Illicit Transference
The fallacy of assuming what's true of the parts must be true of the whole (or vice versa). One corrupt employee doesn't make a corrupt company, and one great player doesn't make a great team.
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Origin
A category of informal logical fallacy recognized since Aristotle, who catalogued related reasoning errors in Sophistical Refutations (c. 350 BCE). It encompasses two mirror-image errors: the fallacy of composition (parts to whole) and the fallacy of division (whole to parts).
Updated February 22, 2026