Illicit Negative Fallacy

A fallacy related to the False Dilemma and the Half Truth but not really the same as either, the illicit negative is everywhere.

Take for example the statement “I believe God exists”. We often implicitly or explicitly assume it has only one possible negative, “I don’t believe God exists”.

There are, in fact, three alternative statements:

• I have no belief that God exists (weak atheism, or, sometimes, agnosticism, especially in the UK)
• I believe that God does not exist (strong atheism)
• I have no belief that God does not exist (An even weaker form of agnosticism form of agnosticism but as rational a statement as any other)

We can look at which of these statements are mutually exclusive (hint: the affirmative ones) but in any case, in many arguments about God (for example on Twitter or Quora) these distinctions will likely be forgotten. The reactions to David Mitchell’s explanation of his agnosticism are a good example of this happening.

These failures of logic, called logical fallacies, are everywhere from politics to family arguments. Take this famous exchange between Will Self and Mark Francois:

Will: your problem, Mark, is not that you have be a racist or an anti-semite to vote for Brexit, it’s just that every racist and anti-semite in the country did.

Mark: I think that’s a slur of 17.4 million people [who voted Brexit].

We have a politician provoked into mixing up the negative forms of a statement to reach a non sequitur that makes the conversation valueless to the point of being funny.

Once you start thinking about it, confusion of the inverse is everywhere.