A Look at Rick Altman's Four and a Half Fallacies

The Historical Fallacy can be explained by:

• Lack of research
• Hollywood’s construction of the grand narrative of a crisis with a happy ending.
• Ontological arguments e.g Rudolph Arnheim and Bela Balasz.
• Assuming cinema is a single object.
• A belief or oversight whereby film remains an unchanged medium throughout the course of history,
• Suggesting cinema is primarily a visual medium and sound acts as a pollutant to that.

The Ontological Fallacy refers to the belief in the primacy of the image over sound. This is due to:

• The History of Filmic Technological Development. This is often based on theory established at a time when sound and music were still being introduced, when the notion of sound in film was in its infancy, together with the technological limits of the time. Present day critics however still refer to these theories without understanding the need to revise the suggestion  that sound has a marginal role in film and has little effect on the overall structure of a film. Such references should be revisited and tested through the films of today.
• The Conventional Filmic Process. The filmic process gives birth to the two tracks. Film image as a single strip, whereas sound is synthesized from multiple sources. 
• The Conventional Division. Sound is always divided into speech, music and sound effect, probably stemming from the different process required to produce them. Image is not categorised in such a way although the image does come from different sources as well (e.g., stock shots, special effects/CGI, second unit footage, background mattes etc.). No one seems to pay much attention to such division of sources and processes in the image and therefore sound often blurs any division between speech, music and sound effects.  
• The Popular reference to Film as Filmic Language: "any theory based on the concept of film as a kind of language invariably assumes that film consists of a single channel, like a succession of written letters or of spoken sounds, and the syntagmas and paradigms of that channel are invariably taken to be visual scenes.” William Johnson, “The Liberation of Echo: A New Hearing for Film Sound,” Film Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Summer 1985): 2-12

The Reproductive Fallacy
The false idea that film sound is reproduced as it is, whereas the image goes through multiple stages of human intervention. Allan Williams points out that recorded sound is not a reproduction but a representation, much like the image.

The Nominalist Fallacy
This would echo the position that most writers on the topic attribute to sound itself—constantly subjugated to the primacy of the visual, associated with emotion and subjectivity as against the objectivity and rationality of vision, seen as somehow more “natural” and less constructed as a mode of communication—in essence, fundamentally secondary to our relationship to the world and to dominant ways of understanding it.” Michel Hilmes, “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 249-259.