User:TheHumanAmbassador/Analyzing Undertale Port Part 3

Why not bring a Round 3 around?

I'd have to do this work anyway later on when Discussions replaces Forums. Might as well get a head start, while also seeing if new problems would emerge if we tried doing precisely this on the Undertale Wiki.

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Section 1=Part 1

Part 2 (Both halves are included, they're in separate tabs)

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So now that we've established how logical arguments work, we're good to go, right? Well... no. There are many common mistakes that people make. Times where they form an argument where the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, even though it looks like it does. These are called logical fallacies.

There are two kinds of logical fallacies:Formal fallacies, and informal fallacies. Formal fallacies are problems with the structure of the argument. Informal fallacies are fallacies that are essentially "missing" premises.. Thus containing hidden ones... Which happen to be false (or at least not known to be true). (If a premise that's actually presented is false, that's a factual error. While that's a problem with your argument, it is an entirely separate issue from fallacies, and does not count as one.)

The non sequitor is a generic fallacy; this is because all formal fallacies are also non sequitors. So, we only use the term when a formal fallacy is commited that doesn't already have its own name.

Likewise, the red herring is another generic fallacy-Though it's an informal one.

If you make an argument that proves A.. And then use that to say that B is true, that's a red herring. A fallacy. If you're trying to prove B, then make an argument for B! (You're missing the argument that A implies B.)

A common fallacy is "appeal to authority". An argument that if an authority says that something is true... That means it is. This is not true-They can still be mistaken or lying. Instead, one should analyze the claim itself, and the evidence to support that claim. One can cite an authority... But it's only to present the authority's claim as a claim that you too are making. The authority's claim is only to be cited as a claim-It still needs to be analyzed, and it is bound by the same rules as it would be if you had made the claim on your own. Because all you're doing is presenting another argument made by someone else-Nothing more. If it doesn't hold up, it is to be rejected-Authority or no authority.

"This theory is true because Matpat said so!"-Argument from Authority

In fact, this is a common theme of many fallacies, so I'll get this done with right here and now:One should always analyze a claim strictly on the claim itself. The person making the claim is completely irrelevant. Assuming a link between the person making the claim and the claim itself is the basis for many, many fallacies. You know about the literary theory of Death of the Author? Well, you need to apply that principle to all logical arguments.. Because it DOES apply to all logical arguments. (Death of the Claimer? Death of the Claimant? Death of the Arguer?)

For instance, argumentum ad populum is the fallacy of thinking that since the majority of the people believe something to be true.. That it is. And ad hominem, where someone argues that since the person making the claim isn't credible/intelligent/, the claim is false. And tu quoque, the argument that since the arguer acts contrary to what they're claiming.. It's false.

Remember. The person making the argument doesn't matter. Only the argument itself does.

Another common fallacy is begging the question, also known as circular reasoning. This happens when an argument assumes itself to be true prior to making this conclusion-This would almost always be because the conclusion is given as one of the premises. It's not always obvious, though, as it's usually worded in a different way.


 * Premise 1:Humans have been deemed dangerous to the monsters.
 * Premise 2:If humans are dangerous to the monsters, then they'll declare them as a threat.
 * Conclusion:Therefore, the monsters consider humanity as a threat to them.

...Declaring humanity as a threat and deeming them dangerous are the same thing. No new information is gained. (For example:WHY were they considered dangerous?)

Yet another is post hoc, ergo propter hoc. This is the assumption that since event A happened before event B, then event A caused event B.


 * Premise 1:Chara arrived in New Home after the Royal Memorial Statue was built
 * Conclusion:The Royal Memorial Statue caused Chara to arrive there.

There are also those who use anecdotes as evidence... Which it's not. But this doesn't really apply much in Undertale (unless we're theorizing about Chara's morality, and people are discussing Chara's past.)

There's also argument from incredulity-This is an argument that since you can't imagine a possibility being true... It must be false. ...Yes, it's literally "it's not true because I can't see how it is true"! ...Yes, that is a fallacy.

There's also affirming the consequent. ...Here, have an argument that commits this fallacy.


 * Premise 1:If a monster absorbs a human SOUL, they gain massive power.
 * Premise 2:Undyne gained massive power
 * Conclusion:Undyne absorbed a human SOUL.

The problem here is that "if A, then B" does not imply "if B, then A."

There's plenty more fallacies to go over in the coming parts..

So let's continue in the next tab, shall we?


 * -|Section 2=Here, I'll go over the rest of the primary fallacies! (Which is really all of them except for very complex ones that require knowledge of how the burden of proof works. Well, that have a name, of course. Remember, if it doesn't have its own name, and it's a formal fallacy, you call it a non sequitur.)

Just like affirming the consequent is a fallacy, so is denying the antecedent.


 * Premise 1:If Frisk is a monster, they have a SOUL.
 * Premise 2:Frisk is not a monster
 * Conclusion:Frisk has no SOUL.

"If A, then B" does not imply "if not A, then not B". Only the contrapositive "if not B, then not A" is implied.

There is also the four-term fallacy. This is when a syllogism uses four terms when it should have three. The most common form of this is equivocation, where a word gets its meaning swapped out in the middle of the argument.


 * Premise 1:A monster is a person of unnatural wickedness or cruelty
 * Premise 2:Toriel is a monster
 * Conclusion:Toriel is wicked and/or cruel.

Premise 1 is valid, because that is indeed one of the definitions of a monster. But the "monster" from Premise 2 is not the same kind of monster as the "monster" of Premise 1-There is a different meaning this time.

The next fallacy we'll go over is affirming a disjunct.


 * Premise 1:Either people say that monster SOULs are made of love, hope, and compassion, or the Librarby is unreliable
 * Premise 2:The Librarby is unreliable
 * Conclusion:Nobody says that monster SOULs are made of love, hope, and compassion

The fallacy is assuming that "A or B" implies that A implies not-B. They can both be true. It's very similar to denying a conjuct-The assumption that "not both A and B" implies that "not-A" implies B. In a way, both fallacies are assuming that "A or B" and "not both A and B" imply each other. They don't.

Next up is appeal to emotion.

...This fallacy takes many forms. appeal to intution (The fallacy of saying that since it's intuitive, it's true!), appeal to normality (It's normal, so it's not a problem!), appeal to consequences (believing that the consequences of believing in something is an indication of whether or not it is true), appeal to gravity (The claim isn't being made seriously, so it's false), argumentum ad fastidium (It's gross, therefore it's wrong), appeal to hate (it makes you mad, so it's wrong)..

But essentially, the fallacy of appeal to emotion is using emotions as an argument.

Remember, how something feels is not the same as to how it is. Only logic will help us find the truth.

We continue in the next tab.

However, Jacky720 has made some great additions to this as well in their posts, so for some extra information, you can read the rest of this thread. (Actually Jacky, if you're reading this, what might be the best way to incorporate this? Should there be a tab with some features comments, and where they originated from? Adding in the link to the post in question in Discussions is doable. That way, we can all know it's not a fake quote.)


 * -|Section 3=Okay, now it's time for the THIRD part of this.

Yes, there's still some more primary fallacies.

For instance, there's illicit major and illicit minor.


 * Premise 1:All monsters have SOULs
 * Premise 2:No humans are monsters
 * Conclusion:No humans have SOULs.

...As you can see, this is also a case of denying the antecedent, if you look closely at the reasoning here.

And there's also the masked man fallacy. This is more distinct.


 * Premise 1:We know who Sans is
 * Premise 2:We do NOT know who the River Person is.
 * Conclusion:The River Person is not Sans.

Now, there might be other reasons to believe that Sans is not the River Person, but this argument is not one of them.

Now, at first glance, this might not seem like a fallacy. After all, if we replace "River Person" with Sans, we get a contradiction-So surely, "The River Person" CANNOT be the same as Sans, right?

But really, the mistake here is the amount of information we have on the subject. It's assuming that knowing what a thing is would be the same as knowing every single instance of that thing.

Let's imagine that there are only six monsters in the entire Underground:Sans, Papyrus, Undyne, Alphys, Toriel, and Asgore.

In that case, we can conclude that the River Person must be one of those six.

Now, there are more than 600 monsters in the Underground (I've done the calculations and found a lower bound), but the same principal applies-River Person has to be somebody, after all. (Though it could be a monster we've never seen.)

We know who Sans is. We know who Papyrus is. We know who Undyne is. We know who Alphys is.. We know who Toriel is, and we know who Asgore is.

Using the fallacy, we can rule out ALL of them, meaning that the River Person both is and isn't any of those six, creating a contradiction.

But if you think about it, it's not that whoever the River Person is, we don't know. It's that we don't know WHICH monster is equivelant with the River Person.

Let's try another argument, shall we? Maybe this one should expose the problem for you better.


 * Premise 1:Everyone knows who Sans is
 * Premise 2:The River Person is Sans
 * Conclusions:Everyone knows who the River Person is.

Are you starting to see why this is fallacious?

And there are informal fallacies I'm missing as well.

I'm sure you're all aware that one should take into account ALL the evidence, and search for it, right? Evidence both supporting your view, and the evidence against it?

Did you want to know what's it's called when you DON'T do that? It's called confirmation bias.

Now it's time for another one:Composition fallacy!


 * Premise 1:Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen
 * Premise 2:Hydrogen and oxygen are both gases at room temperature
 * Conclusion:Therefore, water is a gas at room temperature

..Okay, this one wasn't Undertale-related. ...I wasn't able to think of a case here.

Anyways, the fallacy is assuming that if parts to a whole have certain properties, then that whole will have these same properties. This is not always the case.

And it's converse is the fallacy of division-The fallacy that if the whole has a certain set of properties, then so do all of the parts.

Then there's the false dillema (also known as false dichotomy). (I'd actually classify it as a factual error, aka false premise, but.. it's considered a fallacy for some reason. I guess it's because the idea is that the false premise isn't supposed to appear in the argument?)


 * Premise 1 (hidden):Either A is true, or B is true
 * Premise 2:A is not true
 * Premise 3:Therefore, B is true.

...Basically, premise 1 is not necessarily true. (Yeah, I'm not sure why this isn't called a factual error.)

You see, sometimes, it's easy to stop at two possibilities. But before you say that something's true because the main alternative is gone, try and see if it's possible for there to be a third option. Or a fourth. Or a fifth.

...This will make MUCH more sense when we get into the burden of proof.

I continue in the next tab.


 * -|Section 4=

It's easy to say that since intuition tells us something is true, then it must be. But that's another fallacy.

There's also illicit contraposition. Usually, a contrapositive is implied by the original statement, but there is an exception to this.

Premise:No monsters are humans Conclusion:No non-humans are non-monsters.

Looks like your classical contrapositive, right? Well, there's a problem here.

The reason why contrapositives work is because it places one category inside of another.

If all As are also Bs, then if it is not a B, then it is not an A. In essence, category A exists inside of category B.

In this case, however, we are simply stating that no As are Bs-In essence, that the two categories never touch each other. That doesn't mean there's nothing outside of the whole system. We can't prove, from this alone, that humans and monsters are the only races out there (though the intro makes it clear that there were indeed only two races.. Though depending on what the intro is in reference to canon, it might not be necessarily true. Even still, I'm not creating a third race unless there's no other way to make the whole game be consistent, that wouldn't be even worse...)

Now for another fallacy, that is specific to Undertale itself, but based upon a common fallacy!

Recall the definition of canon that I gave you in Part 1, and what Undertale should be analyzed as.

Undertale is.. a fictional world. We all know it's not an actual world. But it was made to operate as one, like all story-based games.

Canon is the actual world of Undertale itself. We see it through an imperfect medium, ie:The game itself. Not everything we observe within the game is necessarily canon-For example, Hard Mode probably isn't. Even still, we should start by trusting that what we observe is canon. I ended off with saying that we should out in about the same level of trust in the canonicity of events with the game as we put trust in the truthfulness of events we witnessed.

But the medium and world both have a creator:Toby Fox. And it is very common to say that if a mysterious event hasn't been explained, then that just means Toby goofed.


 * Premise 1: Asgore interacts with the HUD in Undertale.
 * Premise 2: We don't know how the HUD could be canonically interacted with.
 * Conclusion:So Toby Fox did it! (Just a plot hole, nothing to see here!)

Just because we don't know something doesn't mean we just say Toby did it.

So, what do I call this fallacy? Well, Toby Fox has an avatar that he uses.. a dog. So, using wordplay and the original fallacy this is based off of, I call it Dog of the Gaps.

Yes, the medium has imperfections. But we should at least try to explain the phenomena. Otherwise, we might deem something noncanon when in fact it held a key to the solution to a long unsolved mystery!

And that's all the deductive fallacies that I was able to find, which applies to Undertale. This ends Part 3, so you can either continue to Part 4, or look at the discussion of this part.