Argument To Moderation

Argument to moderation (Latin: argumentum ad temperantiam; also known as middle ground, false compromise, gray fallacy and the golden mean fallacy) is an informal fallacy which asserts that the truth can be found as a compromise between two opposite positions.

As Vladimir Bukovsky puts it, the middle ground between the Big Lie of Soviet propaganda and the truth is a lie, and one should not be looking for a middle ground between disinformation and information. According to him, people from the Western pluralistic civilization are more prone to this fallacy because they are used to resolving problems by making compromises and accepting alternative interpretations, unlike Russians who are looking for the absolute truth.

An individual demonstrating this false compromise fallacy implies that the positions being considered represent extremes of a continuum of opinions, and that such extremes are always wrong, and the middle ground is always correct. This is not always the case. Sometimes only X or Y is acceptable, with no middle ground possible. Additionally, the middle ground fallacy allows any position to be invalidated, even those that have been reached by previous applications of the same method; all one must do is present yet another, radically opposed position, and the middle-ground compromise will be forced closer to that position. In politics, this is part of the basis behind Overton window theory.