I personally just model errors like that as “projection”. The error here is “I can’t think of any more possibilities, therefore, more possibilities do not exist”. It’s very common for people to assume that other things are bounded by the same limitations as they are. The concept of “unknown unknowns” is related here as well.
More generally, when people talk about life and reality, they talk about themselves, even if they do not realize it. They assume their map is the territory. For instance, if a person says “Life is suffering”, that may be true for them, and every counter-argument they hear may even evaluate to false in their model of reality, but that still doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone. Another comment mentioned “Proof by failure of imagination” and I like that name, since the fallacy is an error which occurs in a person. When we say “logical error” we don’t mean that there’s an error in logic itself, but in its use. If something is implicit for long enough, we risk forgetting it (I think this happened to morality. Now certain things are considered good in an absolute sense, rather than in a context)
If somebody uses a “proof by contradition”, then a single example is enough (∃), but this argument is in the other direction, so one needs to show that something is true for all examples (∀) and not just some (∃). The only reason I can think of that somebody would make this error, is that they consider the examples they thought of to be “the best”. If you can refute the best argument for why something would happen, it’s easier to assume that it won’t (I guess this is what steelmanning is?). This method works fine for smaller problem spaces, but quickly grows useless because of the inherent asymmetry between attacking and defending
I personally just model errors like that as “projection”. The error here is “I can’t think of any more possibilities, therefore, more possibilities do not exist”. It’s very common for people to assume that other things are bounded by the same limitations as they are. The concept of “unknown unknowns” is related here as well.
More generally, when people talk about life and reality, they talk about themselves, even if they do not realize it. They assume their map is the territory. For instance, if a person says “Life is suffering”, that may be true for them, and every counter-argument they hear may even evaluate to false in their model of reality, but that still doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone.
Another comment mentioned “Proof by failure of imagination” and I like that name, since the fallacy is an error which occurs in a person. When we say “logical error” we don’t mean that there’s an error in logic itself, but in its use. If something is implicit for long enough, we risk forgetting it (I think this happened to morality. Now certain things are considered good in an absolute sense, rather than in a context)
If somebody uses a “proof by contradition”, then a single example is enough (∃), but this argument is in the other direction, so one needs to show that something is true for all examples (∀) and not just some (∃). The only reason I can think of that somebody would make this error, is that they consider the examples they thought of to be “the best”. If you can refute the best argument for why something would happen, it’s easier to assume that it won’t (I guess this is what steelmanning is?). This method works fine for smaller problem spaces, but quickly grows useless because of the inherent asymmetry between attacking and defending