epistemic approach constitutes another framework. Its core idea is that arguments play an epistemic role: they aim to expand our knowledge by providing a bridge from already justified beliefs to not yet justified beliefs. Fallacies are arguments that fall short of this goal by breaking a rule of epistemic justification. In the Bayesian approach, the epistemic norms are given by the laws of probability, which our degrees of belief should track.

The study of fallacies aims at providing an account for evaluating and criticizing arguments. This involves both a descriptive account of what constitutes an argument and a normative account of which arguments are good or bad. In philosophy, fallacies are usually seen as a form of bad argument and are discussed as such in this article. Another conception, more common in non-scholarly discourse, sees fallacies not as arguments but rather as false yet popular beliefs.

Traditional account

Informal fallacies are a form of incorrect argument in natural language. An argument is a series of propositions, called the premises, together with one more proposition, called the conclusion. The premises in correct arguments offer either deductive or defeasible support for the conclusion. The source of the error in incorrect arguments can be in the argument's form, content or context. If the error is only due to the form, it is considered a formal fallacy. Informal fallacies may also include formal errors but they primarily involve errors on the level of content and context. Informal fallacies are expressed in natural language. This brings with it various difficulties not faced when studying formal fallacies, like ambiguous terms, vague expressions or the premises being assumed implicitly rather than stated explicitly. Traditionally, a great number of informal fallacies have been listed, including the fallacy of equivocation, the fallacy of amphiboly, the fallacies of composition and division, the false dilemma, the fallacy of begging the question, the ad hominem fallacy or the appeal to ignorance. The traditional approach tries to account for these fallacies using the concepts and theses discussed in this section.

Arguments and fallacies

Only arguments can constitute a fallacy. Various erroneous expressions do not count as fallacies because no argument was made, e.g. because no reasons were cited or no assertion was made. The core idea of arguments is that the premises support the conclusion or that the conclusion follows from the premises. Deductively valid arguments offer the strongest form of support: for them, it is impossible for the conclusion to be false if all the premises are true. The premises in non-deductive arguments offer a certain degree of support for their conclusion but they are defeasible: it is possible for all the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. Defeasible arguments may still be rationally compelling despite being fallible. So they do not automatically constitute fallacies. The premises of an argument may be seen as the foundation on which the conclusion is built. According to this analogy, two things can go wrong and turn an argument into a fallacy. It could be that the foundation is shaky. But even a solid foundation is not helpful if it does not provide support for the conclusion in question.

Traditionally, fallacies have been defined by three necessary conditions: "a fallacy (i) is an argument, (ii) that is invalid, and (iii) appears to be valid." This definition covers only formal fallacy since it has deductive invalidity as a necessary condition. But it can easily be modified to include informal fallacy by replacing this condition with a more general term, like logical weakness or incorrect reasoning. The last clause includes a psychological element in referring to how the argument appears to the arguer. This clause is used to distinguish genuine fallacies from mere mistakes in reasoning, for example, due to carelessness. The idea is that fallacies have an alluring element that goes beyond mere carelessness by seducing us into committing the mistake, thereby explaining why they are committed in the first place. Some philosophers reject this appeal to appearances because the reference to psychology would complicate the investigation in various ways. One issue is that appearances are different for different people. This problem would also involve social sciences in order to determine which reference group of people to consult for defining fallacies. It has been suggested that, at its core, the study of fallacies is about normative aspects of arguments and not about their persuasive force, which is studied by empirical psychology instead.

Form, content and context

The source of the error in incorrect arguments can lie in the argument's form, content or context. The form or structure of an argument is also called "rule of inference". The most well-known rule of inference is modus ponens, which states that given a premise of the form "If p then q" and another in the form "p", then the conclusion is "q". Rules of inferences are formal because it depends only on the structure or the syntax of the premises and not on their content. So an argument based on modus ponens is valid no matter what propositional contents are used for "p" and "q".

The content of an argument is found on the level of its propositions: it is what is expressed in them. The source of many informal fallacies is found in a false premise. For example, a false dilemma is a fallacy based on a false disjunctive claim that oversimplifies reality by excluding viable alternatives.

The context of an argument refers to the situation in which it is used. Based on its context it may be intended to play different roles. One way for an argument to be fallacious is if it fails to perform the role it was supposed to play. The strawman fallacy, for example, involves inaccurately attributing a weak position to one's opponent and then refuting this position. The argument itself may be valid in that the refutation of the opposed position really is successful. The error is found on the level of the context since the opponent does not hold this position. This dependence on a context means that the same argument may be successful in another context: against an opponent who actually holds the strawman position.

Natural language and contrast to formal fallacies

Formal fallacies are deductively invalid arguments. They are of special interest to the field of formal logic but they can only account for a small number of the known fallacies, for example, for affirming the consequent or denying the antecedent. Many other fallacies used in natural language, e.g. in advertising or in politics, involve informal fallacies. For example, false dilemmas or begging the question are fallacies despite being deductively valid. They are studied by informal logic. Part of the difficulty in analyzing informal fallacies is due to the fact that their structure is not always clearly expressed in natural language. Sometimes certain keywords like "because", "therefore", "since" or "consequently" indicate which parts of the expression constitute the premises and which part the conclusion. But other times this distinction remains implicit and it is not always obvious which parts should be identified as the premises and the conclusions. Many informal arguments include enthymematic premises: premises that are not explicitly stated but tacitly presumed. In some domestic quarrels and political debates, it is not clear from the outset what the two parties are arguing about and which theses they intend to defend. Sometimes the function of the debate is more to clarify these preliminary points than to advance actual arguments.

The distinction between formal and informal fallacies is opposed by deductivists, who hold that deductive invalidity is the reason for all fallacies. One way to explain that some fallacies do not seem to be deductively invalid is to hold that they contain various hidden assumptions, as is common for natural language arguments. The idea is that apparent informal fallacies can be turned into formal fallacies by making all these assumptions explicit and thereby revealing the deductive invalidity. The claim that this is possible for all fallacies is not generally accepted. One requirement for a formal treatment is translating the arguments in question into the language of formal logic, a process known as "formalization". Often many of the subtleties of natural language have to be ignored in this process. Some bodies of knowledge can be formalized without much residue but others resist formalization. This is also true for many informal fallacies.

Other approaches

The traditional approach to fallacies has received a lot of criticism in contemporary philosophy. This criticism is often based on the argument that some of the alleged fallacies are not fallacious at all, or at least not in all cases. Various alternative approaches to how arguments and fallacies are to be conceived have been proposed. These alternatives often aim to show that, given their perspective, it is possible to evaluate if an alleged fallacy is actually fallacious in a given case. The dialogical approach uses a game-theoretic framework to define arguments and sees fallacies as violations of the rules of the game. According to the epistemic approach, it is the goal of arguments to expand our knowledge by providing a bridge from already justified beliefs to not yet justified beliefs. Fallacies are arguments that fall short of this goal by breaking a rule of epistemic justification. It has been suggested that there may not be one single framework for evaluating all fallacies but only a manifold of ideals according to which a given argument may be good or bad.

Dialogical

The dialogical approach sees arguments not simply as a series of premises together with a conclusion but as a speech act within a dialogue that aims to rationally persuade the other person of one's own position. A prominent version of this approach is defended by Douglas N. Walton. On his game-theoretic conception, a dialogue is a game between two players. At the outset, each player is committed to a set of propositions and has a conclusion they intend to prove. A player has won if they are able to persuade the opponent of their own conclusion. In this sense, dialogues can be characterized as "games of persuasion". The players can perform various moves that affect what they are committed to. In this framework, arguments are moves that take the opponent's commitments as premises and lead to the conclusion one is trying to prove. Since this is often not possible directly, various intermediary steps are taken, in which each argument takes a few steps towards one's intended conclusion by proposing an intermediary conclusion for the opponent to accept. This game is governed by various rules determining, among other things, which moves are allowed and when. The dialogical approach makes it possible to distinguish between positive arguments, which support one's own conclusion, and negative arguments, which deny the opponent's conclusion.

From this perspective, fallacies are defined as violations of the dialogue rules. They are "deceptively bad argument[s] that impede the progress of the dialogue". The strawman fallacy, for example, involves inaccurately attributing a weak position to one's opponent and then proving this position to lead to one's own conclusion. This mistake is not logical in the strict sense but dialogical: the conclusion may as well follow from these premises but the opponent does not hold these commitments. In some cases, it varies from game to game whether a certain move counts as a fallacy or not. For example, there are cases where the tu quoque "fallacy" is no fallacy at all. This argument, also known as appeal to hypocrisy, tries to discredit the opponent's argument by claiming that the opponent's behavior is inconsistent with the argument's conclusion. This move does not necessarily break the rules of the dialogue. Instead, it can reveal a weakness in the opponent's position by deflecting her criticism onto herself. This move shifts the burden of proof back to the opponent, thereby strengthening one's own position. But it still constitutes a fallacy if it is only used to evade an argument.

Epistemic

The core idea behind the epistemic approach is that arguments play an epistemic role: they aim to expand our knowledge by providing a bridge from already justified beliefs to not yet justified beliefs. Fallacies are arguments that fall short of this goal by breaking a rule of epistemic justification. This explains, for example, why arguments that are accidentally valid are still somehow flawed: because the arguer himself lacks a good reason to believe the conclusion.

The fallacy of begging the question, on this perspective, is a fallacy because it fails to expand our knowledge by providing independent justification for its conclusion. Instead, the conclusion is already assumed in one of its premises. A purely logical approach, on the other hand, fails to explain the fallacious nature of begging the question since the argument is deductively valid.

The Bayesian approach constitutes a special form of the epistemic approach. Bayesianism interprets degrees of belief as subjective probabilities, i.e. as the degree of certainty of the believer that the believed proposition is true. On this view, reasoning based on an argument can be interpreted as a process of changing one's degrees of belief, usually in response to new incoming information. Fallacies are probabilistically weak arguments, i.e. they have a low probability on the Bayesian model. Whether an argument constitutes a fallacy or not depends on the credences of the person evaluating the argument. This means that what constitutes a fallacy for one arguer may be a sound argument for another. This explains why, when trying to persuade someone, one should take the audience's beliefs into account. But it can also make sense of arguments independent of an audience, unlike the dialogical approach.

This perspective is well suited for explaining why some slippery slope arguments constitute fallacies but others not. Slippery slope arguments argue against a certain proposal based on the fact that this proposal would bring with it a causal chain of events eventually leading to a bad outcome. But even if every step in this chain is relatively probable, probabilistic calculus may still reveal that the likelihood of all steps occurring together is quite small. In this case, the argument would constitute a fallacy. But slippery slope arguments are rationally justified if the associated probabilities are sufficiently high.

Types

A great variety of informal fallacies have been discussed in academic literature. There is controversy both concerning whether a given argument really constitutes a fallacy in all of its instances and concerning how the different fallacies should be grouped together into categories. The categorization here follows proposals commonly found in the academic literature in these or similar terms. It distinguishes between fallacies of ambiguity, which have their root in ambiguous or vague language, fallacies of presumption, which involve false or unjustified premises, and fallacies of relevance, in which the premises are not relevant to the conclusion despite appearances otherwise. Other categorizations have been proposed and some fallacies within this categorization could also be grouped in another category.

Fallacies of ambiguity

The source of the error for fallacies of ambiguity lies in the usage of language. This is due to the fact that many terms in natural language have ambiguous or vague meanings. Ambiguous terms have several meanings while vague terms have an unclear meaning. Fallacies of ambiguity often result in merely verbal disputes: the arguing parties have different topics in mind and thereby talk past each other without being aware of this. One way to avoid or solve these fallacies is to clarify language, e.g. by committing to definitions and by introducing new distinctions. Such reformulations may include a condensation of the original argument in order to make it easier to spot the erroneous step.

Fallacies of ambiguity are perhaps best exemplified by the fallacy of equivocation, in which the same term appears with two different meanings in the premises, for example:

Feathers are light.

What is light cannot be dark.

Therefore, feathers cannot be dark.

The source of this fallacy is due to the ambiguity in the term "light", which is used first in the sense "not heavy" and later in the sense "bright". Equivocations are especially difficult to detect in cases where the two meanings are very closely related to each other.

The fallacy of amphiboly also involves ambiguity in meaning, but this ambiguity arises not on the level of individual terms but on the level of the sentence as a whole due to syntactic ambiguity, for example:

"The police were told to stop drinking on campus after midnight.

So, now they are able to respond to emergencies much better than before"

On one interpretation, the police are not allowed to drink alcohol. On another, it is now the job of the police to stop other people from drinking. The argument seems plausible on the former reading but fallacious on the latter reading.

The fallacies of division and composition are due to ambiguity of the term "all" and similar expressions. This term has both a collective and a distributive meaning. For example, the sentence "all the citizens are strong enough to resist a tyrant" may mean either that all together are strong enough (collective) or that each one individually is strong enough (distributive). The fallacy of division is committed if one infers from the sentence in the collective sense that one specific individual is strong enough. The fallacy of composition is committed if one infers from the fact that each member of a group has a property that the group as a whole has this property. For example, "[e]very member of the investigative team was an excellent researcher", therefore "[i]t was an excellent investigative team". Any form of fallaciously transferring a property from the whole to its parts or the other way round belongs to the category of fallacies of division and composition, even when linguistic ambiguity is not the cause.

Fallacies of presumption

Fallacies of presumption involve a false or unjustified premise but are often valid otherwise. This problematic premise can take different forms and the belief in it can be caused in different ways, corresponding to the various sub-categories in this field. Many well-known (alleged) fallacies in the field of philosophy fall into this category, for example, the naturalistic fallacy, the moralistic fallacy or the intentional fallacy.

A false dilemma is a fallacy of presumption based on a false disjunctive claim that oversimplifies reality by excluding viable alternatives. For example, a false dilemma is committed when it is claimed that "Stacey spoke out against capitalism, therefore she must be a communist". One of the options excluded is that Stacey may be neither communist nor capitalist. Our liability to commit false dilemmas may be due to the tendency to simplify reality by ordering it through either-or-statements.

For fallacies of generalization, the false premise is due to an erroneous generalization. In the case of the fallacy of sweeping generalization, a general rule is applied incorrectly to an exceptional case. For example, "[e]veryone has a right to his or her property. Therefore, even though Jones had been declared insane, you had no right to take his weapon away." The generalization, in this case, ignores that insanity is an exceptional case to which the general rights of property do not unrestrictedly apply. Hasty generalization, on the other hand, involves the converse mistake of drawing a universal conclusion based on a small number of instances. For example, "I’ve met two people in Nicaragua so far, and they were both nice to me. So, all people I will meet in Nicaragua will be nice to me".

Begging the question is a form of circular reasoning in which the conclusion is already assumed in the premises. Because of this, the premises are unable to provide independent support for the conclusion. For example, the statement "Green is the best color because it is the greenest of all colors", offers no independent reason besides the initial assumption for its conclusion. Detecting this fallacy can be difficult when a complex argument with many sub-arguments is involved, resulting in a large circle.

Fallacies of relevance

Fallacies of relevance involve premises that are not relevant to the conclusion despite appearances otherwise. They may succeed in persuading the audience nonetheless due to being emotionally loaded, for example, by playing on prejudice, pity or fear.

Ad hominem arguments constitute an important class among the fallacies of relevance. In them, the arguer tries to attack a thesis by attacking the person pronouncing this thesis instead of attacking the thesis itself. Rejecting a theory in physics because its author is Jewish, which was common in the German physics community in the early 1930s, is an example of the ad hominem fallacy. But not all ad hominem arguments constitute fallacies. It is a common and reasonable practice in court, for example, to defend oneself against an accusation by casting doubt on the reliability of the witnesses. The difference between fallacious and justified ad hominem arguments depends on the relevancy of the character of the attacked person to the thesis in question. The author's cultural heritage seems to have very little relevance in most cases for theories in physics but the reliability of a witness in court is highly relevant for whether one is justified in believing their testimony. Whataboutism is a special form of the ad hominem fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. It is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.

Appeal to ignorance is another fallacy due to irrelevance. It is based on the premise that there is no proof for a certain claim. From this premise, the conclusion is drawn that this claim must therefore be false. For example, "Nobody has ever proved to me there’s a God, so I know there is no God". Another version of the appeal to ignorance concludes from the absence of proof against a claim that this claim must be true.

Arguments from analogy are also susceptible to fallacies of relevance. An analogy is a comparison between two objects based on similarity. Arguments from analogy involve inferences from information about a known object (the source) to the features of an unknown object (the target) based on the similarity between the two objects. Arguments from analogy have the following form: a is similar to b and a has feature F, therefore b probably also has feature F. The soundness of such arguments depends on the relevance of this similarity to the inferred feature. Without this relevance, the argument constitutes a faulty or false analogy, for example: "If a child gets a new toy he or she will want to play with it; So, if a nation gets new weapons, it will want to use them".