Overwhelming Exception

An overwhelming exception is an informal fallacy similar to a hasty generalization. It is a generalization that is accurate, but comes with one or more qualifications which eliminate so many cases that what remains is much less impressive than the initial statement might have led one to believe.

Examples:

  • "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" (The attempted implication (fallacious in this case) is that the Romans did nothing for us). This is a quotation from Monty Python's Life of Brian.
  • "Our foreign policy has always helped other countries, except of course when it is against our National Interest..." (The false implication is that our foreign policy always helps other countries).
  • "Well, I promise the answer will always be 'yes.' Unless 'no' is required." (from Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa)

See also faulty generalization for other fallacies involving generalization.

Fallacies of relevance
General
  • Dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid (Accident)
  • Ad nauseam (Argument from repetition)
  • Argumentum ad ignorantiam (Argument from ignorance)
  • Argumentum e silentio (Argument from silence)
  • Argumentum ad temperantiam (Argument to moderation)
  • Argumentum ad populum (Appeal to the people)
  • Base rate
  • Compound question
  • Evidence of absence
  • Ignoratio elenchi (Irrelevant conclusion)
  • Invincible ignorance
  • Loaded question
  • Moralistic
  • Naturalistic
  • Non sequitur
  • Proof by assertion
  • Special pleading
  • Straw man
  • Two wrongs make a right
Appeals to emotion
  • Fear
  • Flattery
  • Nature
  • Novelty
  • Pity
  • Ridicule
  • Children's interests
  • Invented here
  • Island mentality
  • Not invented here
  • Repugnance
  • Spite
Genetic fallacies
  • Ad hominem
  • Ad hominem tu quoque
  • Appeal to accomplishment
  • Appeal to authority
  • Appeal to etymology
  • Appeal to motive
  • Appeal to novelty
  • Appeal to poverty
  • Appeals to psychology
  • Argumentum ad lapidem (Appeal to the stone)
  • Appeal to tradition
  • Appeal to wealth
  • Association
  • Bulverism
  • Chronological snobbery
  • Ipse dixit (Ipse-dixitism)
  • Poisoning the well
  • Pro hominem
  • Reductio ad Hitlerum
Appeals to consequences
  • Appeal to force
  • Wishful thinking
Informal fallacies
  • Absence paradox
  • Begging the question
  • Blind men and an elephant
  • Cherry picking
  • Complex question
  • False analogy
  • Fallacy of distribution (Composition
  • Division)
  • Furtive fallacy
  • Hasty generalization
  • I'm entitled to my opinion
  • Loaded question
  • McNamara fallacy
  • Name calling
  • Nirvana fallacy
  • Rationalization (making excuses)
  • Red herring fallacy
  • Special pleading
  • Slothful induction
Correlative-based fallacies
  • False dilemma
  • Denying the correlative
  • Suppressed correlative
Deductive fallacies
  • Accident
  • Converse accident
Inductive fallacies
  • Sampling bias
  • Conjunction fallacy
  • False analogy
  • Hasty generalization
  • Misleading vividness
  • Overwhelming exception
Vagueness and ambiguity
  • Amphibology
  • Continuum fallacy
  • False precision
  • Slippery slope
Equivocation
  • Equivocation
  • False attribution
  • Fallacy of quoting out of context
  • Loki's Wager
  • No true Scotsman
  • Reification
Questionable cause
  • Animistic
  • Appeal to consequences
  • Argumentum ad baculum
  • Correlation does not imply causation (Cum hoc)
  • Gambler's fallacy and its inverse
  • Post hoc
  • Prescience
  • Regression
  • Single cause
  • Slippery slope
  • Texas sharpshooter
  • The Great Magnet
  • Wrong direction
  • List of fallacies
  • Other types of fallacy

Famous quotes containing the words overwhelming and/or exception:

    “The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population—the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it’s the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it’s the fools that form the overwhelming majority.”
    —Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)

    “The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)