Fallacy Research Articles

Learning about informal fallacies and the detection of fake news: An experimental intervention.

The philosophical concept of informal fallacies-arguments that fail to provide sufficient support for a claim-is introduced and connected to the topic of fake news detection. We assumed that the ability to identify informal fallacies can be trained and that this ability enables individuals to better distinguish between fake news and real news. We tested these assumptions in a two-group between-participants experiment (N = 116). The two groups participated in a 30-minute-long text-based learning intervention: either about informal fallacies or about fake news. Learning about informal fallacies enhanced participants' ability to identify fallacious arguments one week later. Furthermore, the ability to identify fallacious arguments was associated with a better discernment between real news and fake news. Participants in the informal fallacy intervention group and the fake news intervention group performed equally well on the news discernment task. The contribution of (identifying) informal fallacies for research and practice is discussed.

A logical error in Gassmann poroelasticity

AbstractThe well‐known ‘Biot–Gassmann’ formula for the undrained compressibility of porous rock is in error. The error was introduced by Gassmann (implicitly revising earlier work by Biot) and results in an expression which is simpler than Biot's corresponding expression, containing only one material parameter (KS) in place of Biot's two (H and R). The error occurred when Gassmann applied a hydraulically open theorem to a hydraulically closed system, thus violating the assumptions of the undrained compressibility. Similar errors have marred the many subsequent derivations of Gassmann's result. Biot's (prior) correct formulation was subsequently rederived exactly (in different notation) by Brown and Korringa, and separately by Rice and Cleary. The inconsistency between Gassmann and these three analyses is caused by Gassmann's logical error, rather than by the issue of solid micro‐homogeneity. The additional parameter may be experimentally determined via the ‘Skempton B‐coefficient’ (the ratio of fluid pressure to external pressure in an undrained quasi‐static compression test). This correction resolves a long‐established inconsistency between Gassmann's result and effective‐medium theory. A new generation of experimentation is required to determine the systematics of the magnitude of the correction to the Gassmann result.

Quantum Volume for Photonic Quantum Processors.

Defining metrics for near-term quantum computing processors has been an integral part of the quantum hardware research and development efforts. Such quantitative characteristics are not only useful for reporting the progress and comparing different quantum platforms but also essential for identifying the bottlenecks and designing a technology road map. Most metrics such as randomized benchmarking and quantum volume were originally introduced for circuit-based quantum computers and were not immediately applicable to measurement-based quantum computing (MBQC) processors such as in photonic devices. In this Letter, we close this long-standing gap by presenting a framework to map physical noises and imperfections in MBQC processes to logical errors in equivalent quantum circuits, whereby enabling the well-known metrics to characterize MBQC. To showcase our framework, we study a continuous-variable cluster state based on the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) encoding as a near-term candidate for photonic quantum computing, and derive the effective logical gate error channels and calculate the quantum volume in terms of the GKP squeezing and photon transmission rate.

Descriptive Presentation: Invoking Identity as a Claim for Descriptive Representation

Descriptive representation is commonly understood as the proportion of women or racial minorities in an institution. While useful, this approach is limited in its ability to capture intersectional identities, less visible characteristics, and the extent to which particular characteristics are more or less central to one’s identity. Traditional approaches have raised concerns about essentialism—“the assumption that members of certain groups have an essential identity that all members of that group share” (Mansbridge 1999, 637). This assumption can lead to faulty logic—for example, that any woman can represent all women. Traditional approaches have also focused on visible characteristics, rather than shared experiences. These limitations affect not only who counts as a descriptive representative, but also our ability to assess which descriptive representatives will be most likely to contribute to substantive and symbolic representation.

Critical thinking in musicians' health education. Findings from four workshops with experts (Part I).

Health education encompasses building health knowledge, but also training skills such as critical thinking, that guide individuals' ability to access, understand and use health information to take care of their own health (WHO, 1998). This study aimed to document expert discussions on the content of an ideal health education curriculum for higher music education (HME) students in the UK, integrating critical thinking. Four interdisciplinary workshops were conducted, where 67 experts in relevant fields discussed the content of four lists created based on literature reviews (cognitive biases, logical fallacies, critical appraisal tools and health topics). Notes taken during the discussions were thematically analysed. Most of the participants thought that the topics and tools were relevant. Two of four identified themes are reported in this paper, which represents the first of a two-part series: (1) critical thinking applied to health; and (2) misconceptions. This is the first attempt to document conversations aimed at using the applied knowledge of key stakeholders to discuss the content of an ideal health education curriculum integrating critical thinking, for conservatoire students.

Utilizing programming traces to explore and model the dimensions of novices' code‐writing skill

AbstractStudies have found that most novice programmers have low proficiency in writing code. However, it is unclear what subskills compose code writing and which subskills novice programmers struggle with. This study utilizes programming traces to identify latent subskills that constitute code writing so that teachers can offer specific instruction on the weak subskills. Data were collected from an undergraduate course teaching introductory computer science in Java. Six hundred and fourteen students made submissions to homework programming questions in a web‐based learning system. Based on the submission traces, we computed 11 features related to correctness and time students spent on their submissions. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis on two‐thirds of students selected randomly and identified four factors. The first factor, code style proficiency, was mainly related to code style errors. The second, syntactic proficiency, concerned compiler errors. The third is semantic proficiency, which concerns runtime and logic errors. The fourth, syntactic debugging proficiency, concerned the success rate and time required for fixing compiler and code style errors. A confirmatory factor analysis conducted on the remaining one‐third of the data supported the four‐factor structure. The factor model showed measurement invariance between the data set where the model was developed and two new datasets, one from the same sample but collected at a different time point and another from a different sample and context (onsite course vs. online course). The factors were related to prior programming abilities, programming language familiarity, and future exam performance. These associations provided validity evidence for the factor model.

Critical ordinary language philosophy: A new project in experimental philosophy

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems.

COVID-19 in Humor: Verbal Humor Construction in Indonesian Stand-Up Comedian Performances

This current study explains how verbal humor is constructed in stand-up comedian's discourse on COVID-19 pandemic issue in Indonesia. This research employed a qualitative approach by applying the content analysis method. The transcription of five stand-up comedy audio-video clips concerning COVID-19 in Indonesia that were taken from www.youtube.com provided the primary data in the form of spoken words. Videos were selected based on keywords submitted by comedians. The findings show that verbal humor in stand-up comedian discourse has variations in knowledge resources (KRs). Topics presented by comedians related to the COVID-19 pandemic are realized in various logical mechanisms (LM) such as fallacious reasoning, word repetition, insult humor, and false analogy. Another variation found is the variation in the narrative strategy, target, and situation constructed by the comedian.

A flexible communication stack design for improved software development on industrial testbeds and simulators

In order to facilitate deterministic behavior; industrial real-time communication stacks need another design than non-real-time communication stacks typically found in e.g., Internet of Things and Cloud solutions. We propose a flexible stack design that enable code reuse between testbeds and simulators, as well as how stack layers are driven and prioritized. The design can be generalized and used for non-real-time bare-metal solutions like battery powered Internet of Things. Our approach aims at extending the use of simulation during development of industrial systems in order to find logical errors and wrong assumptions earlier in the development. Conducted and evaluated experiments show that the proposed solutions are able to extend the use of simulation during development of real-time communication software. This is achieved by reusing the same code on an industrial testbed and in a discrete event simulator. In addition, the experiments show that the stack design is generalizable and enable reuse with other non-real-time embedded systems. The contribution consists of a set of building blocks for real-time systems that enable control over the system timing when executing on a simulation host while reusing the source code from an industrial testbed. Overall, this will improve the engineering situation, with respect to code reuse, flexibility and debugging.

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

Magic, metaphysics, and methods

Commentary: Droopy kidneys and floppy airways: Keeping taut standards with surgical innovation

In the early 1900s, patients with abdominal pain began to be diagnosed with a condition known as nephroptosis.1 Before long, nearly 170 operations had been devised to reposition and stabilize the “movable kidney.” However, within a span of about 30 years, surgical procedures to fix nephroptosis peaked and then disappeared. Surgical history is littered with such operations with plausible anatomic rationale but lack of efficacy because the purported causal mechanism suffered from various logical fallacies (Figure 1).

Editorial—The truth is out there: The psychology of conspiracy theories and how to counter them

Editorial—The truth is out there: The psychology of conspiracy theories and how to counter them

Dynamic Verification Framework of Approximate Computing Circuits using Quality-Aware Coverage-Based Grey-Box Fuzzing

Approximate computing (AC) has recently emerged as a promising approach to the energy-efficient design of digital systems. For realizing the practical AC design, we need to verify whether the designed circuit can operate correctly under various operating conditions. Namely, the verification needs to efficiently find fatal logic errors or timing errors that violate the constraint of computational quality. This work focuses on the verification where the computational results can be observed, the computational quality can be calculated from computational results, and the constraint of computational quality is given and defined as the constraint which is set to the computational quality of designed AC circuit with given workloads. Then, this paper proposes a novel dynamic verification framework of the AC circuit. The key idea of the proposed framework is to incorporate a quality assessment capability into the Coverage-based Grey-box Fuzzing (CGF). CGF is one of the most promising techniques in the research field of software security testing. By repeating (1) mutation of test patterns, (2) execution of the program under test (PUT), and (3) aggregation of coverage information and feedback to the next test pattern generation, CGF can explore the verification space quickly and automatically. On the other hand, CGF originally cannot consider the computational quality by itself. For overcoming this quality unawareness in CGF, the proposed framework additionally embeds the Design Under Verification (DUV) component into the calculation part of computational quality. Thanks to the DUV integration, the proposed framework realizes the quality-aware feedback loop in CGF and thus quickly enhances the verification coverage for test patterns that violate the quality constraint. In this work, we quantitatively compared the verification coverage of the approximate arithmetic circuits between the proposed framework and the random test. In a case study of an approximate multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit, we experimentally confirmed that the proposed framework achieved 3.85 to 10.36 times higher coverage than the random test.

A highly reliable and low-power cross-coupled 18T SRAM cell

Static random access memory (SRAM) is a critical cell of VLSI, which is sensitive to the charge generated by high-energy particles and susceptible to logical errors. In this paper, the cross-coupled 18T SRAM cell (CC18T) is proposed, which uses the NMOS stack structure to reduce average power consumption, and employs redundant transistors to build a feedback loop to improve reliability. The model simulation results show that CC18T can fully achieve single-node-upset recovery and partial double-node-upset recovery. Compared with RHMD10T, QUCCE10T, QUCCE12T, We-Quatro, S4P8N, S8P4N, DNUCTM, DNUSRM, SESRS and SEA14T, the average power consumption of CC18T is reduced by 30% on average, the read access time and write access time are also reduced by 9.27% and 10.35% on average.

Robust and explainable identification of logical fallacies in natural language arguments

The spread of misinformation, propaganda, and flawed argumentation has been amplified in the Internet era. Given the volume of data and the subtlety of identifying violations of argumentation norms, supporting information analytics tasks, like content moderation, with trustworthy methods that can identify logical fallacies is essential. In this paper, we formalize prior theoretical work on logical fallacies into a comprehensive three-stage evaluation framework of detection, coarse-grained, and fine-grained classification. We adapt existing evaluation datasets for each stage of the evaluation. We employ three families of robust and explainable methods based on prototype reasoning, instance-based reasoning, and knowledge injection. The methods combine language models with background knowledge and explainable mechanisms. Moreover, we address data sparsity with strategies for data augmentation and curriculum learning. Our three-stage framework natively consolidates prior datasets and methods from existing tasks, like propaganda detection, serving as an overarching evaluation testbed. We extensively evaluate these methods on our datasets, focusing on their robustness and explainability. Our results provide insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the methods on different components and fallacy classes, indicating that fallacy identification is a challenging task that may require specialized forms of reasoning to capture various classes. We share our open-source code and data on GitHub to support further work on logical fallacy identification.

Ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights: No Longer the Whimsical Desire of the West in the Cycles of Economic Meltdown

This work is a reexamination of the historic economic rights debate in light of two major changes in American public policy. The first change considers the effect of the debate by the passing of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The second policy change considers how the debate should include the effects of the economic bailout brought about by the TARP program. These changes are explained first, as government interventions made in response to widespread suffering and medical cost bankruptcies due to the United States’ healthcare system having no guaranteed right to healthcare. The second change focuses on the necessity of a national economic bailout conducted in response to a “Great Recession,” as an historic proof that government must intervene when severe economic downturns threaten to collapse the national economy. These interventions support the passage of economic rights and show how the opposition to the passage of economic rights have been based on faulty moral argumentation and reasoning. The essay concludes with a continued call for the passage of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

Logical Fallacies in V.S. Rai’s Poem 'Corona Says'

The poem “Corona Says” composed by a Nepali poet V.S. Rai criticizes the human actions that are assumed to have caused the recent pandemic of coronavirus. As the title suggests, coronavirus is the speaker in the poem, and it defends its presence against the human curse and tries to justify the affliction it has brought upon human beings through subtle arguments. This research paper analyses the truth of these arguments for their validity. For this purpose, various online articles written and published during the pandemic time were reviewed, and books on logical fallacies were also consulted. Close examination showed that the arguments of the corona are beset with logical fallacies which render these arguments invalid.

Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit

Practical quantum computing will require error rates well below those achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction1,2 offers a path to algorithmically relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many physical qubits, for which increasing the number of physical qubits enhances protection against physical errors. However, introducing more qubits also increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be sufficiently low for logical performance to improve with increasing code size. Here we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across several code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number. We find that our distance-5 surface code logical qubit modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average, in terms of both logical error probability over 25 cycles and logical error per cycle ((2.914 ± 0.016)% compared to (3.028 ± 0.023)%). To investigate damaging, low-probability error sources, we run a distance-25 repetition code and observe a 1.7 × 10−6 logical error per cycle floor set by a single high-energy event (1.6 × 10−7 excluding this event). We accurately model our experiment, extracting error budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems. These results mark an experimental demonstration in which quantum error correction begins to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to reaching the logical error rates required for computation.

Assessment of Situation Awareness Conflict Risk between Human and AI in Process System Operation

The conflict between human and artificial intelligence is a critical issue, which has recently been introduced in Process System Engineering, capturing the observation and action conflicts. Interpretation conflict is another source of potential conflict that can cause serious concern for process safety as it is often perceived as confusion, surprise, or a mistake. It is intangible and associated with situation awareness. However, interpretation conflict has not been studied with the required emphasis. The current work proposes a novel methodology to quantify interpretation conflict probability and risk. The methodology is demonstrated, tested, and validated on a two-phase separator. The results show that interpretation conflict is usually hidden, mixed, or covered by traditional faults, and noises in observation and interpretation, including sensor faults, logic errors, cyberattacks, human mistakes, and misunderstandings, may easily trigger interpretation conflict. The proposed methodology will serve as a mechanism to develop strategies to manage interpretation conflict.

Деконструкція міфу доктрини «русский мир» про православ’я як основу російської ідентичності

The article analyzes the basic ideology of the “Russian Peace” doctrine: the myth that “Orthodoxy is the basis of Russian identity.” The existence of this ideologeme in the informational and symbolic field of Ukraine and the whole world, its manipulation, and its inclusion in the current context of the Ukrainian cultural space lead to a distorted perception of relations between Russia and Ukraine, the existing war between them. The article attempts to reveal those distortions and semantic substitutions that are ontologically contained in many ideologemes of the “Russian world” and which can be analyzed as typical errors in the context of the argumentation theory. Such research aims to develop a conditional “dictionary” for the mythologist of the “Russian world,” which could be used during the conduct of a thorough information confrontation. The author chose the myth “Orthodoxy is the basis of Russian identity” as the basic ideologeme because most other ideologues are derived from this thesis with the help of skillful semantic manipulations. Secondly, this myth is interpreted and used by Russian ideologues in incredibly diverse ways and in various contexts. Based on the analysis of this myth, the author concludes that the ideology of the “Russian measure” by definition does not meet the criteria of clarity, clarity, and unequivocalness; the meanings of its key concepts are as variable as possible, depend on the context, are used interchangeably in general formulations where clarification of the non-standard use of the term is not foreseen; there is a change of identities, which makes it possible to manipulate historical facts and people’s memory. Russian ideologues constantly use such logical errors in their argumentative practices. In the process of revealing the illogicality and paradox of the mentioned myth, it turns out that the very essence of this mythologem significantly contributes to the unfolding of the crisis of Russian culture and politics, which is spoken about by the same ideologues who praise the messianic role of Russia.