Aristotle
on
False Reasoning
SUNY series
in
Ancient Greek Philosophy
Anthony Preus, editor
Aristotle
on
False Reasoning
Language and the World
in the Sophistical Refutations
Scott G. Schreiber
State University of New York Press
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schreiber, Scott G. (Scott Gregory), 1952–
Aristotle on false reasoning : language and the world in the Sophistical refutations /

Homonymy in S.E. 22
Amphiboly 25
Amphiboly in S.E. 26
Amphiboly Outside the Organon 28
Problems with Aristotle’s Distinction: The Argument of S.E. 17 31
Conclusion 34
Chapter 3: Form of the Expression 37
Introduction 37
vii
viii CONTENTS
Form of the Expression As a Category Mistake 38
Confusion of Substance with Quantity 39
Confusion of Substance with Relative 40
Confusion of Substance with Quality 42
Confusion of Substance with Time 42
Confusion of Activity with “Being-Affected” 43
Confusion of Activity with Quality 44
Form of the Expression Fallacies That Are Not Category Mistakes 44
Confusion of a Particular with a Universal 44
Confusion of One Particular Substance with Another 45
Confusions Based on Gender Terminations 45
Form of the Expression and Solecism: Aristotle and Protagoras 48
Form of the Expression As a Linguistic Fallacy of Double Meaning 51
Chapter 4: Composition, Division, and Accent 55
Difficulties and Procedure 55
Fallacies Due to Accent 58
Fallacies Due to Composition and Division (C/D) 60
C/D Fallacies Are Not Examples of Double Meaning 60
The Primacy of Oral Speech 64
Further Examples 65

False Resolutions to Fallacies Due to Accident 117
False Resolutions by Appeal to Linguistic Equivocation 117
False Resolutions by Appeal to Oblique Context 121
False Resolutions by Citing Missing Qualifications 123
Final Remarks on Double Meaning and Fallacies
Due to Accident 126
Historical Reasons for Treating Fallacies Due to
Accident As Errors of Logical Form 128
Fallacies Due to Consequent 130
Introduction 130
Aristotle’s Examples 132
Conclusion 139
Chapter 8: Secundum Quid 141
Introduction 141
Two Types of Secundum Quid Fallacy 142
Resolutions of Secundum Quid Fallacies 144
Secundum Quid As a Fallacy outside of Language:
Aristotle’s Position 145
Problems with Aristotle’s Position 148
Conclusion 150
Chapter 9: Many Questions 153
Introduction 153
xCONTENTS
Disjunctive and Conjunctive Premises 155
Disjunctive Premises 155
Conjunctive Premises 156
Resolutions of Fallacies Due to Many Questions 159
Homonymy and Amphiboly As Cases of Many Questions 161
Unity of Predication versus Unity of Definition:
The Problem of de Interpretatione 163

Rhet. Rhetoric
S.E. Sophistical Refutations
Top. Topics
xi
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Preface
My interest in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations was prompted by one extraor-
dinarily bold claim that he makes early in the treatise. He says that there are
twelve ways and only twelve ways by which false arguments can appear to be
persuasive. How could that be, I wondered. Does not the rich history of
human gullibility suggest a nearly unlimited number of ways that people can
be fooled into accepting poor arguments? But Aristotle rarely makes such
claims lightly. So began my close analysis of this treatise that purports to
argue for and illustrate exactly those twelve ways of producing false but per-
suasive arguments. Aristotle constructs his twelvefold classification of fallacies
from the perspective of the victim of the false reasoning. The question he asks
is this: What would explain why some person finds some piece of false rea-
soning persuasive? The victim of the sophism must hold some additional false
belief, either about language or about the world, which makes the false rea-
soning appear cogent to him. Aristotle’s twelvefold taxonomy of false argu-
ments, then, is based upon twelve types of false belief that lend persuasiveness
to bad arguments. And these false beliefs are not just about the mechanics of
proper logical form. For Aristotle, logical acumen alone is not enough to
safeguard one from sophistical arguments. One also must possess the right
meta-logical and metaphysical beliefs, and Aristotle believes that he has un-
covered the twelve false beliefs about language and the world whose correc-
tion will protect one from being taken in by false argumentation.
Aristotle’s classification of fallacies and his justification of that classification
in the Sophistical Refutations have received little systematic study in the twen-
tieth century. Such, however, was not always the case. From the early Greek

modern literature on informal fallacies. Accordingly, I have used my own
translations of all the Greek references. Nevertheless, I also have included
(most often in the notes) extensive citations of Aristotle’s Greek. I owe this
to those Greek readers of the book, because so many of Aristotle’s fallacies
are heavily dependent upon features of the Greek language. A further result
of this dependency is that any translation of Aristotle’s examples from Greek
into another language can have significant consequences of either clarifying
or obfuscating the fallacy being exemplified. Moreover, different modern lan-
guages will produce different transformations. What happens to Aristotle’s
examples when they are rendered into German or French adds a further layer
of difficulty for the English reader trying to grasp Aristotle’s theory. As a
consequence, I have restricted my secondary sources predominantly to those
written in English (the exceptions being the premodern Greek and Latin
commentators). I would be remiss, however, not to mention an important
addition to the modern scholarship on Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations that
appeared late in 1995, after much of my own research had been completed.
Louis-Andre Dorion has published an extensive French translation of and
xiv PREFACE
commentary on the entire treatise as a volume in the J. Vrin series, Histoire
des Doctrines de l’Antiquité Classique. While my interpretations of Aristotle’s
examples sometimes differ from Dorion’s, readers interested in a line-by-line
commentary will find his study an important resource.
Preface xv
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Introduction
Reasoning and the Sophistical Refutations
ARISTOTLE ON THE KINDS OF REASONING
Central to Aristotle’s philosophic method is his analysis of reasoning or the
syllogism (sullogism¬V).
1

3. false reasoning (paralogisms) from premises only apparently
scientific; and
4. eristic reasoning from premises only apparently endoxic.
1
2INTRODUCTION
As neat as this arrangement looks in Topics I, 1, it is not Aristotle’s final
word on the kinds of reasoning. He proceeds to disrupt the scheme in two
ways. First, he distinguishes another type of reasoning called “peirastic”
(peirastik¬V), or examinational reasoning. Peirastic proceeds from some belief
of the person being examined. This sort of premise differs from a dialectical
premise in that (1) it must be believed by the person being examined (whereas
in dialectic, an endoxon may be posited for examination, which neither partici-
pant is committed to) and (2) it need not be an endoxon (i.e., it may be an
entirely idiosyncratic belief).
6
Peirastic is the closest successor to that Socratic
questioning that characterized the early Platonic dialogues: an examination of
someone’s claim to know something. Second and more important, even in
Topics I, 1, Aristotle wants to consider eristic as, more broadly, false or apparent
reasoning, not just reasoning from false or apparent premises, whether endoxic or
scientific. And so Aristotle finally settles on a disjunctive definition of eristic,
as either reasoning from only apparent endoxa or apparent reasoning, whether
from real or apparent endoxa.
7
This same definition is found in the S.E. intro-
duction to eristic: “reasonings from apparent but not real endoxa, or apparent
reasonings.”
8
For Aristotle, the mark of eristic is appearance. Eristic arguments simu-
late but fail to be real arguments. This characteristic of simulation also is

to be labeled a “treatise,” Aristotle seems to have intended it as the closing
book to the Topics. So, for instance, in the Prior Analytics (65b16), he cites S.E.
167b21-36 under the title of the Topics. And the last chapter of S.E. is intended
as a conclusion to the whole of his treatments of both dialectic and eristic.
Nevertheless, the discussions of dialectic and eristic are clearly distinct and so
marked both in the beginning of the Topics (100a25-101a4) and in the intro-
duction to S.E. (164a20-22). In the later passage, Aristotle goes on to say that
elsewhere he has discussed didactic, dialectical, and peirastic argumentation, and
that now he must begin his treatment of eristic (S.E. 165a38–165b11).
12
Aristotle has two projects in S.E. The first is to identify the various
sources of false reasoning. The second is to provide the reasoner who encoun-
ters false reasoning the means to resolve the resultant confusion engendered
by the apparent but false argument. According to Aristotle, people fall victim
to false reasoning, whether in the course of a dialectical exchange with an-
other reasoner or in the privacy of their own reflections, from two general
sources. False arguments are either due to language (parΩ t‹n l°xin) or
outside of language (⁄xw t›V l°xewV). He further specifies six distinct linguis-
tic sources and six distinct extralinguistic sources. The diagram on the follow-
ing page shows Aristotle’s entire classification.
13
In S.E.4-11, Aristotle describes and illustrates each type of false reason-
ing, repeatedly affirming the inviolable distinction between the linguistic and
the extralinguistic sources of error. Commentators have not always received
this distinction kindly. Often the view has been that Aristotle’s division is
arbitrary. Many of the examples he cites to illustrate the different species
under these two principal headings seem to be just as easily categorized under
a different species from the other heading. One especially strong tendency
has been to see arguments outside of language as reducible to arguments due
to language.

Form of the Expression Division Accident
Consequent
Secundum Quid
Many Questions
▼▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
▼
Introduction 5
Aristotle’s examples raise their own peculiar difficulties. Accordingly, before
considering the role of resolutions in clarifying the distinction between lin-
guistic and extralinguistic fallacies, I analyze in part 1 Aristotle’s discussions
and illustrations of linguistically based fallacies. In chapter 1 I look at Aristotle’s
argument from S.E. 1, that there is a “power of names” to have multiple
signification. “Multiple signification,” however, turns out itself to have two
meanings that Aristotle fails to keep separate. On the one hand, universals
signify many different individuals as well as the universal under which the
individuals fall. This is the sense of multiple signification that Aristotle shows
in S.E. 1 to be unavoidable, given the nature and function of language. On
the other hand, some words signify different kinds of individuals rather than
just different individuals of the same kind. Both types of multivocity play
roles in the production of false reasoning.
In chapters 2 and 3 I analyze the first three types of fallacy “due to
language.” These are the three cases of what Aristotle calls “double meaning”:
fallacies due to homonymy, amphiboly, and the Form of the Expression. I
expose several problematic cases among Aristotle’s examples of these three
types. The chief source of the problems, I conclude, is Aristotle’s failure to

essary and sufficient for the removal of the perplexity as to why the apparent
refutation is false and why it appears true. I conclude that Aristotle recognizes
three kinds of erroneous presupposition whose correction is able to resolve all
perplexities arising from false reasoning. These are false beliefs about parts of
language itself, false beliefs about the relationship language has to the realities
it signifies, and false beliefs about the extralinguistic world that is signified.
The characteristic of fallacies due to language is that their resolutions require
some correction of false presuppositions about the nature of language or how
language relates to the things it signifies. Resolutions of fallacies outside of
language, on the other hand, require no such corrections. This is not to say,
however, that the correction of errors about the nature and use of language
is sufficient to resolve linguistically based fallacies. Fallacies of double mean-
ing also derive their plausibility from particular false presuppositions about
the world.
Part 3 is an analysis of the six fallacy types that arise outside of language.
For each type I isolate that feature of the extralinguistic world that one must
understand if one is to avoid that fallacy. In chapter 6 I argue that, for
Aristotle, false reasonings due to Begging the Question and Non-Cause As
Cause derive their plausibility from mistaken beliefs about the proper ex-
planatory powers of nonlinguistic facts. In chapter 7 I discuss Aristotle’s
fallacy types of Accident and Consequent. I argue that Aristotle presents no
convincing argument or evidence for a distinction between the two types. The
common ontological mistake that renders examples of such fallacies appar-
ently sound is the confusion of accidental with essential predication. Chapter
8 deals with the fallacy of Secundum Quid. I argue that these fallacies can only
be resolved by correcting both false linguistic and false ontological presuppo-
sitions. Here is the most glaring taxonomic mistake in Aristotle’s scheme.
The need for some linguistic clarification should place these errors under
Aristotle’s heading of fallacies “due to language.” In chapter 9 I isolate two
extralinguistic errors promoting fallacies due to Many Questions. Sometimes