Latin questions (Lingua latina)

[Khemehekis]

This thread is for questions involving Latin -- the tongue of Ancient Rome. The scope covers both Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin.

[Khemehekis]

I am doing a write-up on a text on logical fallacies published in Ciladian in Ancient Ciladia (a country that once existed on Kankonia). There's one I'd like to give a Latin name to, in addition to its Ciladian name, but am not too sure about.

This fallacy I want to call a Classical Latin translation of "if there, not here". It seems to be si ibi, non hic, but I'm not sure about it.

(For those who are wondering, this is the fallacy when people argue that people don't need to do something in one place, and therefore shouldn't be allowed to do it there, because they can do it in another place. "You can kiss in private, so we can go around arresting people who kiss in public!" Basically, this is like saying, "You can watch movies at home now, so you shouldn't be allowed to watch them in the cinema!" This fallacy frequently comes up in deletion discussions on places like Wikipedia and Wiktionary. People will often argue, for instance, that you can read articles on Pokémon species and other Pokémon stuff at Bulbapedia, and therefore Wikipedia shouldn't have an article on this or that Pokémon species (even when it meets Wikipedia's notability criteria), or Wiktionary shouldn't have an entry for this or that Pokémon-related word (even when it meets CFI).

Spoiler:

And then this gets into an even-broader fallacy: confusing "doesn't need to" with "shouldn't be allowed to". Come to think of it, no one really needs to eat candy. So would it be OK with you if your country made a law against eating candy?

)

[Salmoneus]

That's not a fallacy, though. That's all totally logical. It leaves one premise (the reason to not want something to happen in a certain place) unexpressed, but the argument itself is logical.

Premise 1: some people don't like it when other people kiss in public [kind of implied by the very fact of people having this argument!]
Premise 2: people have a right to kiss
Deduction from premise 2: it would be wrong to prevent people kissing
Premise 3: nobody is stopping people kissing in private
Deduction from premise 3: stopping people kissing in public doesn't stop people kissing
Further deduction: stopping people kissing in public doesn't infringe the right to kiss
Further deduction: there is no reason not to stop people kissing in public
Conclusion: since there is a reason to stop people kissing in public (see premise 1) and no reason not to stop people kissing in public, it is right to stop people from kissing in public.

That's not a fallacy. It's entirely logical. It can only be defeated by the opponent (you) introducing additional premises (like "the state can never regulate the behaviour of the individual simply to reduce unhappiness", or "there is a specific right to kiss in public", or "the unhappiness of those required to limit their kissing to private places is more important than the unhappiness of those forced to watch public kissing"), arguing for those premises and having them accepted.

An argument is only fallacious if it involves inaccurate deductions; it's not fallacious just because the person using the argument doesn't share your premises!

Likewise with the wikipedia example. There's always been a convention - a premise - that it's better to give detailed information of little general interest by linking to a publicly-accessible resource similar in register to wikipedia, rather than by duplicating entries from those resources onto wikipedia. Given that, it makes sense that when obscure information (of highly questionable notability in the first place) is freely available on a specialised wiki resource, that is a reason not to also have that information on wikipedia itself, but only to provide links to it. That's not fallacious! You may disagree with the premise, but that doesn't make it a fallacy!


EDIT: fwiw, I'm not sure whether we need a new thread every time somebody wants to complain about an argument they had on wikipedia or the like!

[Khemehekis]

EDIT: fwiw, I'm not sure whether we need a new thread every time somebody wants to complain about an argument they had on wikipedia or the like!

The reason I created a new thread was because the primary purpose of my last post was to find out how to say "if there, not here" in Latin. You may or may not have notced that we didn't already have a thread for Latin on the LL&N-E board. (I was quite surprised when I realized we didn't, because Latin is one of the most-studied foreign languages in the West, and so many conlangers make their second conlang (after their cipher first one) a Latin case rip-odd.) If we had already had a Latin thread, I would have posted my question in that existing one.