BY DAVID KYLE JOHNSON
LISTS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF LOGICAL FALLACIES, which exist both on and offline, are numerous. They are in logic textbooks, on Wikipedia, have dedicated websites (like yourlogicalfallacyis.com and logicallyfallacious.com), and even dedicated books—like Bad Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Fallacies in Western Philosophy (edited by Robert Arp, Steven Barbone, and Michael Bruce [Hoboken, NY: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018]). Our collective list of logical fallacies is the end result of the efforts of numerous philosophers, all carefully thinking about the many ways that reasoning can go wrong. Consequently, it’s difficult to discover a genuinely new fallacy—to identify a common mistake in reasoning that no one has officially identified and named. I would like to humbly argue, however, that I may have recently done just that.