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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Slippery slope arguments can be fallacious due to vague terms rather than causal relations

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.A series of small steps may lead from an acceptable starting point to an unacceptable conclusion
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    • 2.The steps in such a series may depend on vague terms rather than genuine causal relations
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    • 3.Vague terms lack clear boundaries, enabling apparently good reasoning to yield false conclusions
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Sorites paradoxes demonstrate that predicates like 'heap' or 'bald' lack determinate boundaries, making incremental reasoning formally invalid.
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    • 2.Slippery slope arguments structurally mirror sorites reasoning by exploiting tolerance principles: if n grains is a heap, so is n-1.
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    • 3.Where the slope's steps depend on such tolerance principles, the argument's force derives from vagueness, not empirical causal chains.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Timothy Williamson's epistemicism notwithstanding, vague predicates create epistemic inaccessibility that licenses conflation of adjacent cases.
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    • 2.When slope arguments chain such conflations across a continuum, the cumulative error is semantic, not a prediction of causal momentum.
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