Talk:Argumentum ad dictionarium

Move to mainspace
This is a good piece and I don't see why it's not in mainspace, which doesn't have an article. Sophie Wilder  22:02, 18 January 2014 (UTC)
 * it's awful and has to be taken down completely. --Aniro (talk) 16:09, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Dear Queex
Why did you revert my edit for no apparent reason whatsoever?

The silly argument against
{This English word) means something quite different ('faux amis')/something rude in (another language). Anna Livia (talk) 11:47, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

Fallacy ad fallacium?
This is a good article in many ways but capable of being misunderstood or misused. Sometimes people imagine and impute a fallacy where there is none. I suspect that this will be the case more often than not for argumentarum ad dictionarum.

Often the common meaning of a word or phrase is unhelpful, vague, distorted by ideological prejudices or is a "package deal" of disparate elements. In that case it may make sense to chuck out the common meaning and repair to a dictionary. Sometimes even a dictionary won't untangle the knot. A lot of political controversies involve such words: liberal, conservative, progressive, patriotism, treason, etc.

In fact sometimes the lack of resorting to a dictionary (or other authoritative source) can contribute to an equivocation fallacy. Example:

Jane Fonda (or some Donald Trump fans) were traitors (colloquial use). Treason is a capital crime (technical use). Therefore Jane Fonda (or some Donald Trump fans) should be executed.

"Package deal" colloquial use of words like "pedophile" also does a lot of damage by conflating some very heinous actions with some very trivial ones. Some of the 'asshattery' we saw this week in the U.S. Senate in the Jackson confirmation hearings is the result of decades of such unchallenged confusion.

This article is useless and misleading and has to be removed
"it can refer to any argument about definitions, semantics, or what label to apply to a person or idea" - the mere fact that someone discussed definitions and did it in a wrong way doesn't mean that any discussion of definitions is a fallacy. This article is useless, because there are other articles that discuss specific fallacies that can arise when discussing definitions - i.e. equivocation, mistaking the map for the territory, etc. And it's misleading, because it implies that any discussion of definitions is bad per se. --Aniro (talk) 16:17, 28 October 2022 (UTC)