536 



FALLACIES. 



without any breach of duty on your 

 part ; that other persons not only 

 ought not to hinder you, but have no 

 cause to think worse of you for doing 

 it. This is a perfectly distinct pro- 

 position from the preceding. The 

 right which you have by virtue of a 

 duty incumbent upon other persons is 

 obviously quite a different thing from 

 a right consisting in the absence of 

 any duty incumbent upon yourself. 

 Yet the two things are perpetually 

 confounded. Thus a man will say he 

 has a right to publish his opinions, 

 which may be true in this sense, that 

 it would be a breach of duty in any 

 other person to interfere and prevent 

 the publication ; but he assumes there- 

 upon that in publishing his opinions 

 he himself violates no duty, which 

 may either be true or false, depending 

 as it does on his having taken due 

 pains to satisfy himself, first, that the 

 opinions are true, and, next, that their 

 publication in this manner, and at 

 this particular juncture, will probably 

 be beneficial to the interests of truth 

 on the whole. 



" The second ambiguity is that of 

 confounding a right of any kind with 

 a right to enforce that right by re- 

 sisting or punishing a violation of it. 

 People will say, for example, that they 

 have a right to good government, 

 which is undeniably true, it being the 

 moral duty of their governors to govern 

 them well. But in granting this you 

 are supposed to have admitted their 

 right or liberty to turn out their gov- 

 ernors, and perhaps to punish them, 

 for having failed in the performance 

 of this duty ; which, far from being 

 the same thing, is by no means uni- 

 versally true, but depends on an im- 

 mense number of varying circum- 

 stances," requiring to be conscien- 

 tiously weighed before adopting or 

 acting on such a resolution. This 

 last example is (like others which have 

 been cited) a case of fallacy within 

 fallacy ; it involves not only the second 

 of the two ambiguities pointed out, 

 but the first likewise. 



One not unusual form of the Fal- 



lacy of Ambiguous Terms is known 

 technically as the Fallacy of Compo- 

 sition and Division : when the same 

 term is collective in the premises, 

 distributive in the conclusion, or vice 

 versa; or when the middle term is 

 collective in one premise, distributive 

 in the other. As if one were to say, 

 (I quote from Archbishop Whately,) 

 " All the angles of a triangle are 

 equal to two right angles : ABC is an 

 angle of a triangle ; therefore ABC 

 is equal to two right angles. . . . 

 There is no fallacy more common, or 

 more likely to deceive, than the one 

 now before us. The form in which it 

 is most usually employed is to estab- 

 lish some truth separately concern- 

 ing each single member of a certain 

 class, and thence to infer the same of 

 the whole collect, vely. " As in the argu- 

 ment one sometimes hears to prove 

 that the world could do without great 

 men. If Columbus (it is said) had 

 never lived, America would still have 

 been discovered, at most only a few 

 years later ; if Newton had never 

 lived, some other person would have 

 discovered the law of gravitation ; 

 and so forth. Most tnae ; these 

 things would have been done, but in 

 all probability not till some one had 

 again been found with the qualities 

 of Columbus or Newton. Because 

 any one great man might have had 

 his place .supplied by other great men, 

 the argument concludes that all great 

 men could have been dispensed with. 

 The term *' great men" is distributive 

 in the premises and collective in the 

 conclusion. 



"Such also is the fallacy which 

 proi)ably operates on movst adven- 

 turers in lotteries : e.g. ' the gaining 

 of a high prize is no uncommon oc- 

 currence ; and what is no uncommon 

 occurrence may reasonably be ex- 

 ])ected ; therefore the gaining of a 

 high prize may reasonably be ex- 

 pected : ' the ctmdusiou when applied 

 to the individual (as in practice it is) 

 must be understood in the sense of 

 ' reasonably expected by a certain in- 

 dividual ; ' therefore for the major 



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