The Concept of Fallacy is Empty A Resource-Bound Approach to Error

In recent years model-based reasoning has achieved a certain prominence among logicians and cognitive scientists. Its repute is deserved, notwithstanding that it has some vigorous rivals. Although both model-based and non-model-based systems aim at elucidations of good reasoning, there are certain issues that challenge them equally across the lines of their respective theoretical and methodological differences. One of these challenges is as old as the history of systematic logic itself. It is the challenge to identify, analyze and set conditions for the avoidance of fallacious reasoning. Aristotle defined a fallacy as an argument that appears to be a syllogism but is not a syllogism in fact. A syllogism is a (classically) valid argument, none of whose premisses is redundant and whose conclusion is neither identical to nor immediately inferrable from any single premiss, hence is derived without circularity. Aristotle further provides that syllogisms not have multiple conclusions; and it follows from the non-circularity requirement that syllogisms not have inconsistent premisses. It is widely assumed by logicians of the present-day that syllogisms are of little relevance to the concerns of contemporary logic. This is a mistake. Aristotle’s syllogistic is the first ever relevant, paraconsistent, intuitionist, nonmonotonic logic.