Composition Fallacy

Type

Informal

AKA

Part-to-Whole Fallacy

Description

Assuming that what is true of the parts must be true of the whole.

Examples

"Each piece of this machine is lightweight, so the machine must be lightweight."
"Every player on the team is a star, so the team must be unbeatable."

Linked from

9-11 Terrorist attacks

Reason for rejection: The collapse mechanisms were consistent with structural damage from impact and prolonged, unfought fires weakening steel. No physical evidence of explosives or thermite was found. Controlled demolition requires weeks…

Argument from Contingency

The move from contingent parts to a contingent whole is unearned. That each thing in the universe depends on something else does not show that the universe as a whole depends on anything. Every brick in a wall rests on another brick; it do…

Argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason

David Hume made the essential point in 1779 (Dialogues, Part IX): if each member of a collection is explained, it is a further demand, and an unwarranted one, to ask for an explanation of the collection as a whole (Composition Fallacy). Le…

Argument from the Unity of Reality

That parts interact does not make the whole an object with a cause. Everything in the universe is connected by gravity and shared history. It does not follow that the collection is a thing which must have been unified by something outside…

Emergence

It is the answer to the Composition Fallacy and the Division Fallacy: what is true of the parts need not be true of the whole, and the other way round.

Aristotle

He appears here in three ways. His unmoved mover is the ancestor of every cosmological argument, including the Kalam Cosmological Argument and the First Cause Argument, and Thomas Aquinas built the Five Ways on him. His virtue ethics, in w…