The fallacy of a false attribution occurs when an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument. A contextomy is a type of false attribution.
A particular case of misattribution is the Matthew effect: a quotation is often attributed to someone more famous than the real author. This leads the quotation to be more famous, but the real author to be forgotten.[1]
References
External links
- Quoting Out of Context Fallacy Files.
- Humbug! The skeptic’s field guide to spotting fallacies in thinking – textbook on fallacies. False Attribution (p56).
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
