False Dilemma Fallacy
Also known as: False Dichotomy, Either/Or Fallacy, Black-and-White Thinking
Formulated by Aristotle (-350)
Definition
A logical fallacy that presents only two options as if they were the only possibilities, or as mutually exclusive, when in fact more options exist or the two are not actually incompatible. By artificially narrowing the field of choice, the argument forces a conclusion that a fuller picture would not support. The pattern was already implicit in the classical study of valid disjunctive reasoning that Aristotle laid out, since a disjunction ('either A or B') is only a safe basis for inference when A and B genuinely exhaust and exclude each other, a condition rhetoricians have exploited by faking ever since. In economic debate the fallacy often takes the shape of an implied 'either/or' between two uses of capital that are not actually competing on a one-to-one basis, for example presenting dividends and hiring as if a euro spent on one must be a euro refused to the other, when a dividend can be reinvested elsewhere and hiring is not the only form productive investment can take.