CORCORAN ON FALLACIES

This unpublished 1994 work is a useful and important appendix to my 1989 signature essay “Argumentations and logic”. The fallacies discussed in the 1989 work are brought together, interrelated, and classified. It was originally written for the students in my 1994 course at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Although the English original has never been published, a Spanish translation appeared 1994 with “Argumentaciones y lógica”, Agora 13/1, 27–55: translation by R. Fernandez and J. Sagüillo of revised and expanded version of the 1989 work. In the strict sense used here, a fallacy is a mistaken belief or a mistaken process of arriving at a belief. A belief mistakenly arrived at is not necessarily a mistaken belief and, by the same token, a correct belief is not necessarily a belief arrived at correctly. This brings us to the process/product fallacies: one process/product fallacy is thinking that every product of a flawed process is flawed; another process/product fallacy is thinking that every correct product resulted from a correct process. In keeping with the process/product terminology, a fallacy may be classified as a product fallacy or as a process fallacy according as whether it is a mistaken belief or a mistaken process of arriving at a belief. In the ideal case a fallacy comes into existence when a particular person arrives at a particular belief; when the belief is mistaken there is a product fallacy; when the process is mistaken there is a process fallacy. The two fallacies (or more precisely, fallacy-types) mentioned above as process/product fallacies are types of product fallacies since each fallacy of either type is a mistaken belief rather than a mistaken process.