Conflation

Conflation is the act or process of combining two or more different concepts, ideas, information, or things into one, often blurring their distinctions and treating them as if they are the same. It involves the fusion of separate elements, leading to a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the individual components. This often occurs unintentionally through a lack of clear communication or understanding, but it can also be a deliberate rhetorical tactic used to persuade or mislead. The resulting mixture can be a simplification that obscures important nuances, or it can be a deliberate attempt to confuse the audience by blending seemingly unrelated items. conflation can appear in a variety of fields, including language, history, politics, media, and personal relationships. It is important to identify conflation to ensure you have clarity in a debate or a good understanding of the subject.

Conflation meaning with examples

• The politician's speech presented a conflation of national security and economic prosperity, arguing that strengthening the military automatically leads to increased wealth, despite a lack of concrete evidence to support this claim. The blending of these two disparate concepts allowed him to gain support from different voting demographics that were in opposition.
• In the documentary, the filmmakers employed conflation, suggesting the subject's minor personal flaws were equivalent to serious criminal behavior by presenting them in a way that lacked important information that contradicted the claims. The audience's understanding of the person became a complex mishmash that lacked a lot of the reality of the subject's life.
• The author's historical analysis used conflation, incorrectly associating a small group's actions with an entire population. By presenting the actions of the few as representative of the many, the work lacked any reasonable basis to the conclusions he was trying to draw.
• Due to poor research methods, the scientist made a conflation, treating correlation as causation. They made a mistake on their results and the findings were wrong due to the conflation, as the researcher was presenting a relationship between two variables as a cause-and-effect relationship, leading to a distorted view of the data.