The complete list

Every logical fallacy, cognitive bias, rhetorical device, and debate tactic on fallacy.is, grouped by category. 63 entries. Each has a short URL you can paste into any discussion.

Logical fallacies (28)

Errors in reasoning that make an argument invalid or misleading, regardless of the conclusion.

1. Ad Hominem Attacking the person making an argument instead of the argument itself.
2. Anecdotal Evidence Drawing a general conclusion from a single story or personal experience.
3. Appeal to Authority Using a person's status as proof of a claim, instead of the evidence behind the claim.
4. Appeal to Emotion Substituting an emotional reaction for an argument about the facts.
5. Appeal to Ignorance Treating the absence of evidence against a claim as evidence for it, or vice versa.
6. Appeal to Nature Treating "natural" as evidence that something is good or safe, and "unnatural" as evidence that it is harmful.
7. Appeal to Tradition Treating the age of a practice as the justification for it, rather than as one weak piece of evidence.
8. Bandwagon Treating how many people believe a claim as evidence that the claim is true.
9. Broken Window Fallacy Counting the visible benefits of an event while ignoring what the same resources would otherwise have done.
10. Cherry Picking Presenting only the evidence that supports your case and ignoring the rest.
11. Circular Reasoning Supporting a claim with the claim itself, dressed up in different words.
12. Equivocation Using a word in two different senses within the same argument, as if they were the same.
13. Fallacy Fallacy Concluding that a claim is false because the argument offered for it was flawed.
14. False Cause Concluding that one thing caused another based on correlation or sequence alone.
15. False Dichotomy Framing a choice as two options when more exist.
16. False Equivalence Treating two things as equivalent when they differ in ways that matter to the argument.
17. Genetic Fallacy Judging a claim by its source, origin, or history instead of its content.
18. Hasty Generalization Drawing a broad conclusion from a sample too small or unrepresentative to support it.
19. Loaded Question Asking a question that smuggles in an unproven assumption the answerer can't address without conceding it.
20. Middle Ground Assuming the truth must lie halfway between two positions, simply because those are the two positions on offer.
21. Nirvana Fallacy Rejecting a workable option because it falls short of a perfect one that is not actually available.
22. No True Scotsman Redefining a category on the fly to exclude counterexamples, protecting a claim about the category.
23. Post Hoc Assuming that because one thing followed another, the first caused the second.
24. Red Herring Introducing an irrelevant topic to distract from the actual argument.
25. Slippery Slope Claiming a small step will inevitably cause a chain of extreme consequences, without showing why.
26. Special Pleading Applying a standard generally, then inventing an exception for your own case with no principled reason behind it.
27. Straw Man Replacing someone's argument with a weaker version, then knocking down the weaker version.
28. Tu Quoque Dismissing a critique by pointing out that the critic is guilty of the same thing.

Cognitive biases (9)

Predictable patterns in how the mind distorts judgment. Useful to name, hard to avoid.

1. Anchoring Letting an initial number or reference point pull later judgments toward it, even when that starting point is arbitrary.
2. Availability Heuristic Judging how likely something is by how easily examples come to mind.
3. Confirmation Bias The tendency to notice, remember, and trust evidence that supports what you already believe.
4. Dunning-Kruger Effect A pattern where people with limited competence in a domain tend to overestimate their ability in that domain.
5. Fundamental Attribution Error Explaining other people's behaviour by their character while explaining your own by circumstances.
6. Gambler's Fallacy Believing that past random outcomes change the odds of future independent ones.
7. Hindsight Bias Once an outcome is known, it feels like it was predictable all along, and earlier uncertainty gets remembered as confidence.
8. Sunk Cost Fallacy Continuing a course of action because of what has already been spent on it, rather than what it still offers.
9. Survivorship Bias Drawing conclusions from the things that made it through while ignoring the ones that didn't.

Rhetorical devices (9)

Techniques used to persuade rather than reason. Some are fair; many are traps.

1. Dog Whistle Coded language that carries an extra meaning for a target subgroup while sounding innocuous to everyone else.
2. Euphemism Softened language that obscures what is actually being described.
3. False Balance Presenting two positions as evenly supported when the evidence behind them is not.
4. FUD Seeding vague fear about an alternative instead of making the case for your own option.
5. Gaslighting A sustained pattern of denial aimed at making someone distrust their own memory of events.
6. Loaded Language Word choice that delivers a verdict before any argument has been made.
7. Thought-Terminating Cliché A stock phrase deployed to close a question rather than answer it.
8. Weasel Words Vague attributions that imply a claim while leaving the speaker free to deny having made one.
9. Whataboutism Deflecting a criticism by raising a different criticism of the critic or their side.

Debate tactics (7)

Moves people make in arguments: dodges, traps, and bad-faith patterns worth naming.

1. DARVO Answering an accusation by denying it, attacking the accuser, and recasting yourself as the real victim.
2. Gish Gallop Burying an opponent in a flood of claims, too many and too fast to refute in real time.
3. Kafkatrap An argument built so that denying the accusation counts as proof of the accusation.
4. Motte and Bailey Defending a bold claim by retreating to a weaker, related claim when challenged, then returning to the bold claim later.
5. Moving the Goalposts Dismissing evidence that meets your demand, then demanding new, harder evidence.
6. Sealioning Hounding someone with relentless, polite requests for evidence to exhaust them rather than to understand.
7. Shifting the Burden of Proof Demanding your opponent disprove your claim instead of supporting it yourself.

Statistical fallacies (10)

Errors in reading data and evidence: samples, averages, correlations, and what the numbers do not say.

1. Base Rate Fallacy Reading a test result or a piece of evidence without accounting for how common the thing being tested for actually is.
2. Berkson's Paradox A filter that selects on two traits at once makes those traits look negatively related inside the selected group.
3. Correlation Is Not Causation Treating a statistical association as evidence of cause without ruling out confounders, reverse causation, selection, or chance.
4. Ecological Fallacy Concluding something about an individual from a statistic that describes the group they belong to.
5. Misleading Average Reporting a mean that hides a skewed distribution, so the average ends up describing almost nobody in the data.
6. P-Hacking Running analyses until one crosses the significance threshold, then reporting that one as though it were the only test.
7. Regression to the Mean Extreme results tend to be followed by ordinary ones for purely statistical reasons, and that drift gets mistaken for an effect.
8. Simpson's Paradox A pattern that holds in every subgroup can reverse once the subgroups are pooled, so the combined number tells the opposite story.
9. Small Sample Size Small groups produce more extreme results by chance alone, so they crowd both the top and the bottom of any ranking.
10. Texas Sharpshooter Finding a pattern in the data first, then presenting it as the thing you set out to test.