Argumentative Traps & Framing Fallacies

Primes about moves that distort a space of options or claims: false dilemma and no true scotsman narrow a category to win an argument, idealized-substrate fallacy and preference falsification hide the gap between stated and real conditions, and paradox and tolerance paradox show frames straining against their own logic.

10 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Cooperative Principle and Gricean Maxims — Cooperative communication.
• Escalation Dominance — Holding a credible per-rung advantage across a conflict's intensity ladder, so the contest resolves below the top because the disadvantaged party prefers stopping to climbing into a losing position.
• False Dilemma — A partition of a rich option space is presented as exhaustive when it is not, so reasoning proceeds inside cells while real alternatives have been suppressed.
• Idealized-Substrate Fallacy — Designing against a friction-stripped idealized substrate, then deploying onto a real one where the elided terms dominate.
• Moral Relativism — Morality depends on context.
• No True Scotsman — When a counterexample to a universal claim appears, membership in the subject category is redefined to exclude it, preserving the claim by emptying it of content.
• Paradox — Contradictory but revealing truth.
• Preference Falsification — Under asymmetric cost on expression, agents voice a cheaper preference than the one they privately hold, so the visible distribution diverges from the held one.
• Rights vs. Freedoms — Claims vs liberties.
• Tolerance Paradox — A system defined by an open principle must refuse that principle to elements that would destroy it, or be destroyed by its own openness.