About this guide
What this is, how it is put together, where the material comes from, and what it does not claim to be.
- fallacies
- 91
- clusters
- 11
- dialogues
- 273
- source links
- 154
What it is
A field guide to the ways an argument can go wrong. Ninety one named fallacies, each with a plain definition, an example in the wild, a way to answer it, and the neighbours it is easily confused with. Everything is grouped by what actually breaks in the reasoning rather than by Latin name, because the useful question in an argument is never what a mistake is called — it is where the mistake happens.
Two languages, not a translation
The Arabic is written as Arabic rather than run through a translator. Where an example would not travel — it turns on English wordplay, or assumes a reference an Arabic reader has no use for — it is rebuilt rather than translated word for word: the phoenix stands in for the unicorn, and remote Thursdays for remote Fridays. Where a scenario is just a workplace dispute or a piece of pure logic, it carries over as it is, because nothing is gained by inventing a different one. Each language is meant to be read on its own.
Why there is practice
Recognising a fallacy in a list is easy; recognising one while somebody is talking is the skill that matters. So the practice section asks six kinds of question, including 273 short exchanges where two people argue and you name what went wrong, and drills on the pairs that are genuinely easy to mix up. Your progress is scheduled so the ones you miss come back sooner, and it is kept on your device — there is no account and nothing is sent anywhere.
What it is not
A guide like this is easy to misuse, so three limits are worth stating plainly. Fallacy names are not standardised — the labels here are the common ones, not official ones. The grouping into eleven clusters is a judgement call made to be useful, not a taxonomy anyone should defend as the only correct one. And naming a fallacy does not win an argument: an argument can be badly made and still reach a true conclusion, which is itself a fallacy in this guide. The point of learning these is to argue better, not to collect accusations.
Where the material comes from
The entries were written against the standard reference literature on fallacies, and every entry links out to the sources behind it — 154 links across the works below. Where those sources disagree, the entry follows the more careful reading and says so; where a name is contested, the alternative is given.
Sources used
- Wikipedia — List of fallaciesThe broadest cross-check on names, variants and disputed labels.
- The Fallacy FilesGary Curtis's taxonomy — the closest thing to a careful structural classification.
- Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyPeer-reviewed academic treatment; used where a definition needed settling.
- Logically FallaciousBo Bennett's catalogue; useful for the long tail of rarely indexed names.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyConsulted on the history of the concept of a fallacy itself.
- Fallacies.onlineShort worked examples, used as a sanity check on phrasing.
- Primary texts and specialist pagesWikisource, Logic Museum, Simply Psychology and The Decision Lab, for single entries needing a primary or psychological source.
How it is built
A static site: no accounts, no database, no tracking of what you read or answer. It works from a plain file server, and the pages you see were generated ahead of time.
Reading this by machine
The whole guide is published in plain text and structured data as well as in pages, so an index, a language model or your own script can read it without scraping markup. It is licensed CC BY 4.0: use it, quote it, train on it — just say where it came from.
- llms.txtAn index of the whole site: what it is, the licence, and one line per entry.
- llms-full.txtEvery entry in full — definition, example, counter, origin, tells and sources — in one file.
- fallacies.jsonThe corpus as structured data, both languages, with a versioned envelope.
- feed.xmlAn Atom catalogue of all the entries, for a feed reader.
And every entry has a plain-markdown twin: add .md to its address.