Anything over a hundredweight is too heavy to lift.
These sacks (collectively) are over a hundredweight.
.'. These sacks (distributively) are too heavy to lift.
§ 854. The ambiguity of the word 'all,' which has been before commented upon (§ 119), is a great assistance in the English language to the pair of fallacies just spoken of.
§ 835. The Fallacy of Accent ([Greek: prosodía]) is neither more nor less than a mistake in Greek accentuation. As an instance Aristotle gives Iliad xxiii. 328, where the ancient copies of Homer made nonsense of the words [Greek: tò mèn oú katapútetai ómbro] by writing [Greek: oû] with the circumflex in place of [Greek: oú] with the acute accent. [Footnote: This goes to show that the ancient Greeks did not distinguish in pronunciation between the rough and smooth breathing any more than their modern representatives.] Aristotle remarks that the fallacy is one which cannot easily occur in verbal argument, but rather in writing and poetry.
§ 856. Modern writers explain the fallacy of accent to be the mistake of laying the stress upon the wrong part of a sentence. Thus when the country parson reads out, 'Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbour,' with a strong emphasis upon the word 'against,' his ignorant audience leap [sic] to the conclusion that it is not amiss to tell lies provided they be in favour of one's neighbour.
§ 857. The Fallacy of Figure of Speech [Greek: tò schêma tês léxeos] results from any confusion of grammatical forms, as between the different genders of nouns or the different voices of verbs, or their use as transitive or intransitive, e.g. [Greek: úgiaínein] has the same grammatical form as [Greek: témnein] or [Greek: oìkodomeîn], but the former is intransitive, while the latter are transitive. A sophism of this kind is put into the mouth of Socrates by Aristophanes in the Clouds (670-80). The philosopher is there represented as arguing that [Greek: kápdopos] must be masculine because [Greek: Kleónumos] is. On the surface this is connected with language, but it is essentially a fallacy of false analogy.
§ 858. To this head may be referred what is known as the Fallacy of Paronymous Terms. This is a species of equivocation which consists in slipping from the use of one part of speech to that of another, which is derived from the same source, but has a different meaning. Thus this fallacy would be committed if, starting from the fact that there is a certain probability that a hand at whist will consist of thirteen trumps, one were to proceed to argue that it was probable, or that he had proved it.
§ 859. We turn now to the tricks of refutation which lie outside the language, whether the deception be due to the assumption of a false premiss or to some unsoundness in the reasoning.
§ 860. The first on the list is the Fallacy of Accident ([Greek: tò sumbebekós]). This fallacy consists in confounding an essential with an accidental difference, which is not allowable, since many things are the same in essence, while they differ in accidents. Here is the sort of example that Aristotle gives—
'Is Plato different from Socrates ?' 'Yes.' 'Is Socrates a man ?'
'Yes.' 'Then Plato is different from man.'
To this we answer—No: the difference of accidents between Plato and Socrates does not go so deep as to affect the underlying essence. To put the thing more plainly, the fallacy lies in assuming that whatever is different from a given subject must be different from it in all respects, so that it is impossible for them to have a common predicate. Here Socrates and Plato, though different from one another, are not so different but that they have the common predicate 'man.' The attempt to prove that they have not involves an illicit process of the major.