The act of creating a fabricated or mislabeled logical fallacy and attributing it to your opponent in order to discredit them. This is not simply identifying a real fallacy; it's inventing a non-existent flaw in reasoning, giving it a Latin-ish name, and accusing the other person of committing it. The goal is to weaponize the vocabulary of logic to create a rhetorical "gotcha" that sounds sophisticated but is itself a deceptive construct. It's the equivalent of counterfeit intellectual currency—it looks like a valid critique but is actually a hollow fabrication designed to win points.
Example: "When I pointed out a flaw in his analogy, he shouted, 'That's a classic reductio ad pizza fallacy—you're just reducing my complex argument to a food metaphor!' He'd just forged a fallacy on the spot. There's no such thing, but it sounded academic and shut down the conversation, which was his real goal." Fallacy Forging
by AbzuInExile January 31, 2026
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