Masked-man fallacy

In philosophical logic, the masked-man fallacy (also known as the intensional fallacy or epistemic fallacy)[1] is committed when one makes an illicit use of Leibniz's law in an argument. Leibniz's law states that if A and B are the same object, then A and B are indiscernible (that is, they have all the same properties). By modus tollens, this means that if one object has a certain property, while another object does not have the same property, the two objects cannot be identical. The fallacy is "epistemic" because it posits an immediate identity between a subject's knowledge of an object with the object itself, failing to recognize that Leibniz's Law is not capable of accounting for intensional contexts.

  1. ^ Bowell, Tracey; Kemp, Gary (2013). Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide. Routledge. p. 225. ISBN 978-0-415-47182-4.