Hi! Welcome to “Dusty Phrases.” You will find a phrase below, in one ancient language or another, along with its English translation. You may also find the power to inspire your friends or provoke dread among your enemies.
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Latin:
Ignotum per ignotius
English:
The unknown by the more unknown
Has someone ever tried to explain something and the explanation was less familiar that the original source of confusion? Well… this phrase addresses that scenario. There is truly a Latin phrase for everything.
If you don’t want to shout “NERDS!” when that type of thing happens, you could opt to give an explanation about the nature of rhetorical fallacies, citing the Latin name for this particular type of fallacy.
via wiki
Ignotum per ignotius (Latin for “the unknown by the more unknown”) describes an explanation that is less familiar than the concept it would explain.
An example would be: “The oven felt hot because of Fourier’s Law.” It is unlikely that a person unfamiliar with the hotness of ovens would be enlightened by a reference to a fundamental law of physics. Another example would be referencing Rayleigh scattering as an explanation for why the sky is blue, when a more apt explanation would be simply that air is blue.
That said, since these explanations could enlighten people in theory, ignotum per ignotius is not strictly a logical fallacy; it is just a criticism of an argument on rhetorical grounds, stating that such an argument is not useful in a particular context.
Ignotum per æque ignotum
Ignotum per æque ignotum, meaning “the unknown by the equally unknown”, is a related form of fallacy in which one attempts to prove something unknown by deducing it from something else that is also not known to be true.
