Fallacy of quoting out of context
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The practice of "quoting out of context", sometimes referred to as "contextomy," is a logical fallacy and type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning. Quoting out of context is often a means to set up "straw man" arguments. Straw man arguments are arguments against a position which is not held by an opponent, but which may bear superficial similarity to the views of the opponent. [1]
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[edit] Examples
[edit] There is no God
The Bible contains the sentence:
A fool says in his heart, "There is no God."
If the context is omitted, this becomes:
There is no God.
[edit] Absurd in the highest degree
Another example found in debates over evolution is an out-of-context quotation of Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
This sentence, sometimes truncated to the phrase "absurd in the highest degree", is often presented as part of an assertion that Darwin himself perceived his own theory of evolution as absurd. However, Darwin went on to explain that the apparent absurdity of the evolution of an eye is no bar to its occurrence.
The quote in context is
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Quoting Out of Context Fallacy Files.
