100 Logical Fallacies Every Educated Adult Should Know

No.	Item	Definition
1.	Ad hominem	Attacking the person instead of their argument.
2.	Anecdotal fallacy	Substituting personal stories for adequate evidence.
3.	Appeal to authority	Treating an authority’s opinion as sufficient proof.
4.	Appeal to emotion	Substituting emotional reactions for relevant reasons.
5.	Appeal to fear	Using frightening possibilities instead of supporting evidence.
6.	Appeal to ignorance	Claiming truth because nobody has disproved it.
7.	Appeal to nature	Treating naturalness as proof of goodness.
8.	Appeal to novelty	Claiming something is better merely because it’s new.
9.	Appeal to pity	Using sympathy to establish an unrelated conclusion.
10.	Appeal to ridicule	Mocking a claim instead of refuting it.
11.	Appeal to tradition	Claiming something is correct because it is longstanding.
12.	Balance fallacy	Giving unequal evidence equal weight for apparent fairness.
13.	Bandwagon fallacy	Treating popularity as proof of correctness.
14.	Base rate fallacy	Ignoring underlying prevalence when judging probability.
15.	Broken window fallacy	Counting destruction’s benefits while ignoring displaced opportunities.
16.	Bulverism	Explaining someone’s supposed error without establishing it.
17.	Cherry picking	Selecting supportive evidence while ignoring contrary evidence.
18.	Circular reasoning	Using the conclusion to support itself.
19.	Conjunction fallacy	Judging combined events likelier than one constituent event.
20.	Continuum fallacy	Denying distinctions because boundaries are imprecise.
21.	Cum hoc fallacy	Inferring causation merely because events occur together.
22.	Defense attorney’s fallacy	Using possible matches to dismiss evidence against defendants.
23.	Definist fallacy	Using a biased definition to settle disagreement.
24.	Denying a conjunct	Assuming one false component makes another true.
25.	Denying the antecedent	Rejecting a result because one condition is absent.
26.	Disjunction fallacy	Judging alternatives collectively less likely than one alone.
27.	Ecological fallacy	Inferring individual characteristics from group statistics.
28.	Equivocation	Switching a word’s meaning during an argument.
29.	Etymological fallacy	Treating historical word origins as present meanings.
30.	Exclusive premises	Drawing a syllogistic conclusion from two negative premises.
31.	Existential fallacy	Inferring existence from premises that establish none.
32.	Fallacy of accent	Misleading through emphasis that changes apparent meaning.
33.	Fallacy of composition	Attributing parts’ properties to the whole.
34.	Fallacy of division	Attributing the whole’s properties to its parts.
35.	Fallacy of four terms	Using four terms where syllogisms require three.
36.	False analogy	Drawing conclusions from a misleading comparison.
37.	False dilemma	Presenting limited options when others exist.
38.	False equivalence	Treating importantly different things as equivalent.
39.	Galileo gambit	Treating rejection as evidence of being right.
40.	Gambler’s fallacy	Expecting independent outcomes to compensate for previous results.
41.	Genetic fallacy	Judging a claim solely by its origin.
42.	Guilt by association	Discrediting someone through connections rather than relevant evidence.
43.	Hasty generalization	Drawing broad conclusions from insufficient evidence.
44.	Homunculus fallacy	Explaining a capacity by presupposing it inside.
45.	Hot-hand fallacy	Assuming recent successes guarantee better future odds.
46.	Hypothesis contrary to fact	Asserting unsupported certainty about what might have happened.
47.	Illicit contraposition	Contraposing a categorical statement that disallows it.
48.	Illicit conversion	Invalidly reversing a categorical statement’s subject and predicate.
49.	Illicit major	Overextending the conclusion’s predicate beyond its premise.
50.	Illicit minor	Overextending the conclusion’s subject beyond its premise.
51.	Inconsistent comparison	Comparing options using selectively different standards.
52.	Inverse gambler’s fallacy	Inferring many earlier trials from an unlikely outcome.
53.	Is–ought fallacy	Deriving moral requirements from purely factual premises.
54.	Kettle logic	Using mutually contradictory arguments to defend one claim.
55.	Loaded question	Asking a question containing an unjustified assumption.
56.	Ludic fallacy	Applying simplified game probabilities uncritically to real uncertainty.
57.	Lump of labor fallacy	Assuming the available amount of work is fixed.
58.	Masked man fallacy	Inferring different identities from differences in knowledge.
59.	McNamara fallacy	Dismissing what cannot be measured numerically.
60.	Middle ground fallacy	Assuming compromise between opposing claims establishes truth.
61.	Modal fallacy	Confusing necessity with what merely happens.
62.	Moralistic fallacy	Inferring reality from how things ought to be.
63.	Motte-and-bailey fallacy	Defending a controversial claim by substituting something weaker.
64.	Moving the goalposts	Changing evidential requirements after they are met.
65.	Multiple comparisons fallacy	Ignoring chance findings when testing many hypotheses.
66.	Naturalistic fallacy	Defining moral goodness through merely natural properties.
67.	Negative conclusion fallacy	Drawing a negative conclusion from affirmative premises.
68.	Nirvana fallacy	Rejecting realistic solutions against an unattainable ideal.
69.	No true Scotsman	Redefining a group to exclude inconvenient counterexamples.
70.	Noncentral fallacy	Applying category judgments to an unrepresentative member.
71.	Package-deal fallacy	Assuming grouped things must always occur together.
72.	Personal incredulity	Rejecting a claim because it seems incomprehensible.
73.	Poisoning the well	Preemptively discrediting someone to dismiss their forthcoming argument.
74.	Post hoc fallacy	Assuming an earlier event caused a later one.
75.	Proof by assertion	Presenting an unsupported assertion as established truth.
76.	Prosecutor’s fallacy	Confusing evidence’s rarity with probability of innocence.
77.	Psychologist’s fallacy	Projecting the observer’s perspective onto the person observed.
78.	Quantifier shift	Confusing individual existence with shared universal existence.
79.	Red herring	Introducing irrelevant information to distract from disagreement.
80.	Regression fallacy	Mistaking ordinary statistical reversion for causal effects.
81.	Reification fallacy	Treating an abstraction as a concrete entity.
82.	Relative privation	Dismissing problems because worse problems exist.
83.	Retrospective determinism	Assuming an outcome was inevitable because it happened.
84.	Reverse causation	Mistaking an effect for its cause.
85.	Shifting the burden of proof	Demanding opponents disprove an unsupported claim.
86.	Single cause fallacy	Attributing a complex outcome to just one cause.
87.	Slippery slope	Assuming one step inevitably triggers extreme consequences.
88.	Special pleading	Demanding unjustified exceptions for one’s own case.
89.	Straw man	Attacking a distorted version of someone’s argument.
90.	Sunk cost fallacy	Justifying further investment through unrecoverable past costs.
91.	Suppressed correlative	Redefining a distinction so one alternative becomes impossible.
92.	Survivorship fallacy	Drawing conclusions while overlooking cases that disappeared.
93.	Texas sharpshooter fallacy	Inventing a pattern after selectively examining results.
94.	Third-cause fallacy	Missing a common cause behind correlated events.
95.	Tu quoque	Rejecting criticism by pointing out the critic’s hypocrisy.
96.	Two wrongs make a right	Justifying wrongdoing by pointing to another wrong.
97.	Type–token fallacy	Confusing a category with an individual instance.
98.	Undistributed middle	Inferring connection merely from a shared classification.
99.	Use–mention fallacy	Confusing a word with what it names.
100.	Zero-sum fallacy	Assuming every gain requires an equivalent loss.