Woods and Hansen (1997) showed that, contrary to Hintikka (1987), the fallacies in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations are not strongly relative to refutation-oriented question-and-answer dialogues, but are failures to satisfy Aristotle’s conditions for being a deduction. They are however weakly relative to them, in the sense of being the fallacies that one finds in them. Aristotle finds quite different fallacies in public speeches and in attempts at proof. Aristotle has a generic conception of mistaken reasoning, a conception that includes false assumptions as well as inferential errors (including the error of thinking that something does not follow when it does).
