Someone posted this article on Facebook about a drink company getting sued because they claim that their product is “all natural”, but it contains what the plaintiffs in the lawsuit say are not natural ingredients. https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/463609871/beaumont-costales-files-class-action-lawsuit-against-lacroix-water
I jokingly responded with: “They meant ‘natural’ in the sense that everything that exists was created by the big bang”. Obviously, this is not what is meant by “natural”, as most of us use that term, in drink or food products, so it was recognized I was making a joke.
I regard what I did there as what Ayn Rand called “context dropping”. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/context-dropping.html
When done seriously, and not in the context of a joke, it indicates a serious thinking problem, especially if it is a “mental habit”.
In Objectivism, context is considered a very important concept. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/context.html
The Objectivist view of concept-formation depends on having a context. So, for instance, when you form the concept “cat”, you do so in a certain context. You see two or more concrete instances of cats, which have distinct identities. They might have different colors and different amounts of fur and size. One cat may be old, while the other cat is young. But, when you look at those two concrete cats in comparison to, say, a parrot, their similarities, are much greater than any of their differences. According to Objectivism, you cannot form the concept “cat” without a “foil” of some other entity that is so different, that these two entities seem similar by comparison. (You’ve then achieved what Objectivism calls the “unit perspective” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/unit.html
on cats, and can then say that you are omitting the differences between the two cats on the premise that they must have some size, color, and amount of fur, but it can be any within certain ranges, which is “measurement-ommission” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/measurement.html
.)
I think if you are a “habitual context dropper”, then your mind would be paralyzed, because you couldn’t form concepts with any great success.
However, in logic, I think what I was jokingly doing would be considered the “fallacy of equivocation”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
The “fallacy of equivocation” is an example of an “informal fallacy”. https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions.html
However, I’ve noticed that most of the informal fallacies in logic seem like instances of what Rand called “context dropping”. For instance, argument ad hominem involves attacking someone’s character or motives for holding a particular viewpoint rather than the truth or falsity of that viewpoint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominemhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Pointing out bad motives can sometimes be a valid form of critique, such as when you are pointing out that a witness in court has a motive to lie about what they are testifying about. That has to do with whether the witness is an accurate reporter of *facts observed*, whether they are “credible”, rather than a *logical argument*, which, assuming the truth of the facts used, is independent of the credibility of the person making the logical argument. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adhomine.html
So, what I suspect is that all informal fallacies in logic are really just common examples of what Rand called “context dropping”. Unfortunately, Miss Rand didn’t write much on what she considered to be “context dropping”, although I noted early on in my reading of her that she used the term a good bit. It’s unfortunate that she didn’t write more on this, as I believe she coined it. The closest I’ve ever seen to the same meaning is “taking something out of context”. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/take+something+out+of+context
However, that has more to do with just misrepresenting what someone said by quoting just some small portion of what they said. “Context dropping” as Miss Rand used the term is more about something that goes on within the mind of the person, with their own thinking, which becomes incorrect because of their failure to “hold context”.