In this paper, an analysis is given of the straw man fallacy as a misrepresentation of someone's commitments in order to refute that person's argument. With this analysis a distinction can be made between straw man and other closely related fallacies such as ad hominem, secundum quid and ad verecundiam. When alleged cases of the straw man fallacy are evaluated, the speaker's commitment should b...

Whitman argues that group selection is consistent with methodological individualism. He begins by defining a weak form of methodological individualism in which agents are not necessarily self-interested or rational and shows that this form of is consistent with Sober and Wilson’s model of group selection. However, Sober and Wilson’s group selection is also consistent with a methodological indiv...

Attributing higher “probability” to a sentence of form p-and-q compared to p is a reasoning fallacy only if (a) the word “probability” carries its modern, technical meaning, and (b) the sentence p is interpreted as a conjunct of the conjunction p-and-q. Legitimate doubts arise about both conditions in classic demonstrations of the conjunction fallacy. We use betting paradigms to reduce these so...

With their 2007 classification - shift work involving "circadian disruption" is probably carcinogenic to humans (Group 2A) - the International Agency for Research on Cancer [IARC] provided a riddle for scientists and the public alike. Thereafter, eighteen epidemiological investigations into shift work and a host of malignant endpoints (including cancers of the breast, prostate, lung, colon, rec...

The authors identify and offer an analysis of a new form of the Straw Man fallacy, and then explore the implications of the prevalence of this fallacy for contemporary political discourse.

Information generally comes from less than fully reliable sources. Rationality, it seems, requires that one take source reliability into account when reasoning on the basis of such information. Recently, Bovens and Hartmann (2003) proposed an account of the conjunction fallacy based on this idea. They show that, when statements in conjunction fallacy scenarios are perceived as coming from such ...

Abstract Given the diverse, interdisciplinary, and multilevel nature of international business (IB) research, it is critical to address methodological challenges prior data collection. Thus, we suggest that an ounce prevention worth a pound cure . We describe following challenges: (1) researching important relevant issue; (2) making meaningful theoretical progress; (3) recognizing, anticipating...