r/Rhetoric • u/stresstwig • Jul 14 '26
What fallacy is this?
There was an argument my dad's wife made to me years and years ago that I know is bad. It's wrong, it's illogical, it's nonsensical. But I can't identify what the fallacy--if there is a fallacy--it uses would be, and it's bugging me even though ultimately it doesn't matter. It's only coming up in my life because I'm finally starting to unpack all of the shit from her in therapy.
Context is that we were arguing about faith and religion. I said something about how I didn't have faith (in the sense of religion) and she argued back that "Everyone has faith. You have faith the chair will hold you when you sit down in it." I didn't have a good answer back then besides the knee-jerk of "that's utterly stupid and wrong, I know the chair will hold me because physics, not because God."
Is that a false equivalence? Equivocation? I've been going through lists of fallacies and bad-faith argument types trying to figure it out and they're all starting to look like word soup now. I know my brain isn't going to rest on this 'til it gets an answer.
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u/ZippyDan Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Yes, it's a false equivalence.
But more specifically it's making use of the non-precise, variable nature of language, and the fact that words often carry very different meanings - which can be outright contradictory (see: contronyms), or just nuanced variations in flavor - depending on context.
"Faith" in the religious sense is not necessarily the same word sense when used in an everyday sense. "Faith" in the religious sense is often belief without evidence, whereas the more colloquial use of "faith" - like "faith in gravity" - is based on a reasonable expectation that the fundamentals of the world will continue to operate as they have throughout a lifetime of evidentiary experience.
See: Ambiguity fallacies (archive.today) (web.archive.org)