Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Definist fallacy

Definist fallacy

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Current topic is not independently notable and should just be discussed (if at all) in a paragraph or section of the Naturalistic fallacy article. ExplodingCabbage (talk) 16:04, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some further elaboration:

The article right now is solely about a hypothetical fallacy discussed in one journal article by Frankena, whose sole point is to critique Moore's account of the naturalistic fallacy, and does so by inventing a broader "fallacy" called the "definist fallacy" and then arguing that it is not a fallacy at all.

Most sources that use the term "definist fallacy" do so in an entirely different sense to Frankena's. If you look at the first page of Google results for "definist fallacy", then, besides Wikipedia and pages that copied from Wikipedia, you will mostly see pages that use the term to describe a fallacy that involves either:

unfairly defining a term in such a manner as to favour your side of an argument, or
arguing that a term must be rigorously defined before it can be used

neither of which relate to the current article topic.

Note also that the existing redirect from Socratic fallacy is incorrect. The Socratic Fallacy is synonymous with yet another entirely different and unrelated "definist fallacy", not Frankena's that our article is currently about nor either of the other two that I mention above.

Thus even though the term is fairly popular, usage of it is overwhelmingly not related to the current article topic, which I suspect is probably better thought of as a minor subtopic for the Naturalistic fallacy article.

(And in any case, the article as it currently exists is awful, so even if a case exists for the "fallacy" from Frankena's 1939 argument against Moore having its own dedicated article, nothing would really be lost by starting again from scratch.) ExplodingCabbage (talk) 16:12, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Philosophy-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 17:05, 12 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]