The Fallacy Catalogue
Every fallacy names the condition it breaks. Below is a starter set of eight, each tagged with the structural violation it commits and the AOML notation that records it. The full Universal Fallacy Map holds 101, sorted the same way.
New to the five? Start with the plain-language guide.
Descriptions and structural readings are drawn from the Universal Fallacy Map (Second Edition); the short treatments and illustrative examples are editorial.
Attacking the person instead of the argument.
A category swap. Evidence about a speaker's sincerity is offered where the claim's own axis calls for veridical support — is it so in the world? Whether the speaker is honest and whether the claim is true are different kinds of question, settled by different methods; the move trades one for the other.
Example“You can't trust his budget figures — he lied about a fishing trip.”
Because B followed A, concluding A caused B.
An operator applied past its license. The CAUSE relation needs more than sequence to compose legitimately; here bare temporal precedence is read as causation. The form looks like a causal claim, but nothing licenses it to be one.
Example“I wore the red socks and we won — the socks did it.”
Assuming the conclusion among the premises.
The RESULT of an inference is smuggled in as one of its inputs. The composition has the shape of a derivation but licenses nothing — the conclusion was already granted before the argument ran.
Example“It's reliable because it says so, and it wouldn't say so if it weren't reliable.”
Judging from the winners while the losers are invisible.
The right question, the wrong habitat. Sampling is a legitimate validation method — but only over a frame that includes the failures. When the frame quietly excludes them, the method no longer warrants the conclusion drawn from it.
Example“Every founder I admire dropped out, so dropping out works.”
A broad rule drawn from too few cases.
A compound, and the one that explains why pure Stratification hosts no everyday fallacy. The inference crosses a level — instance up to category (Type 4 is the locus) — but what makes it illicit is the failed operator license: the abstraction lacks an adequate sampling warrant (Type 2 is the root). Supply the warrant and the level-crossing is legitimate; delete the crossing and there is nothing left to evaluate.
Example“Two of them showed up late, so the whole team is unreliable.”
Two options presented as if they were all of them.
A precondition failure. Before any distinction can be judged, the space of alternatives has to be correctly configured. Forcing a multidimensional field into a binary corrupts that space itself — the argument isn't wrong inside the frame; the frame is wrong.
Example“You're either with us or against us.”
A term quietly changes meaning mid-argument.
A frame failure over time. The opposition a word draws must hold steady across its uses; when the distinction drifts between occurrences, the terms no longer name the same contrast they started with — an identity-persistence failure (Paper III §6).
Example“Nothing is better than happiness; a ham sandwich is better than nothing; therefore…”
Invoking an authority to settle the claim — filed under two readings, by what does the illicit work.
Expert testimony used outside the expert's axis of competence. Testimony is a real validation method — it just doesn't warrant claims off its domain.
The mere fact that a claim is authoritatively asserted treated as establishing it — the M[A] ↛ A schema in the flesh: a source-marking modulation collapsed into the claim it modulates.
Example“A Nobel physicist endorses this diet, so it works.” — competence off-axis, and assertion mistaken for proof.
Adapted from The Universal Fallacy Map, Second Edition — 10.5281/zenodo.21880635. Part of the WellFlow Labs series, Foundations of the Convergent Semantic Architecture. · Back to home