A couple of months ago, I made note of the neosemantic fallacy: “the magic of neologisms, which encourage [one] to infer that a new word refers to a new kind of thing.”1
I realized yesterday that it was just a flavor of the fallacy of reification. JS Mill characterized this as the tendency “to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own.”
The fact that giving reification a new name made me think of it as a distinct fallacy means that I committed the neosemantic fallacy in my earlier post. So, although it’s not the autological fallacy, it is an autological fallacy.2
- Citing Habgood-Coote, who attributes it to Nguyen.
- Finally, a fallacy post that isn’t also a politics post!