Tag: false-analogy

Teaching Aid

Teaching aids are used by teachers to help students learn a subject more easily. A scale model of an eclipse is a teaching aid. It is not presented as evidence about how an eclipse can occur, but to help students to understand the mechanism of an eclipse.

Flat-Earthers often incorrectly consider a teaching aid is presented as if it is evidence of a phenomenon, then demand a similar thing as “evidence” of another phenomenon. In reality, a natural phenomenon is studied from the observation of the phenomenon itself. A teaching aid is there merely to help students learn.

Continue reading “Teaching Aid”

False Analogy in the Use of Scale Models in Flat-Earth “Experiments”

Flat-Earthers like to use scale models to represent an actual object. They would apply the facts they observe from the model to the actual object itself. It is the fallacy of false analogy. The two situations can be substantially different. Just because both the scale model and the real object looks the same, it does not mean they are similar in another aspect.

Observation of the real object is stronger evidence than any argument from analogy —like using a scaled-down model of the real object. Using an analogy to dismiss the result of direct observation of the real object is unreasonable.

Continue reading “False Analogy in the Use of Scale Models in Flat-Earth “Experiments””

False Analogy

A false analogy is a fallacy in which similarity in one respect of two concepts, objects, or events is taken as sufficient to establish that they are similar in another respect in which they are actually are not similar.

Almost all of what flat-Earthers happily claim as “experiments” are actually false analogies. They would take everyday objects and use them as analogies for actual objects. In reality, a shared similarity in both the analogy and the real thing is not sufficient to ‘prove’ both are similar in some other respect.

Continue reading “False Analogy”