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Fallacies

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Date Read: August 2024
How Strongly I Recommend It: 8/10
This is a good, short read on basic fallacies frequently made in theological and exegetical studies. I’ve fallen into some of these before and it’s good to remind myself of these often. A mentor of mine re-reads the book about every year. By design it’s primarily negative, focusing on what not to do.

My Notes

Beware of the root fallacy. Don’t assume a word has meaning based on its composite linguistics. A pineapple is not a special apple that grows on pine trees.

A root does not always project this meaning onto words that implement the root.

Meaning “is a set of relations for which a verbal symbol is a sign.”

Etymology does play a more importat role in Hebrew wehre many words occur only once.

Discover and test the meaning of a word inductively.

Beware of the reverse root fallacy: reading later meanings of a word back into a word.

Beware of appealing to obsolete classical Greek in determining the meaning of a Biblical Greek word.

Beware of eappealing to unknown or unlikely meanings. Kephale does not mean “source” in any kind of clear, indisputable way, so it should not form the basis of exegesis on “headship” concversation.

Beware of novel interpretations of a text—the only time the are acceptable is when existing interpretations are so unlikely that a new explanation is warranted.

Beware of interpreting a word in a unique way inconsistently with how the same author uses the word everywhere else in his writings.

Beware of assuming a specific technical meaning that may not be present or accurate.

Beware of restricting the semantic meaning of a word or of expanding it beyond warrant in a given context.

Beware of directly importing a Hebrew word’s meaning into that of its approximate Greek counterpart, skipping over semantic ranges and difficulties.

Beware of diminishing the peculiarities of a given body of work; a writer may use a word very intentionally in his writings in a way others may not.

Beware of word studies. They are often divorced from context, language, and other elements of language. Word studies do not have to be problematic but very much lend themselves to it if not careful.

“…there is no one-to-one connection between the Greek tense-form and the time of the action, or between the Greek tense-form and the kind of action (as if a certain kind of action absolutely demands a specific tense), but between the Greek tense-form and the author’s choice of how the action will be conceived.” (73)

Beware of explicitly or implicitely setting forth a false disjunction (false dichotomy).

Beware of collapsing distinctions between to items said to be alike at certain points.

Beware of appealing to selective evidence. A charged, complex, or emotional topic is more likely to be argued from a selective/incomplete set of evidence to support an a priori conclusion.

Beware of improperly handling syllogisms or making negative inference. Pay attention to both the truth and validity of the premises.

Beware of invalidly reframing the Scriptures to reflect our own personal experience. “Taking up our cross” does not refer to our own personal struggles of rheumatism, etc. We shouldn’t read our own mental baggage into the text. Recognize the distance we are from it.

Beware of purely emotive appeals without basis in sound argumentation.

Beware of reading a text in far more specificity than it actually says, or of taking a text and overgeneralizing with it. Keep things contextual!

Beware of jumping sideway from a text to another thought, quite possibly a biblical though, but one that has no connection to the actual context/content of the verse.

Beware of conclusions that do not follow.

Beware of arguing ambiguously so as to (falsely) secure some semblance of wider agreement than there really is.

Beware of using inadequate analogies to explain something.

Beware of simplistic appeals to authority.

Beware of uncontrolled attempts at historical reconstruction, in the process of forming historical context for reading the New Testament.

Beware of fallacies of causation:

• post hoc, propter hoc = “if event B happened after event A, it happened because of event A”
• cum hoc, propter hoc = “mistakes correlation for cause”
• pro hoc, propter hoc = “putting the effect before the cause”
• the reductive fallacy = “reduces complexity to simplicity, or diversity to uniformity, in causal explanations”
• the fallacy of reason as cause = “mistakes a causal for a logical order, or vice versa”
• the fallacy of reponsibility as cause = “confuses a problem of ethics with a problem of agency in a way which falsifies both”

Beware of psychoanalyzing motivations to understand cause and effect.

Beware of problems related to the literary genre of the passage. Not everything should be considered the same way.

Beware of problems related to arguments from silence.

Beware of problems related to juxtaposing or connecting texts.

Beware of problems related to distinguishing between the figurative and literal.

Build up my skills of exegesis by evenhanded study and a prayerful, reverent determination to be like the workman who rightly handles the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15). Have a humble mind and resolve to focus on central truths.