In the following tirade from the Dutch feminist author and politician Anja Meulenbelt a fallacious train of thought is exposed. In her reaction to comments from Hein Roethof, who was in the 1980 s a member of Dutch parliament for the PvdA (Dutch labor party) of the Lower House and – as spokesman for judicial matters – had branded the actions of the feminists against pornography as “self-appointed moral censorship,” Anja Meulenbelt accused him of committing the argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, without actually using this term in so many words:
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Notes
- 1.
In the 1930 s this verification criterion (in fact a criterion for the meaningfulness of statements) had been replaced by the logical empiricists with a somewhat weaker confirmation criterion i.e. the degree in which a theory can be confirmed by the observations made. In the eyes of Popper, this criterion also finds no mercy due to its inductivistic nature: A large number of observations could perhaps make a universal statement probable, but not logically enforceable.
- 2.
According to Popper, theories or hypotheses derived from them are not tested and/or falsified based on observations or “observational sentences” (as it is called in logical empiricism) but based on “basic sentences,” singular statements which could serve as a premise in testing a theory or universal statement. Unlike the observational sentences of the logical empiricists, in the case of Popper basic sentences are not more directly connected to the observation or with the facts themselves than any theoretical statement: They are equally theoretically charged as all other statements. They differ only in their logical form of theoretical or universal statements because they are singular. According to Popper, the acceptance of a basic sentence by the scientific community – necessary in order to be able to test a theory – is a question of convention. Basic sentences conform to this conventionalistic position of Popper. Thus they are not statements that connect a theory to the observation or even a statement of pure observation, but statements that offer the logical possibility of testing a theory; the scientific community can agree to temporarily accept such basic sentences as true. Note the strong similarities between Popper’s conventionalistic position in the case of testing theories and the pragma-dialectical views on the critical testing of the acceptability of a standpoint, where a successful defence or attack always takes place ex concessis.
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van Eemeren, F., Garssen, B., Meuffels, B. (2009). The Concluding Stage: The Concluding Rule. In: Fallacies and Judgments of Reasonableness. Argumentation Library, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2614-9_8
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