440 



CHAPTER VII. 

 FALLACIES OF CONFUSION. 



1. UNDER this fifth and last class we find it con- 

 venient to arrange all those fallacies, in which the 

 source of error is not so much a false estimate of the 

 probative force of known evidence, as an indistinct, 

 indefinite, and fluctuating conception of what the evi- 

 dence is. 



At the head of these stands that multitudinous 

 body of fallacious reasonings, in which the source of 

 error is the ambiguity of terms : when something which 

 is true if a word be used in a particular sense, is 

 reasoned upon as if it were true in another sense. In 

 such a case there is not a mal-estimation of evidence, 

 because there is not properly any evidence to the 

 point at all; there is evidence, but to a different 

 point, which, from a confused apprehension of the 

 meaning of the terms used, is supposed to be the 

 same. This error will naturally be oftener committed 

 in our ratiocinations than in our direct inductions, 

 because in the former we are deciphering our own or 

 other people's notes, while in the latter we have the 

 things themselves present, either to our senses or to 

 our memory. Except, indeed, when the induction is 

 not from individual cases to a generality, but from 

 generalities to a still higher generalization; in that 

 case the fallacy of ambiguity may affect the inductive 

 process as well as the ratiocinative. It occurs in 

 ratiocination in two ways: when the middle term is 

 ambiguous, or when one of the terms of the syllogism 



