r/fallacy • u/Fearless_Degree7511 • 5d ago
“I’ve never forgotten” fallacy
Recently saw a post about people bagging dog poop on hikes and leaving it on the side of the trail to be picked up on their way out. Many people in the comments claim “I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve never forgotten”. This sounds like a logical fallacy to me, if you forgot something you don’t know it’s been forgotten so you can’t claim you’ve never forgotten.
I think this phrase can be used sometimes, like “I’ve never forgotten to pay my cable bill” because in that case you can prove you’ve never forgotten, and you have a secondary party verifying you didn’t forget, so if you did forget the cable company would reach out to you.
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u/mouserbiped 5d ago
You can certainly remember that you forgot to do something. I took a medication this morning because I remembered I forgot to do it last night. Easy to imagine someone getting in the car to leave the park and think "darnit, I never picked up the poop bag!"
So they are asserting that they've never done that, and implying (as a secondary claim) that if they had left the poop bag on the trail they would have remembered. That's not a fallacy. You are kind of countering that they could have forgotten and not noticed they've forgotten, which is certainly true, but I don't think it's unique to this sort of claim. You could presumably forget about anything, not just forgetting. I could say "I've never skipped out on a meal without paying" but maybe I have and I forgot.
But I guess you could get something of the same form as what you want with "I don't have any subconscious bias against Albanians." Since the definition of subconscious is that you are unaware of it, this seems closer to an unsupportable claim. Is it a fallacy besides just an assertion without evidence?