circular cause and consequence
Circular cause and consequence is a logical fallacy where the consequence of the phenomenon is claimed to be its root cause. It is exemplified in the question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
Examples
There are many real world examples of circular cause-and-effect, in which the chicken-or-egg question helps identify the analytical problem:
- Fear of economic downturn cause people to spend less, which reduces demand, causing economic downturn
- Fear of violence/war can make people more defensive/violent, the resulting tension/violence will cause more fear.
- More jobs cause more consumption, which requires more production, and thus more jobs.
Contradictions
Circular cause and consequence is often confused with mutually contradictory statements, such as the famous 'catch 22', in which two mutually exclusive statements seem to send the reader back and forth in a cycle. Circular reasoning however is a problem of finding the 'root cause' however (e.g. which came first) which is not the basis of the 'catch 22' or any of the following examples of contradictions.
For example, Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, where the White Queen states "Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today". Since every tomorrow becomes eventually today as the future turns into present, and past is gone forever, the result is that poor Alice will never have jam.
A real-life mutual contradiction is that one cannot get a job without experience, but one cannot get experience without a job. In this respect, the initial move to the job market can be very challenging.
Mutual contradiction is much akin to No true Scotsman fallacy, but where "No true Scotsman" fallacy assumes the premise wrong in an exception, the circular cause and consequence implies an impossible outcome in an exception. This implication makes circular cause and consequence similar to a Catch-22, where two mutually exclusive premises are required to reach the conclusion, hence the conclusion is impossible.
| Informal fallacies | |
|---|---|
| Special pleading • Red herring • Gambler's fallacy and its inverse • Fallacy of distribution (Composition • Division) • Begging the question • Many questions | |
| Correlative-based fallacies: | False dilemma (Perfect solution) • Denying the correlative • Suppressed correlative |
| Deductive fallacies: | Accident • Converse accident |
| Inductive fallacies: | Hasty generalization • Overwhelming exception • Biased sample • False analogy • Misleading vividness • Conjunction fallacy |
| Vagueness and Ambiguity: | False precision • Slippery slope • Continuum fallacy |
| Equivocation: | Equivocation • False attribution • Fallacy of quoting out of context • Loki's Wager • No true Scotsman |
| Questionable cause: | Correlation does not imply causation (Cum hoc) • Post hoc • Regression fallacy • Texas sharpshooter • Circular cause and consequence • Wrong direction • Single cause |
| Other types of fallacy | |
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