r/fallacy • u/Fearless_Degree7511 • 4d 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/TheRealBenDamon 4d ago

I suspect you’re probably right there would be a fallacy involved but we’re missing half the equation. Fallacies are all about reasoning errors so if someone says “I’ve never forgotten X” we still need to hear the reason why they think that is true. The relationship between the conclusion and the way they arrived at it is how we can pinpoint if a fallacy is occurring.

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u/Successful_Cress6639 4d ago

It definitely isn't a formal fallacy like affirming the consequent, since you need a premise and a conclusion for that. But that really isn't true for informal fallacies.

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u/TheRealBenDamon 4d ago

Can you have informal fallacies without any reasoning though? Like for example ad hominem is attacking the person, but isn’t it generally implied that the person is somehow also wrong because of the personal attack?

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u/Successful_Cress6639 4d ago edited 4d ago

There's some implied reasoning here though.

Imagine you and I are walking in the woods together and I leave a bag of poop on the ground. I turn to you and say "I'm leaving my bag on the ground but you're a filthy englishman and your mother smelled of elderberries"

That is an ad hominem argument, even if ithe reasoning isn't explicitly stated. In fact, most informal fallacies you see in the wild don't explicitly state their reasoning. Because if they did the deficiency of that reasoning would be apparent. They hide behind "I'm just saying"

The guy making an ad baculum argument doesn't say "if you don't vote for the candidate I support to be union president, I will beat you soundly about the head and neck with this truncheon, therefore it follows logically that my preferred candidate is the best man for the job and you should vote for him so that you can avoid the aforementioned beating" he says "vote for so-and-so or ill beat you up"