#continuum fallacy

Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left: https://amzn.to/2NSASfm vs Shapiro’s book: https://amzn.to/2LkVF9A

The Snaptun Stone is one of the few depictions of Loki, the Norse Trickster God. Found on the Western border between Norway and Sweden, the stone was carved sometime around 1000 CE, and shows Loki with his lips stitched together.

This is almost certainly a reference to a story in chapter 25 of the Prose Edda. In the story Loki makes a bet with Brok, a dwarf, and agrees that should he lose Brok can have his head. Sure enough, he does lose, and Brok and the dwarves come to claim what was promised. Cordial as ever, Loki said he had no qualms about giving up his own head, but added that the dwarves could have no part of his neck. At which point everyone discussed which part of the head was the head, which part was the neck, and which parts were somewhere in between. No one could come to an agreement that was to everyone’s liking, so Brok allowed Loki to keep his head (and neck). But as punishment for escaping payment through tricky wordplay, he stitched Loki’s lips together.

Tax shavings: the “fallacy of the beard” in political discourse

Political speech can be filled with Continuum Fallacies, often leading to abuses of words like “rich,” “poor,” “middle class,” and many others. By way of example, the U. S. Census Bureau defines the poverty level (2007) of a couple with one child as having an income of $14,291 per year or less.[1]But politicians rarely refer to official definitions when they base their stump speeches on casually…

I'm so sorry! I just... that continuum fallacy seems like an interesting & sound concept putting things in a new perspective - but I bet people only use it to nitpick & derail conversations when they should be concentrating on more important things.

First, I really don't mind--I just did also really did spend a couple of days thinking about it.

The thing about the continuum fallacy is that it appears all the time, and it's downright insidious a lot of the time. Like when I was a kid, I was really inspired by this TV show I saw to start exercising more so I could be an athlete like on TV. So I went outside and ran around my house a bunch of times to try to do some cardio. I went back in and did every damned exercise I could think of: pushups, situps, jumping jacks, whatever my tiny brain could conceive. Then I went in the bathroom and flexed my arm in front of the mirror, you know, to see how totally ripped I was after that one day of working out, right? And my mom saw me, and she started laughing, and said one day isn't going to make any difference.

So I quit! Completely! I didn't do it again any day after that. Because A) my mom basically just made fun of me and I felt ashamed and embarrassed, and B) if one day won't make a difference, then there's no point! And B) is the continuum fallacy. If I am out of shape, one day of exercise will not get me into shape. The next day, one day of exercise will not get me into shape. And so on, forever, and I'll never be an athlete.

And that kind of ruled my life for a long time. It wasn't until I was an adult and had lived away from my mom for years before I started really doing long-term things for the sake of self-improvement. But I mean, even then, when I started losing weight, I ran into it again from nearly all of the people I knew: I lost five pounds during the first three weeks of my diet and exercise plan, and I was told, repeatedly, that five pounds would not make me not fat, so it was nothing worth feeling good about. And that's the continuum fallacy again. It's just the same idea, over and over: something small does not have a large effect, therefore, don't act like it matters.

And it's easy to let it lead to bad habits, too. I see positivity posts all the time where people are like "Eat the cookie, one cookie won't make you fat." Well, that's true, but if you keep eating cookies all the time, they will! And maybe that's fine! Maybe you're okay with that! Because body positivity and all that! But you can't pretend that they're not doing anything, any more than you can pretend cigarettes are harmless even though it's totally true to say "one cigarette won't give you lung cancer."

I'm not equating cookies to cigarettes, here. I'm just trying to craft analogies. Don’t... don’t give me shit about how I’m calling fat people unhealthy or saying that it’s bad to be fat. I don’t want to get into that.

But I feel like there's also a slippery slope, there, right? The two fallacies are pretty closely related. The first example I ever heard of the continuum fallacy used beards. If I do not have a beard, then not shaving will not result in me having a beard tomorrow. Okay, great. But I still shouldn't go skipping multiple days in a row without shaving! Kind of like how I don't have to work out every day, but I can't skip multiple days, either. Which is... why I don't ever skip days. It's been two or three years (I forget exactly) since the last time I didn't exercise at all in the morning. I don't go full intensity every day, of course. I do yoga or flexibility exercises on my rest days so that I'm still doing something.

The easiest examples I can think of have to do with fitness, because I'm obsessed with my fitness. But there are all kinds of examples you could make. If you want to learn to play the guitar, one day of practice will not make you an expert. But you have to keep practicing, day after day, even though there will never be a single day when you are not an expert and then suddenly you are. Because each day, you become more of an expert. It's not binary. It's a continuum.

I see it a lot on tumblr, too, where people berate SJWs for picking on targets that they shouldn't. What difference does it make, they say. These small victories don't matter. But they do, really, because each drop in the bucket raises the water level, right? And isn't that the ultimate goal of social justice: to fill a bucket? I may have gotten mixed up a bit, there.

Not that I agree with everything SJWs do in the name of social justice. There's a lot of stuff that I see that makes me scratch my head and think that people are overreacting. But that's not the point. The point is that people who want to make big changes need to do it by making many, many, many small changes, over a long period of time. That's the only way shit gets done.

Well, I guess I lied, earlier. The very first example of the continuum fallacy I ever encountered was when it wasn't even called that. It wasn't called anything. Somebody was just saying that there were such things as large numbers, but it was difficult to define what that meant. If a number is not a large number, adding 1 to it does not make it a large number. So if 5 is not a large number, neither is 6. So neither is 7. So neither is 8. So neither is 9. So neither is 10. But, really, eventually, numbers get large! A billion is a large number!

Like if you think that $2 per gallon of gasoline is not expensive. Neither is $2.01. Neither is $2.02. But surely, $9 is, even though it's only one cent more than $8.99, and only one cent more than $8.98, all the way back down to $2.02. Where's the line?

Marketers use this all the time. It's why they'll charge you $19.99 for a new shirt instead of $20. Because that one cent makes you think that it's cheaper, even though, really, it isn't, right? One cent won't make something go from too expensive to not too expensive. But then... what if they lowered it to $19.98? Or $19.97? Or $10.99?

We can all agree that the first step makes no difference. But successive steps do. And that's where the continuum fallacy becomes a fallacy. Surely, yes, one day of beard growth won't give me a beard, one cookie won't make me fat, one day of skipping my workout won't make me weak, one day of practicing the guitar won't make me an expert, raising the price of gas by one cent won't make it expensive, and lowering the price of a shirt won't make it cheap.

So it's an informal logical fallacy, not a formal one, in the same way that the slippery slope is.

The continuum fallacy (also called the fallacy of the beard,[1] line drawing fallacy, bald man fallacy, fallacy of the heap, the sorites fallacy) is an informal fallacy closely related to the sorites paradox, or paradox of the heap. The fallacy causes one to erroneously reject a vague claim simply because it is not as precise as one would like it to be. Vagueness alone does not necessarily imply invalidity.