Scales of Justice Fallacy

The scales of justice fallacy refers to the error of compressingusing a simple polarized scheme for deciding a complex empirical issue into a binary question. Sometimesissue: each piece of evidence about the question is individually categorized as supporting exactly one does need to consider a binary question, where the answer is yes or no, and evidence for the affirmative side is evidence against the negative. But a lot of real-world questions are much more complicated than this and involve questions that don't fit on a one-dimensional scale. For example, it might be tempting to argue whether some developmental feature of an organism is due to nature or to nurture, but the details of the true causal mechanism might not fit neatlytwo opposing positions. This scheme distorts the conclusions that can be drawn from each piece of evidence, doesn't allow to take into account the dependencies between the pieces of evidence in either category.the context of the issue, and biases perception of individual pieces of evidence, making the ones that fall into the same category seem to support each other, and ones falling in the opposite categories to seem to oppose each other. In reality, individual pieces of evidence may be separate factual claims, arrived at independently, with the issue depending on specific combinations of facts.

• Color politics, Arguments as soldiers
• Filtered evidence
• Narrative fallacy
• Third option

The scales of justice fallacy refers to the error of compressing a complex empirical issue into a binary question. Sometimes one does need to consider a binary question, where the answer is yes or no, and evidence for the affirmative side is evidence against the negative. But a lot of real-world questions are much more complicated than this and involve questions that don't fit on a one-dimensional scale. For example, it might be tempting to argue whether some developmental feature of an organism is due to nature or to nurture, but the details of the true causal mechanism might not fit neatly in either category.

See also

• Color politics
• Filtered evidence
• Narrative fallacy
• Third option

See also

• Color politics
• Filtered evidence
• Narrative fallacy
• Third option

• Color politics
• Filtered evidence
• Narrative fallacy
• Third option

See Alsoalso

• Color politics
• Filtered evidence
• Third option

ReferencesBlog posts

Overcoming Bias Articles

• Color politics
• Third option