Philosophy:False attribution
False attribution can refer to:
- Misattribution in general, when a quotation or work is accidentally, traditionally, or based on bad information attributed to the wrong person or group
- A specific fallacy where an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased, or fabricated source in support of an argument.[1]
Incorrect identification of source
One 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 (see also: obliteration by incorporation and Churchillian Drift).[2]
Such misattributions may originate as a sort of fallacious argument, if use of the quotation is meant to be persuasive, and attachment to a more famous person (whether intentionally or through misremembering) would lend it more authority.
In Jewish biblical studies, an entire group of falsely-attributed books is known as the pseudepigrapha.
Fallacy
A fraudulent advocate may go so far as to fabricate a source in order to support a claim. For example, the "Levitt Institute" was a fake organisation created in 2009 solely for the purposes of (successfully) fooling the Australia n media into reporting that Sydney was Australia’s most naive city.[3]
Contextomy (quoting out of context) is a type of false attribution.[4]
See also
- Fake news
References
- ↑ Humbug! The skeptic’s field guide to spotting fallacies in thinking, a textbook on fallacies. "False Attribution": p. 56.
- ↑ Mermin, N. David (2004). "Could Feynman Have Said This?". Physics Today 57 (5): 10–11. doi:10.1063/1.1768652. Bibcode: 2004PhT....57e..10M.
- ↑ "Deception Detection Deficiency". 2009-09-27. Archived from the original on 2021-12-16. https://web.archive.org/web/20211216072721/https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/deception-detection-deficiency/9974778.
- ↑ McGlone, Matthew S. (2005). "Quoted Out of Context: Contextomy and Its Consequences". Journal of Communication 55 (2): 330–346. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2005.tb02675.x.
Further reading
- Garson O'Toole (2017). Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations. Little A. ISBN 978-1503933408.
External links
| Formal |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Informal |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Categories
 |  |
