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SECTION III.: RELATION OF FALLACIES TO VULGAR ERRORS. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2 [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 2.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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SECTION III.

RELATION OF FALLACIES TO VULGAR ERRORS.

Errorvulgar error,* is an appellation given to an opinion which, being considered as false, is considered in itself only, and not with a view to any consequences, of any kind, of which it may be productive.

It is termed vulgar with reference to the persons by whom it is supposed to be entertained: and this either in respect of their multitude, simply, or in respect of the lowness of the station occupied by them, or the greater part of them, in the scale of respectability, in the scale of intelligence.

Fallacy is an appellation applied not exclusively to an opinion or to propositions enunciative of supposed opinions, but to discourse in any shape considered as having a tendency, with or without design, to cause any erroneous opinion to be embraced, or even, through the medium of erroneous opinion already entertained, to cause any pernicious course of action to be engaged or persevered in.

Thus, to believe that they who lived in early or old times were, because they lived in those times, wiser or better than those who live in later or modern times, is vulgar error: the employing that vulgar error in the endeavour to cause pernicious practices and institutions to be retained, is fallacy.

By those by whom the term fallacy has been employed—at any rate, by those by whom it was originally employed—deception has been considered not merely as a consequence more or less probable, but as a consequence the production of which was aimed at on the part at least of some of the utterers.

Ελεγχοι σοφιστων, arguments employed by the sophists, is the denomination by which Aristotle has designated his devices, thirteen in number, to which his commentators, such of them as write in Latin, give the name of fallaciæ (from fallere to deceive,) from which our English word fallacies.

That in the use of these instruments, such a thing as deception was the object of the set of men mentioned by Aristotle under the name of sophists, is altogether out of doubt. On every occasion on which they are mentioned by him, this intention of deceiving is either directly asserted or assumed.

[* ]Vulgar errors is a denomination which, from the work written on this subject by a physician of name in the seventeenth century, has obtained a certain degree of celebrity.

Not the moral (of which the political is a department,) but the physical, was the field of the errors which it was the object of Sir Thomas Browne to hunt out and bring to view: but of this restriction no intimation is given by the words of which the title of his work is composed.