Logical Fallacy of Failure to Elucidate

Failure to elucidate 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. This is a fallacy that superimposes another level of fallacy on top or one or more of the three fallacies of Agrippa's trilemma.

The logical fallacy of failure to elucidate occurs when the definition of a word or concept is more difficult to understand than the word or concept itself or a definition that is doesn't describe the word or concept in a realistic way.

Examples of the Logical Fallacy of Failure to Elucidate

"Publishing in the online journal Life, Andrulis used over 100 pages to define dozens of newly invented words and to describe how atoms, molecules, cell systems, ecosystems, and the solar system are made of shape-shifting circular vortices called gyres. Supposedly, when smaller gyres collapsed in synchrony with other gyres long ago, they naturally formed larger and more complex systems. Andrulis called this process "complexifying," and he claimed that simple chemicals coalesced in just the right way to form life when collapsing gyres formed gyres-within-gyres." (Reference)

This is an example of a definition that is too complex and a story that is too complex to be feasible.

"Natural selection is the survival of the fittest and the method by which living things advance to become more and more complex."

How about "Natural selection is a misnomer that would better be called genetic information loss that could never allow living things to advance and become more complex without the generation of new and innovative universal information." Note that mutation produced changes by damaging the DNA of subsequent generations permanently but has never been observed to add new, innovative, universal information. And variation that is available in the DNA is already programmed into the information that is designed into the cell, so it doesn't create new, innovative, universal information either.

Fallacy Abuse

Rocky: "Human beings are created as a trinity, spirit, mind or soul, and body."

Sandy: "What is a spirit?"

Rocky: "The spirit is non-material and is the highest authority of our beings."

Sandy: "Ha Ha! I caught you. This is the logical fallacy of failure to elucidate. Your definition is more complex than the concept of the spirit. You didn't' tell me what exactly is the spirit, how it is detected, whether there are negative and positive ones, or how you know."

Rocky's definition is accurate, though incomplete. We don't fully understand the human spirit. There is nothing that is fully known. The fact that we don't know everything about a given thing is not a fallacy of failure to elucidate. Both of the attributes of the spirit that Rocky gave are evident from what God is revealing through Scripture. We may not know all that much about the spirit, but that is true about everything in the Universe. We are constantly learning more. Now, it would not be fallacy abuse for Sandy to ask how the spirit is detected or whether there are positive or negative ones. Sandy may found out that those questions don't make sense or that Rocky doesn't know that answers to those questions, but not knowing the answer to a question is not a fallacy, so Sandy is clearly guilty of fallacy abuse.