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What Logical Fallacy Is This?

RSLancastr

www.StopSylvia.com
RSLancastr
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"Sylvia Browne is at the top of the "psychic game", so if I can prove her to be a fraud, all of the other psychics are sure to be frauds as well."

I recently saw someone making this assertion about VanPraagh.
 
RSLancastr said:
"Sylvia Browne is at the top of the "psychic game", so if I can prove her to be a fraud, all of the other psychics are sure to be frauds as well."

I recently saw someone making this assertion about VanPraagh.
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Poisoning the well? Proof by association? Those are the two I'd go for.
 
A bit of the following as well...

Hasty generalization
Fallacy of composition
representativeness bias
 
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"Does not follow"?

For a while Lance Armstrong was at the top of cycling game -- and he was cheating. That does not mean all cyclists cheat.
 
No fallacy. But a premise that is damn hard to establish.

I think the argument is along the lines of:
1. The cheapest car is 10.000$.
2. I have only 5.000$ dollars.
Therefore I can't afford any car.

Or:
1. The fastest car goes 500mph topspeed.
Therefore there is no car that makes 600mph.

All fine. But hard to establish. Even more so in the case of phychics, where there is no objective way to measure who's top, or some such.
 
+1 for hasty generalization. This could be given as a good example of it.

IXP
 
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RSLancastr said:
"Sylvia Browne is at the top of the "psychic game", so if I can prove her to be a fraud, all of the other psychics are sure to be frauds as well."
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This depends on the terms. If the person was making the assertion that Silvia Browne was on top because she had the highest accuracy rate in terms of predictions and that her accuracy was still below the level of random chance then this would be a valid argument.

However, if SB is claimed to be on top because she is the most well known or popular then this begins with the Bandwagon Fallacy. If "at the top" was chosen specifically because of ambiguity then this would also be Equivocation Fallacy. This would further be an example of the Incomplete Comparison Fallacy since the actual terms of comparison are unknown.

The next part depends on the nature of the proof. For example, if it were found that she had faked one prediction (created the prediction after knowing the outcome) and it was then claimed that all of her predictions must then be fake, that would be Hasty Generalization. However, the proof could consist of showing fallacies on the part of SB herself. She could make large numbers of predictions and then engage in Cherry Picking. She could qualify her predictions to make them seem more accurate which would be Overwhelming Exception. She could be using clusters of accurate predictions to claim that she is psychic which would be the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. She could use lots of imagery in her predictions as an Appeal To Vividness or she could use an Appeal To Emotion.

Finally, showing that SB was a fraud and then claiming that this proved that all other psychics were frauds as well would be an Association Fallacy.
 
This thread was motivated by an email I received on StopSylvia, in which the correspondent (Miklos Jako) called my attention to the following YouTube video he had created about the time he had tested VanPraagh:



After viewing the video and taking some notes, I sent him the following:

(NOTE: I am using Mr. Jako's full name here because he uses it on the YouTube video, so I felt no need to redact it here)

Miklos Jako:

Thanks for pointing out your "testing VanPraagh" video out to me.

While I applaud the video's intent, I'm afraid I had problems with it, which I will try to explain below...

1. It seems to begin in the middle of a thought/sentence "...now, whether or not James and other mediums can do this - communicate with the dead - is, ultimately, not a matter of opinion. This is something that can be proven or disproven."

2. Then you set up what I think is a False Dichotomy:
"can he come up with specific information that only the deceased person and I would know?"
"If he does, he's proven himself."
BUT ONLY TO YOU - AT BEST, SINCE YOUR TEST WAS NOT SET UP PROPERLY. THE REST OF US WOULD ONLY HAVE YOUR WORD ON IT.
"If he doesn't, and only comes up with good guesses and generalizations, then he has disproven himself."
NOT TRUE. He would have only failed to prove himself.

3. Next, I had multiple problems with the following statement:
"and, if he fails, we can reasonably discount all the other mediums, because James is at the top of his field, and if we disprove the best, we can dismiss the rest."

First, although VanPraagh is definitely among the top four most well-known mediums in America (Sylvia Browne, John Edward and Theresa Caputo ("The Long Island Medium") being the others), you seem to be saying that he is indisputably Numero Uno, and I do not believe that has been established, nor is it likely to be, as how would we even quantify this? The best we could hope for is to show that he is the most popular, but that would NOT prove that he is the most capable of communicating with the dead, only that he is the most capable at marketing his "product".

Next, even if we assume, for the sake of discussion, that he IS IN FACT the Number One Medium (in America, at least), the rest of your statement has two major problems: You CANNOT "disprove" his claim to be able to communicate with the dead. Nor do you, in this video. You can, at best, show that there are good reasons to DOUBT his claim. You might even show that, in THIS READING, he was mostly incorrect. But that does NOT prove that he cannot communicate with the dead.

It's the old problem of "proving a negative".

Even with the dozens of articles I have up on my Stop Sylvia Browne web site, documenting case after case after case where she was wrong, wrong, WRONG in a reading/prediction, I have NOT proven that she is not psychic! What I HAVE done, I feel, is gathered enough evidence to make a reasonable person come to the conclusion that there are more reasons to DOUBT her claims than there are to BELIEVE them.

And even if you COULD show that he is Numero Uno, and even if you COULD prove that he cannot communicate with the dead, it is not logical to extrapolate from that to say that "we can dismiss the rest". That is a logical fallacy.

I had other problems with the video, but that will do for now.

Best regards,

-Robert
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I don't think it is actually a hasty generalization (or perhaps it is a special subset). That usually implies a generalization made without bothering to offer any reason why the fact implies the generalization. The quote offered is phrased as an if/then statement (___, so ___), which implies that logic is being offered even though it is not explicitly stated.

The statement has an unstated major premise: it is implied that whoever is at "the top the game" must be a perfect example of the entire field.

Since the success was determined by popularity (and not some kind of objective test), it becomes obvious that the unstated major premise is a fallacious argument from popularity.

If this person is presenting this as an argument against believers (the correct approach would be an impartial search for truth, but it is often framed as a debate), then the entire statement is also a straw man. They are making this "top of the game" argument on behalf of opponents who, I am relatively certain, have never argued that Van Praagh or any other specific psychic is the perfect representation of their beliefs. In fact, fallibility is usually their defensive cry.
 
The problem is that you are using a fallacy in your position. The burden of proof is not on the critic but on the person making the extraordinary claim. It is up to person who claims to be a psychic to prove it rather than someone to prove they are not.

If I claimed that I could bench press 1,000 lbs why would you take my word for it?

If I claimed that I was 200 years old why would you have to disprove this?

If I insisted that gnomes were living in my basement would you really think you had the burden to show that this was not the case?

The same thing applies to claims like UFOs, aliens, ghosts, and bigfoot. If you claim that you saw a large hairy creature then it is not my responsibility to prove that it could not have been bigfoot.
 
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It strikes me as counter-intuitive. I would think that someone who actively seeks the limelight, and who has been able to cash in on her purported ability, is far more likely to be cheating than someone who makes far more modest claims.

To extend Mark6's analogy, I wouldn't generally suspect the guy who comes in 153rd in the Tour de France of doping.
 
Ray Brady said:
It strikes me as counter-intuitive. I would think that someone who actively seeks the limelight, and who has been able to cash in on her purported ability, is far more likely to be cheating than someone who makes far more modest claims.

To extend Mark6's analogy, I wouldn't generally suspect the guy who comes in 153rd in the Tour de France of doping.
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They're all cheating. So they're all equally likely to be cheating. Well, maybe not the cyclists.
 
Prove that Sylvia Browne is at the top of the "psychic game". Do that and I think the job is done. Only problem is that to do that you need to prove that every other psychic is fake so it is meaningless.
 
Mark6 said:
"Does not follow"?

For a while Lance Armstrong was at the top of cycling game -- and he was cheating. That does not mean all cyclists cheat.
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Well, according to Lance Armstrong it does. :D
 
Mark6 said:
"Does not follow"?

For a while Lance Armstrong was at the top of cycling game -- and he was cheating. That does not mean all cyclists cheat.
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If he was cheating for years and getting away with it then it puts a cloud over every cyclist. It puts pressure on other cyclists to cheat in order to compete with Armstrong.

Same thing with SB. She was cheating. If anyone wanted to earn money in a similar way they too could cheat, earn money and get away with it. So it puts a cloud over them. It does not matter if there are some who are real, whether cyclists or psychics. They make a certain claim and they need to show that it is real.
 
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