Economic Reasoning and Fallacy of Composition: Pursuing a Woods-Walton Thesis

Authors

Maurice A. Finocchiaro, University of Nevada, Las VegasFollow

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

12-14-2016

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA)

Publisher

OSSA Conference Archive

Volume

2016

First page number:

1

Last page number:

7

Abstract

Woods and Walton deserve credit for including (in all editions of their textbook Argument) a discussion of “economic reasoning” and its susceptibility to the “fallacy of composition.” Unfortunately, they did not sufficiently pursue the topic, and argumentation scholars have apparently ignored their pioneering effort. Yet, obviously, economic argumentation is extremely important, and economists constantly harp on this fallacy. This paper calls attention to this problem, elaborating my own approach, which is empirical, historical, and meta-argumentational.

Disciplines

Philosophy

File Format

pdf

File Size

479 KB

Language

English

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Repository Citation

Finocchiaro, M. A. (2016). Economic Reasoning and Fallacy of Composition: Pursuing a Woods-Walton Thesis. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), 2016 1-7. OSSA Conference Archive.
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/philosophy_fac_articles/30