Disinterring 100 New Scientific Fallacies Direct and Indirect: Using Discourse and Narrative Analyses to Unearth New Scientific Fallacies

This paper is by no means our first one on scientific fallacies, we had published at least two papers on this topic earlier over the last couple of years or so. The earlier papers were tied to the twin concepts of discourse analysis and narrative analysis, two emerging concepts in the social sciences, and ones with immense potential. We had proposed in those earlier papers, that both discourse analysis and narrative analysis, i.e. a perusal and scrutiny of scientific papers and scientific literature would enable us to discover and unearth i.e. bring to the fore, a large number of scientific fallacies. The underlying assumption behind this assertion is that the current compendium of scientific fallacies is grossly and woefully inadequate, and does not lend itself to high quality research. We therefore begin this paper by reviewing the current set of fallacies, or at least the most important ones, and show how they are used in science. We also distinguish between formal fallacies and informal fallacies, and propose an entirely new distinction, namely direct fallacies and indirect fallacies. The latter only influence scientific outcomes indirectly, and one or more downstream fallacies could be tied to them. They may also be labeled and termed as fallacy inducing situations. We will argue that indirect fallacies must be documented in order to improve the quality of scientific research; this is the imperative need of the day given that the entire discipline of the philosophy of science is badly outdated. Of course, the philosophy of science itself needs to be taught in schools at the appropriate level, and we will argue that the entire science of pedagogy is badly outdated too.