On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 19:51 -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: > On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Daniel Phillips > <d.phillips@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On 07/20/2013 12:36 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote: > >> I think you need more than "hope" to change one of the fundamental > >> rules of LKML; be open and honest, even if that means expressing your > >> opinion in a way that others might consider offensive and colorful. > > > > Logical fallacy type: bifurcation. You can be open and honest without > > being offensive or abusive. > > You are mistaken, that is not what the false dichotomy fallacy means. > I'm not saying you have to be A (open and honest), or B (polite), and > that you can't be both, if that's what you arguing (which seems to be > the case), you are wrong, and to argue against that position would be > a straw man fallacy. > > Your mistaken fallacy seems to be that you think one can *always* be > both A (open and honest), and B (polite), I'm not sure if there's a > name for that fallacy, but you don't provide any evidence for that > claim. It's not actually one of the original logical fallacies, but it's called argument to moderation or false compromise: The fallacy is the assumption that the original statements represent extremal positions of a continuum so there must always be middle ground which represents the correct statement. To those accepting the fallacy making the middle ground statement by that fact alone demonstrates the invalidity of the previous proposition. I think it's not in the original fallacies because they come from Greek rhetoric and the Greeks believed dialectic: the taking opposite positions and arguing them thoroughly. It's only with the advent of Western European political systems that we're conditioned to seek compromise without rigorous examination. This actually makes argument to moderation one of the most effective rhetorical tools in use today for discrediting an opponent's argument without actually addressing it. James -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html