Fallacy of the single cause

All you want to know about Fallacy of the single cause

The fallacy of the single cause, also known as joint effect or causal oversimplification, is a logical fallacy of causation that occurs when it is assumed that there is one, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.

Often after a tragedy it is asked, "What was the cause of this?" Such language implies that there is one cause, when instead there were probably a large number of contributing factors. However, having produced a list of several contributing factors, it may be worthwhile to look for the strongest of the factors, or a single cause underlying several of them.

For instance, after a school shooting, editorialists debate whether it was caused by the shooter's parents, TV violence, stress on students, Hollywood or the accessibility of guns. In fact, many different causes — including some of those — may all have necessarily contributed.

Causal oversimplification is a specific kind of false dilemma where conjoint possibilities are ignored. In other words, the possible causes are assumed to be "A or B or C" when "A and B and C" or "A and B and not C" (etc.) are not taken into consideration.

See also

v • d • e
Informal fallacies
Begging the question · Fallacy of distribution (Composition · Division) · Gambler's fallacy and its inverse · Many questions · Red herring fallacy · Special pleading
Correlative-based fallacies
Deductive fallacies
Inductive fallacies
Vagueness and ambiguity
Equivocation
Questionable cause
Other types of fallacy
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause"

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