begging the question

Begging the question is a fallacy in reasoning whereby one assumes what one claims to be proving.

An argument is a form of reasoning in which one gives a reason or reasons in support of some claim. The reasons are called premises and the claim one tries to support with them is called the conclusion.

If one's premises entail one's conclusion, and one's premises are questionable, one is said to beg the question.

The following argument begs the question.

We know a god exists because we can see the perfect order of creation, an order which demonstrates supernatural intelligence in its design.

The conclusion of this argument is that a god exists. The premise assumes a creator and designer of the universe exists, i.e., that a god exists. In this argument, the arguer should not be granted the assumption that the universe exhibits intelligent design, but should be made to provide support for that claim.

irrelevant appeal to tradition

The irrelevant appeal to tradition is a fallacy in reasoning in which one argues that a practice or a belief is justifiable simply because it has a long and established history. An example of this fallacy can be found in an article by Valerie Reiss on how to choose a psychic:

Christianity sees divination as going against the Bible's mandate not to seek "soothsayers," because that would be expressing a lack of faith in God as omnipotent and all-knowing. Yet many ... of the world's religions and cultures have woven it into their fiber--Hinduism uses Vedic astrology to match marriage partners; in Chinese culture, an expert is consulted on the most mundane to crucial life matters--from when to get married to where to live. Wanting to know what will happen is not just a result of our modern brains grasping for control and answers; it's been the human condition for millennia, people have been seeking prophecies since Greeks took often long journeys to consult the Oracle at Delphi. ("5 Things to Know Before Going to a 'Psychic'")

wishful thinking

Wishful thinking is interpreting facts, reports, events, perceptions, etc., according to what one would like to be the case rather than according to the actual evidence. Wishful thinking is often coupled with self-deception. A person who is afraid of surgery and believes that chemotherapy is a hoax perpetrated by Big Pharma and the AMA may want to believe that the alkaline diet or Gerson therapy is her best chance at cancer survival, despite the lack of scientific evidence for either of those so-called alternative treatments. Her desire to believe in alternatives to surgery and chemotherapy may lead her to ignore the evidence in favor of the treatment recommended by science-based medical doctors. She may be taken in by glorious stories of people who were diagnosed with this or that kind of cancer which went away after doing the alternative treatment. The stories may be true, but the causal link between the alternative treatment and the remission of cancer is made in the mind of the believer. Rather than admit that just because one thing happened after another it isn't necessarily the case that the first thing caused the second, she believes that anyone who doesn't agree with her about the causal connection must be a shill for Big Pharma and the AMA.

Wishful thinking should not be confused with positive thinking, which, in its most absurd form is a kind of magical thinking that involves trying to make things happen by willing them to happen. In its best form, positive thinking is hopeful and optimistic, but realistic.

hindsight bias

"The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise."--Daniel Kahneman

Hindsight bias is the tendency to construct one's memory after the fact (or interpret the meaning of something said in the past) according to currently known facts and one's current beliefs. In this way, one appears to make the past consistent with the present and more predictive or predictable than it actually was. When a surprise event occurs and you say "I knew it all along," you probably didn't. Hindsight bias may be kicking in.

Hindsight bias accounts for the tendency of believers in prophecies and psychic predictions to retrofit events to past oracular claims, however vague or obscure (retroactive clairvoyance). For example, after the Challenger space shuttle disaster that killed seven U.S. astronauts on January 28, 1986, hindsight bias was used by followers of Nostradamus to claim that he had predicted it in the following verse:

recency bias

Recency bias is the tendency to think that trends and patterns we observe in the recent past will continue in the future. Predicting the future in the short term, even for highly changeable events like the weather or the stock market, according to events in the recent past, works fine much of the time. Predicting the future in the long term according to what has recently occurred has been shown to be no more accurate than flipping a coin in many fields, including meteorology, economics, investments, technology assessment, demography, futurology, and organizational planning (Sherden, The Future Sellers).

Doesn't it strike you as odd that with all the intelligence supposedly going on that such things as the breakup of the Soviet Union, the crumbling of the Berlin wall, the former head of Sinn Fein meeting with the Queen of England, the worldwide economic collapse of recent years, the so-called Arab Spring, the recent attacks on U.S. embassies in several Muslim countries, and a host of other significant historical events were not predicted by the experts? Wait, you say. So-and-so predicted this or that. Was it a lucky guess or was the prediction based on knowledge and skill? If the latter, we'd expect not just one correct prediction out of thousands, but a better track record than, say, flipping a coin. Find one expert who's consistently right about anything and we still have a problem. How can we be sure that this sharpshooter isn't just lucky? If thousands of people are making predictions, chance alone tells us that a few will make a right call now and then. The odds in favor of prediction success diminish the more events we bring in, but even someone who seems to defy the odds might be the one a million who gets lucky with a string of guesses. You flip the coin enough times and once in a while you will get seven heads in a row. It's not expected, but it is predicted by the laws of chance. Likewise with predicting how many hurricanes we'll have next year or what stocks to buy or sell  this year.

shoehorning

Shoehorning is the process of force-fitting some current affair into one's personal, political, or religious agenda. So-called psychics frequently shoehorn events to fit vague statements they made in the past. This is an extremely safe procedure, since they can't be proven wrong and many people aren't aware of how easy it is to make something look like confirmation of a claim after the fact, especially if you give them wide latitude in making the shoe fit. It is common, for example, for the defenders of such things as the Bible Code or the "prophecies" of Nostradamus to shoehorn events to the texts, thereby giving the illusion that the texts were accurate predictions.

A classic example of psychic shoehorning is the case of Jeanne Dixon. In 1956 she told Parade magazine: "As for the 1960 election Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office though not necessarily in his first term." John F. Kennedy was elected and was assassinated in his first term. This fact was shoehorned to fit her broad prediction and her reputation was made as the psychic who predicted JFK's violent death. In 1960 she apparently forgot her earlier prediction because she then predicted that JFK would fail to win the presidency. Many psychic detectives take advantage of shoehorning their vague and ambiguous predictions to events in an effort to make themselves seem more insightful than they really are.

confabulation

Have you ever told a story that you embellished by putting yourself at the center when you knew that you weren’t even there? Or have you ever been absolutely sure you remembered something correctly, only to be shown incontrovertible evidence that your memory was wrong? No, of course not. But you probably know or have heard of somebody else who juiced up a story with made-up details or whose confidence in his memory was shown to be undeserved by evidence that his memory was false.

Confabulation is an unconscious process of creating a narrative that is believed to be true by the narrator but is demonstrably false. The term is popular in psychiatric circles to describe narratives of patients with brain damage or a psychiatric disorder who make statements about what they perceive or remember. The narratives are known to be either completely fictional or in great part fantasy, but they are believed to be true by the patients.