Equivocation Fallacy Explained, With Examples

An ambiguous term (“equivocal,” in the language of logic) is one which has more than a single meaning and whose context does not clearly indicate which meaning is intended.

Most words can mean several different things. The overload fallacy is the idea that a word will include all of those senses every time it is used. For example, the English word spring can refer to a season, a metal coil, an act of jumping, or a source of water.

Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

2. Red Herring Fallacy: This fallacy is basically the use of a trick to avoid the main points, often by ignoring other views instead of facing them:

The word-count fallacy is a mistake we make when we insist that a word must have the same meaning every time it occurs. For example, if we are confident that a word carries a certain meaning in seven of its eight occurrences in Scripture, we might be tempted to conclude that it must have that same meaning in its eighth occurrence. Yet, as Darrell B

The Non-central Fallacy, also known as “the worst argument in the world”, was where emotionally charged words (like “slave” in this case) were used to describe situations where they only somewhat fit. The desire was to evoke an appeal to emotion by way of a false equivalence.