Mind projection fallacy

The mind projection fallacy is an informal fallacy that occurs when a person believes in factual claims solely based on mental or sensory experiences, which are often interpreted as objective properties. That is, someone's subjective judgments are "projected" to be inherent properties of an object, rather than being related to personal perception. One consequence is that others may be assumed to share the same perception, or that they are irrational or misinformed if they do not. The idea has been compared to Plato's allegory of the cave.

For example, it is fallacious to say that sweetness is an inherent property of sugar molecules; instead, it results from the human perception of those molecules. Similarly, a person may dismiss a subject as uninteresting based on their personal lack of interest, or believe in a flat earth based on their intuitive perception that the world around them is flat.

There is also a "negative" form of the fallacy, in which someone assumes that their own lack of knowledge about a phenomenon (a fact about their state of mind) means that the phenomenon is not or cannot be understood (a fact about reality; see also Map and territory). This form of the fallacy is similar to the argument from ignorance.