Talk:Suppressed correlative

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suppressed

Perhaps I'm Stupid, But...[edit]

Strikes me that the description preceding the examples is unclear. I, for one, can't make heads or tails of it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.141.217.36 (talk) 01:02, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm stupid too, but I think most examples of this article reflects other related fallacies than the suppressed correlative. I think the article is somewhat garbled, or else the concept might be garbled. Said: Rursus (☻) 07:06, 24 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

this article is actually stating the continuum fallacy.

the black dog thing is just a false premise. perhaps one could say "a dog is temporarily black when the lights are out". this would be a strange statement, but not necessarily fallacious. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.15.29.209 (talk) 15:07, 2 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above examples have since been replaced in the article. —Mrwojo (talk) 06:54, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The old "black dog" example presumably was from the proverb "At night all cows are black." (see: Black cat analogy). Hegel famously used this saying in The Phenomenology of Spirit in what I would say is the same form of critique as suppressed correlative. [1] —Mrwojo (talk) 16:37, 14 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Ant/bacterium example[edit]

Although Actor 1's first statement is false (that ants cannot be small as they are larger than bacteria), his second statement (that nothing is really small) actually seems true to me. Nothing is small on it's own, it's size only exists in emprical measurements (i.e. in m, cm, etc.) or in relation to other things (a mouse is smallerer than an elephant, but is not simply small). Saimdusan Talk|Contribs 20:44, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above example has since been replaced in the article. —Mrwojo (talk) 06:54, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Expanded, referenced, new examples[edit]

I've taken a stab at cleaning up this article because previously it was just an unreferenced definition and a few examples that seemed to be causing confusion as noted above.

The article now starts with a conceptual example (X, not X), moves to one of the more straightforward examples I saw in Bain, and then starts getting into more complicated situations. The brakes/no-brakes example I made up; if someone finds a better example with a sly redefinition, feel free to add it instead. In a footnote Feinberg says that Loewenberg coined the name of this fallacy in 1940 but Bain's name and description as early as 1868 seems to refute that. (I don't have access to Loewenberg's paper.) I didn't find many sources for this fallacy except in relation to a form of empiricism and psychological egoism, which is why I've mentioned those two.

The article could potentially mention some criticism (I saw one non-reliable source that disputed the claim that a suppressed correlative results in meaninglessness). —Mrwojo (talk) 06:54, 29 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Would a good example be the old chestnut of defining art as "anything that anyone regards as art" in terms of a debate about whether a specific thing constitutes art? Herr Gruber (talk) 23:48, 15 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]