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The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a logical fallacy in which information that has no relationship is interpreted or manipulated until it appears to have meaning. The name comes from a story about a Texan who fires several shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.

The fallacy does not apply if one had an ex ante, or prior, expectation of the particular relationship in question before examining the data. For example one might, previous to examining the information, have in mind a specific physical mechanism implying the particular relationship. One could then use the information to give support or cast doubt on the presence of that mechanism. Alternatively, if additional information can be generated using the same process as the original information, one can use the original information to construct a hypothesis, and then test the hypothesis on the new data. See hypothesis testing. What one cannot do is use the same information to construct and test the same hypothesis — to do so would be to commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

The fallacy is related to the clustering illusion, which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns in randomness where none actually exist.

Contents 1 Examples 2 Related logical fallacies 3 See also 4 External links

Examples

• Attempts to find cryptograms in the works of William Shakespeare, which tended to report results only for those passages of Shakespeare for which the proposed decoding algorithm produced an intelligible result. This could be explained as an example of the fallacy because passages which do not match the algorithm have not been accounted for. The fallacy could also be an explanation for cryptograms in the Bible.

Related logical fallacies

• "The roulette ball has landed on odd numbers eight times in a row. Therefore, it's more likely to land on an even number next time." (gambler's fallacy.)
• "More children in town A have leukemia than in town B. Therefore, there must be something wrong with town A." (cum hoc ergo propter hoc or post hoc ergo propter hoc.)

See also

• Availability heuristic
• Correlative based fallacies
• Moving the goalpost, a related fallacy used to obtain the opposite conclusion.
• Anthropic principle, a theory to explain the low, but existent, probability of intelligent life.

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 False dilemma (Perfect solution) · Denying the correlative · Suppressed correlative Deductive fallacies Accident · Converse accident Inductive fallacies Biased sample · Conjunction fallacy · False analogy · Hasty generalization · Misleading vividness · Overwhelming exception Vagueness and ambiguity 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 Circular cause and consequence · Correlation does not imply causation (Cum hoc) · Post hoc · Regression fallacy · Single cause · Texas sharpshooter · Wrong direction Other types of fallacy

External links

• Skepdic's Dictionary entry
• Fallacy files entry

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 6 January 2009, at 08:27.

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