misargument

English

Etymology

From mis- +‎ argument.

Noun

misargument (plural misarguments)

1. (rare) incorrect argument
   • 1847, John Howard Hinton, Julius Charles Hare, Richard Dawes, The True Remedy for the Evils of the Age[1]:

     should not merely try to establish our own opinion dogmatically and historically, and content ourselves with exposing and refuting the misstatements and misarguments of our erring brethren:

   • 1877, William Ricketts Cooper, The Horus Myth in Its Relation to Christianity[2]:

     to be in doubt whether a paper written in defence of Christian doctrine, has not in itself afforded a handle to infidel misarguments.

   • 1977, Oak Ridge Bicentennial Lectures: Technology and Society[3].

     Questioner: Your comments about Arthur Kantorwitz's court and the arguments before or perhaps the misarguments before it reminded me of what we might get in the campaign for election to build an elected scientific priesthood.

   • 1986, Thomas Hugh Chance, Euthydemian Studies: Analysis of Plato's Euthydemus[4]:

     The author of the Topics teaches generalities about the forms and ingredients of arguments and misarguments.

   • 1975, Open Sessions of the Committee on Rules and Administration[5]:

     That is a clear misargument of what the law is. Ballot No. 8 in the other case was a cross-over. It was not a write-in.

   • 1983, Maritime Administration Reauthorization[6]

     Those ships would not be built in the U.S. anyway and this is a misnomer and a misargument which is frequently utilized, that we are losing jobs by building those ships overseas.

   • 1990, People v. Gonzalez[7]:

     Serious prosecutorial misargument has occasionally led us to conclude that a pre-Brown jury was misled.

   • 1993, People v. Montiel[8]:

     In any event, we have consistently deemed such misargument harmless under similar circumstances, and we do so here. The jury was instructed to consider only those sentencing factors it deemed "applicable."

See also

• demagogism
• demagoguery
• demagogy
• fallacy
• misclaim
• misrepresentation
• misstatement
• sophism
• sophistry
• See also Thesaurus:incorrect argument

Further reading

• “fallacy” in Moby Thesaurus II, Grady Ward, 1996.