Elephant Repellent Fallacy

Elephant repellent is one of the many smokescreens that are used to cover the fact that the reasoning is based on one of the three fallacies of Agrippa's trilemma. Whenever a logical fallacy is committed, the fallacy has its roots in Agrippa's trilemma. All human thought (without Divine revelation) is based on one of three unhappy possibilities. These three possibilities are infinite regress, circular reasoning, or axiomatic thinking. This problem is known as Agrippa's trilemma. Some have claimed that only logic and math can be known without Divine revelation; however, that is not true. There is no reason to trust either logic or math without Divine revelation. Science is also limited to the pragmatic because of the weakness on human reasoning, which is known as Agrippa's trilemma.

The Elephant Repellent Fallacy occurs when a claim is made that one thing prevents some other thing that doesn’t happen anyway. It is a false cure based on a false cause for a non-existent problem. Often, this fallacy is confused with a fallacy of solving a real problem with a radical action (such as gun control or wealth redistribution) that is not going to solve the problem (such as violent crime or poverty). That would be a fallacy of a wrong solution, an ineffective solution, or a harmful solution. Elephant repellent refers to non-existent problems such as global cooling and the coming ice age, which was thought to be a problem by most scientists between 1970 and 1980 and was reported in the media (at least 65 articles still exist on the Internet).

Examples of the Elephant Repellent Fallacy

“We must give up freedom to stop the imminent disaster."

This is a common application of the Overton Window effect. It works to create a new normal. Generally, the disasters are not elephant attacks, but other kinds of non-existent problems.