Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

The Tree of Knowledge

I Don’t Believe It!

Dene Bebbington presents a couple of bad but popular arguments.

How often have you read or heard someone say something like “That’s not possible, it couldn’t have happened like that”? That person may think it’s a clever rebuttal which stops debate in its tracks and gives them the rhetorical victory, but it’s a fallacy in informal logic known as the argument from personal incredulity.

Humans have a need for certainty – we have a psychological preference against doubt – which is why this fallacy has a particular allure. To understand what’s going on when someone has committed this fallacy, we can unpack its unstated logic:

1. I can’t imagine how this thing could be true

2. But if this thing is true then I should be able to imagine how it’s true

…