Kettle Logic is a type of informal fallacy

Informal fallacy

An informal fallacy is an argument whose stated premises fail to support their proposed conclusion. The deviation in an informal fallacy often stems from a flaw in the path of reasoning that links the premises to the conclusion...

 wherein one uses multiple arguments to defend a point, but the arguments themselves are inconsistent.

The name derives from an example used by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

 in The Interpretation of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams is a book by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. The first edition begins:.The book introduces Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation...

and in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud relates the story that a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition offered three arguments.

1. That he had returned the kettle undamaged;
2. That it was already damaged when he borrowed it;
3. That he had never borrowed it in the first place.

The three arguments are inconsistent, and Freud notes that it would have been better if he had only used one.

The Kettle logic of the dream-work is related to the what Freud calls the embarrassment-dream of being naked, in which contradictory opposites are yoked together in the dream. Freud said that in a dream, incompatible (contradictory) ideas are simultaneously admitted. Freud also presented various examples of how a symbol in a dream can bear in itself contradictory sexual meanings.

External Links

• Kettle Logic, Freud on Defensive Arguments: http://www.harris-greenwell.com/HGS/FreudsKettleLogic