This is part seven of a 12 week series where, on Mondays, I  explore the tactics of verbal cheap shot artists – people who can’t, or won’t use valid arguments to present their case, but instead resort to verbal cheap shots. To make sure you don’t miss a single article, be sure and sign up for my RSS ^[2] feed or subscribe by email ^[3] (both are free!). Check out my other articles in the Verbal Cheap Shots ^[4] category.

Sometimes knows as causal oversimplification, the fallacy of the single cause is a logical fallacy of causation occurring when the verbal cheap shot artist assumes that there is one, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.

Causal oversimplification is a specific kind of false dilemma where conjoined possibilities are ignored. In other words, the possible causes are assumed to be “A or B or C or D” when “A and B and C but not D” or “A and B and D but not C” are not taken into consideration.

A singular outcome can be dependent on a multitude of inputs

Inputs cause outcomes and there are many inputs into even the simplest of outcomes.