Going into the particular examination of elementary fallacies, we first come across the Fallacy of Accident, an ontological transgression that consists of confusing the essence with the accident, elevating a supervening or juxtaposed property to the category of substantial definition. Realistic philosophy teaches us that the essence constitutes the substance of a reality, that which cannot be suppressed without destroying the concept itself, while the accident represents a particular and contingent quality that can be present or missing without altering the nature of the entity. When the brain operates through quick perceptual shortcuts to save glycolytic energy, it easily falls into the old adage that habit does not make a monk; If we defined birds by the accidental quality of being vertebrates that fly, we would commit the absurdity of excluding penguins from the category and incorporating bats into it. This cognitive short circuit is the plague of the contemporary superficial press, which draws universal conclusions from behaviors that are only verified accidentally in particular individuals, launching anathemas on entire institutional bodies or classes of citizens for the singular transgressions of some of their members, clumsily judging the fair according to personal fortune and not according to its intrinsic reality.
This deviation is followed by the Fallacy of Gratuitous Affirmation, known in classical jurisprudence and in argumentative theory as the vice of Ipsedixitism, named after the Latin expression ipse dixit—he himself said it—which refers to the arrogance of imposing an assertion by the sole weight of one's own will or the volume of the enunciation, completely evading the burden of proof. Theologically, this procedure reflects the sin of arrogance of the intellect, while in the neurology of communication it represents a dominance maneuver where the sender tries to overwhelm the prefrontal cortex of the receiver through sound assertiveness. It is the distinctive mark of ideological propaganda and consumer advertising, where categorical statements devoid of the slightest demonstrative support abound; Every righteous thinker has the inexcusable duty to reject such claims, remembering that what is gratuitously affirmed can and should be equally gratuitously discarded.
The danger multiplies when plot infidelity is hidden in the Fallacy of Ambiguity, also called equivocation or amphibology, which arises when a term or formulation is used with two different meanings within the same deductive chain, destroying the coherence of the syllogism. If the temporal cortex of the brain does not keep the semantic content of a word stable and fixed from the major premise to the conclusion, it leads to dialectical monstrosities. This is what happens when it is argued that every person who causes a wound to the human body is a punishable aggressor, and then concludes that the surgeon who operates to save a life must be treated as a criminal, confusing the malicious injury with the saving medical act; Such a semantic perversion would allow anyone who enjoys a traditional sweet with an anatomical name to be accused of cannibalism. In the politics of our time, this misunderstanding is deliberately manipulated by those who confuse criminal responsibility—which requires a final sentence and full proof—with political or ethical responsibility, which requires the preservation of civic trust and renunciation in the face of reasonable doubt, using the first concept to shield public immorality.