Appeal to fiction

Cogito ergo sum Logic and rhetoric

Key articles

Logical fallacy Syllogism Argument

General logic

Necessary and sufficient conditions Uncertainty tactic Negative conclusion from affirmative premises Weasel word Causality Ad hoc

Bad logic

Presupposition Argumentum ad cellarium Slothful induction SeekFind Negative evidence Neyman's bias v - t - e

An appeal to fiction (also generalizing from fictional evidence) is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone makes claims about reality based on evidence drawn from works of fiction.

Explanation

Fiction is not reality — it is driven in large part by considerations of being interesting to the audience rather than reflecting reality with 100% accuracy. Furthermore, fiction shows systemic bias in its distortion of reality; common deviations for the audience's benefit are catalogued and studied as tropes. Using fiction to argue about reality can therefore systematically skew your beliefs and expectations.

Example

• This tactic was deployed by Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia when he justified the use of torture on terrorism suspects by citing the television show 24 as evidence, stating "Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so."
• Just about anything to do with 1984.
• Atheist professor dropping a piece of chalk and it not breaking, after telling God to have it land intact, or variants.
• In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, an Objectivist society (Galt’s Gulch) is depicted as creating a utopia. Needless to say, just because an economic system works in a fictional book does not prove that it would work in real life.
• In the 2007 film I Am Legend, based on the story by Richardson Matheson, an attempt to cure cancer backfires and causes people to mutate into ghoulish creatures. Anti-vaccination activists tried to cite the film to justify their wariness and skepticism about vaccinations, prompting the film’s screenwriter Akiva Goldsman to point out, “Oh. My. God. It’s a movie. I made it up. It’s. Not. Real.” (And what’s more, the film doesn’t even depict vaccines as the cause of the apocalypse but rather a genetically engineered measles virus.)

See also

• Things to keep in mind before starting a conspiracy, mostly informed by fictional examples

External links

• Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks, p. 9, Nick Bostrom
• The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence, on LessWrong

References

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