Grain of Salt: how to take a claim apart
Specimen
Nine out of ten owners recommend it.
What exactly is being asserted, in one sentence, with nothing loaded into it.
Do the premises actually reach that conclusion, or is there a step missing.
What would count as evidence here, and is any of it on the table.
Out of how many, compared with what, and who ended up in the sample.
Skeptical thinking is the habit of asking what would have to be true for a claim to be wrong, and then looking to see whether it is.
Grain of Salt is an independent reference on how a claim is tested. It covers the named faults of argument, the named faults of judgement, how an argument is built, what counts as evidence, how to check a source, how to read a number, and what the scientific method is actually protecting you from. Seventy-two checks, each with the test you can run on the next claim you meet.
This site explains how to test a claim. It does not adjudicate live disputes and it never holds a named living person up as an example of bad reasoning. Every example on it is invented here.
The eight instruments
- Fallacies Faults in the argument itself: the step from premises to conclusion does not hold.
- Biases Faults in the judgement: what you noticed, how it was worded, what you wanted to be true.
- Reasoning How an argument is built, and the two ways a conclusion can follow from premises.
- Evidence What counts as evidence, who has to produce it, and what would settle the question.
- Sources Where the claim came from, and what survives the journey to the headline.
- Numbers The checks to run on a statistic before believing anything it is used to prove.
- Method The method as a procedure for not fooling yourself, and what pseudoscience leaves out.
- This Site What this site is and is not.
Fallacies
Faults in the argument itself: the step from premises to conclusion does not hold.
- Ad hominem
- Logical fallacies
- Appeal to authority
- Appeal to emotion
- Circular reasoning
- Equivocation
- False dilemma (false dichotomy)
- False equivalence
- Hasty generalization
- The loaded question
- Moving the goalposts
- No true Scotsman
- Non sequitur
- Post hoc ergo propter hoc
- The red herring fallacy
- The slippery slope fallacy
- The straw man fallacy
- The bandwagon effect
- Composition and division
- Tu quoque
Biases
Faults in the judgement: what you noticed, how it was worded, what you wanted to be true.
Reasoning
How an argument is built, and the two ways a conclusion can follow from premises.
Evidence
What counts as evidence, who has to produce it, and what would settle the question.
Sources
Where the claim came from, and what survives the journey to the headline.
Numbers
The checks to run on a statistic before believing anything it is used to prove.
Method
The method as a procedure for not fooling yourself, and what pseudoscience leaves out.