Paul Rosenberg – Properly, what we’ll be covering today are fallacies of irrelevance. There are several types of these, with the genetic fallacy and ignoring refutation being the best known. Nonetheless, I tend to see them all as fallacies of elimination, and so I’ve given our coverage that name.

This fallacy, like more or less all of them, is very old. This one was first noted by Aristotle at 330 BC or so. In our time we see it mainly as political word tricks.

Let’s start with the genetic fallacy, which eliminates an idea based upon its origin, or at least its claimed origin. A common example would be something like this: Continue reading →