Loki's Wager

Information about Loki's Wager

Loki's Wager is a form of logical fallacy. It is the unreasonable insistence that a concept cannot be defined, and therefore cannot be discussed.

Loki is a trickster god in Norse mythology, who, legend has it, once made a bet with some dwarves. The price should Loki lose the wager, it was agreed, would be his head. Loki lost the bet, and in due time the dwarves came to collect the head which had become rightfully theirs. Loki had no problem with giving up his head, but he insisted they had absolutely no right to take any part of his neck. Certain parts were obviously head, and certain parts were obviously neck, but neither side could agree exactly where the one ended and the other began. As a result, Loki keeps his head indefinitely.

The fallacy's focus on over specification makes it in some ways the opposite of hasty generalization and could be considered an extreme form of equivocation.

See also

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Informal fallacies
Special pleading • Red herring • Gambler's fallacy and its inverse • Fallacy of distribution (Composition • Division) • Begging the question • Many questions
Correlative-based fallacies:False dilemma (Perfect solution) • Denying the correlative • Suppressed correlative
Deductive fallacies:Accident • Converse accident
Inductive fallacies:Hasty generalization • Overwhelming exception • Biased sample • False analogy • Misleading vividness • Conjunction fallacy
Vagueness and Ambiguity:False precision • Slippery slope • Continuum fallacy
Equivocation:Equivocation • False attribution • Fallacy of quoting out of context • Loki's Wager • No true Scotsman
Questionable cause:Correlation does not imply causation (Cum hoc) • Post hoc • Regression fallacy • Texas sharpshooter • Circular cause and consequence • Wrong direction • Single cause
A fallacy is a component of an argument that is demonstrably flawed in its logic or form, thus rendering the argument invalid in whole. In logical arguments, fallacies are either formal or informal.
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In cryptography, LOKI89 and LOKI91 are block ciphers designed as possible replacements for the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The ciphers were developed based on a body of work analysing DES, and are very similar to DES in structure.
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trickster is a god, goddess, spirit, human, or anthropomorphic animal who plays pranks or otherwise disobeys normal rules and norms of behaviour.

While the trickster crosses various cultural traditions, there are significant differences between tricksters in the traditions
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Norse, Viking or Scandinavian mythology comprises the indigenous pre-Christian religion, beliefs and legends of the Scandinavian peoples, including those who settled on Iceland, where most of the written sources for Norse mythology were assembled.
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Hasty Generalization, is a logical fallacy of faulty generalization by reaching an inductive generalization based on insufficient evidence. It commonly involves basing a broad conclusion upon the statistics of a survey of a small group that fails to sufficiently represent the whole
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Equivocation, also known as amphibology, is classified as both a formal and informal fallacy. It is the misleading use of a word with more than one meaning (by glossing over which meaning is intended at a particular time).
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Draupnir is a golden arm ring possessed by Odin, the highest god in Norse mythology. The ring was a source of endless wealth, since each ninth morning it had spawned eight more gold rings just like itself. Draupnir was forged by the dwarven brothers Brokkr and Eitri (or Sindri).
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Brokkr is a dwarf from Norse mythology, brother of Eitri (or Sindri).

According to Skáldskaparmál, when Loki had Sif's hair, Freyr's ship Skidbladnir and Odin's spear Gungni fashioned by the Sons of Ivaldi, he bet his own head with Brokkr that his brother Eitri
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No true Scotsman is a term coined by Antony Flew in his 1975 book Thinking About Thinking – or do I sincerely want to be right?[1]:

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Press and Journal

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The Merchant of Venice is one of William Shakespeare's best-known plays, written sometime between 1596 and 1598. Although it is sometimes classified as a comedy ("comedy" had a very different meaning at the time; see Shakespearean comedies) and shares certain aspects with
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A quibble is a common plot device, used to fulfil the exact verbal conditions of an agreement in order to avoid the intended meaning. Its most common uses are in legal bargains and in fantasy, magically enforced ones.
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vagueness. One example of a vague concept is the concept of a heap. Two or three grains of sand is not a heap, but a thousand is. How many grains of sand does it take to make a heap? There is no clear line. (See the paradox of the heap.
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An informal fallacy is an argument pattern that is wrong due to a mistake in its reasoning. In contrast to a formal fallacy, the error has to do with issues of rational inference that occur in natural language; which are broader than can be represented by the symbols used in formal
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Special pleading is a form of spurious argumentation where a position in a dispute introduces favorable details or excludes unfavorable details by alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations themselves.
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The gambler's fallacy is a formal fallacy. It is the incorrect belief that the likelihood of a random event can be affected by or predicted from other, independent events.
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The inverse gambler's fallacy is a term coined by philosopher Ian Hacking to refer to a formal fallacy of Bayesian inference which is similar to the better known gambler's fallacy.
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A fallacy of distribution is a logical fallacy occurring when an argument assumes there is no difference between a term in the distributive (referring to every member of a class) and collective (referring to the class itself as a whole) sense.
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A fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some (or even every) part of the whole.
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A fallacy of division occurs when one reasons logically that something true of a thing must also be true of all or some of its parts.

An example:
  1. A Boeing 747 can fly unaided across the ocean.
  2. A Boeing 747 has jet engines.

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This article or section may be confusing or unclear for some readers.
Please [improve the article] or discuss this issue on the talk page. This article has been tagged since October 2007.
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Many questions, also known as complex question, presupposition, loaded question, "trick question", or plurium interrogationum (Latin, "of many questions"), is an informal fallacy.
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In logic, correlative-based fallacies, also known as fallacies of distraction, are logical fallacies based on correlative conjunctions.

A correlative conjunction is a relationship between two statements where one must be false and the other true.
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false dilemma—also known as false choice, false dichotomy, falsified dilemma, fallacy of the excluded middle, black and white thinking, false correlative, either/or fallacy, and bifurcation
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The perfect solution fallacy is a logical fallacy that occurs when an argument assumes that a perfect solution exists and/or that a solution should be rejected because some part of the problem would still exist after it was implemented.
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The logical fallacy of denying the correlative is an attempt made at introducing alternatives where there are none. In a way, it is the opposite of the false dilemma, which is denying other alternatives.

For example:

Policeman: "..

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The logical fallacy of suppressed correlative is a type of argument which tries to redefine a correlative (two mutually exclusive options) so that one alternative encompasses the other, i.e. making one alternative impossible.
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a Dicto simpliciter (Latin: "from a maxim without qualification" -- meaning 'from a universal rule') or ad Dictum simpliciter (Latin: "to a maxim without qualification" -- meaning 'to a universal rule') The a
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The logical fallacy of accident, also called destroying the exception or a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid, is a deductive fallacy occurring in statistical syllogisms (an argument based on a generalization) when an exception to the generalization is ignored.
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The logical fallacy of converse accident (also called reverse accident, destroying the exception or a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter) is a deductive fallacy that can occur in a statistical syllogism when an exception to a generalization is wrongly
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faulty generalization, also known as an inductive fallacy, is any of several errors of inductive inference:

Logic

The proportion PIE of the sample has attribute CAKE.

therefore

The proportion CAKE of the population has attribute PIE.
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