The Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies
At work, I am frequently in a position where business or program area people are communicating requirements for a system they need to get their work done. Often these discussions involve other technical people, and invariably misunderstandings arise over the use of specific terms. So this page that catalogs and discusses logical fallacies interests me. I never realized that there is a distinction between ambiguity and vagueness!
The Taxonomy categorizes all of the fallacies in these files by fallacy and subfallacy. For example, instead of grouping together “fallacies of relevance”, there is one most general such fallacy—namely, Red Herring—and all fallacies of relevance are subfallacies of it. Red Herring is itself a subfallacy of Informal Fallacy, which is a subfallacy of the most general logical fallacy of all: Logical Fallacy. Logical Fallacy is not shown in the Taxonomy, though it has an entry in the files, but every fallacy in the Taxonomy is a subfallacy of it. Thus, the subfallacy relationship is like a tree with a trunk―Logical Fallacy―which branches until it reaches leaves, that is, fallacies which have no subfallacies―for example, Appeal to Celebrity.
