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Regarding the "assuming the desired" fallacy, regarding the discussion you had with Aviv Franco.

שו"תRegarding the "assuming the desired" fallacy, regarding the discussion you had with Aviv Franco.
שאל לפני 3 שנים

I recently watched your debate with Aviv Franco on the "Head to Head" channel.
The discussion was very interesting, your opinions really interested me as a non-believer, and to be honest, I think Aviv missed some of your arguments a bit, and that's a shame for me.
But something really got stuck in my throat about your opening remarks, and I wanted to ask you directly about your intention on the subject, because maybe I didn't understand you correctly.
I'm talking about your claim that "every valid argument assumes what is sought, by definition."
From what I know, and correct me if I'm wrong:
An argument that "assumes what is sought" literally assumes within its premises the conclusion it is trying to prove.
From what you explained, a valid logical argument must assume within itself the conclusion it wants to prove, otherwise it will not be valid.
You gave the classic argument as an example:
Assumption 1: All humans are mortal.
Assumption 2: Socrates is a human being.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
Now, as I understand it, this argument does not assume what is wanted, and there is a fairly simple way to check this.
Assumption 1, alone, does not assume what is desired, because it is possible that Socrates is not a human being, who is not necessarily mortal.
Assumption 2, alone, does not assume what is desired, because it is possible that Socrates is both human and not mortal.
Only when premises 1 and 2 are put together does the conclusion follow.
In other words, the argument does not assume the conclusion, but rather assumes all sorts of things that, if all of them together are true, the conclusion also follows from them.
Therefore, the argument does not "assume the desired", in the sense of the logical fallacy "assuming the desired".
Just to explain this better, I want to give another example:
Assumption 1: All triangles have 3 sides.
Assumption 2: X is a triangle.
Conclusion: X has 3 sides.
The above argument does assume what is wanted!
Assumption 1, alone, does not assume what is desired, because it is possible that X is not a triangle, and therefore does not necessarily have 3 sides.
But assumption 2, alone, does assume what is wanted, because by definition a triangle is a polygon with 3 sides, so X necessarily has 3 sides if we assume that X is a triangle.
Therefore, assumption 1 is unnecessary in this argument, meaning that there is one and only assumption on which the entire argument relies, and therefore it necessarily assumes what is sought.
So I wanted to ask to understand:
Are you claiming that an argument that is logically valid "assumes the desired" with the intention of "it commits the logical fallacy of assuming the desired"?
Or maybe you meant to say something closer to the fact that a logically valid argument must assume assumptions that, taken together, must "assume what is desired"?
Which is different from saying that a logically valid argument commits the "required premise" logical fallacy, because the "required premise" logical fallacy means that you actually use the conclusion you want to prove within the argument.


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מיכי צוות ענה לפני 3 שנים
Of course, I am not claiming that every valid logical argument contains the conclusion as one of its premises. What I am saying is that every valid logical argument assumes what is wanted. Whether it is a fallacy or not is not really interesting. There is no point in arguing what is called a fallacy and what is not, because that is semantics. In my opinion, the requested assumption is not a fallacy in the essential sense at all because of what I am saying now. But even if you call it, or one of its types (the one that assumes the conclusion as one of the premises) a 'fallacy', it is clear that both of these types have two characteristics: 1. An argument that assumes the requested (of both types, including what you call a 'fallacy') is truly valid. If X is assumed, the conclusion X necessarily follows from it. It's just that it is not very interesting. 2. Such an argument (of both types) does not renew anything beyond what is in its premises, and from this, in fact, its validity derives. In other words, if I prove to you any conclusion in a logical argument, it would lie in its premises (or in one of them or in a combination of all of them). This is what I wanted to argue, and this is to clarify the framework of the discussion (that always if there is a dispute about the conclusion, there is a dispute about one or more premises). Now you can choose whether to call it a fallacy or not. Hope your throat is cleared 🙂

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