In this class, we have discussed arguments and fallacies. At this point, you should know that fallacies are counterfeit arguments. Fallacies can be quite difficult to detect and distinguish from good arguments because of this counterfeit quality. Therefore, it is useful for us to practice our recognition skills by finding real-world examples of fallacies.
For this assignment, I want you to find real-world fallacies that have been argued or endorsed in social media or in mainstream news in the past 12 months. If you can find evidence of someone “making” that fallacy, you’ve just found one.
You are to go on a scavenger hunt to find 10 fallacies from among 5 different types from the list of fallacies that I wrote for this class. So, I want you to show me ten actual, real-world examples of actual people making specific fallacies. These are not hypothetical what-if discussions. These fallacies need to have been argued by someone on mainstream media or social media. Peruse the news page discussions and see what arguments people use. Search on TikTok and analyze the arguments made in the videos. Of the ten examples that you identify, I want those examples to be of at least 5 specific kinds of fallacies that I discuss on the Fallacies page here.
A few rules about this assignment:
First, I don’t want students sharing and submitting the same examples so that they can reduce the amount of work that they have to do. These examples have to be unique—meaning that I do not want anyone else to be using any examples that you found, and I certainly don’t want you using examples found by anyone else in class. If I find that students have submitted identical examples for this assignment, I will contact you and require that you resubmit new examples of any that have been used by others. Unfortunately, I need to do this because it is not fair to the students who can’t collaborate with their classmates. So, the hunting work you do needs to be your own. Fortunately, because I am allowing you to use examples that anyone has produced on social media platforms, such as Facebook or TikTok, there should be no shortage of examples for everyone. Seriously–it is quite disturbing how many examples of fallacies are being created on the Internet every day. The challenge of this assignment is not so much finding fallacies, but rather being able to recognize them. Make sure that you are naming the fallacy correctly. It is not enough for you simply to find examples of defective logic. You need to tell me what is wrong with each example by naming the specific fallacy.
Second, I want to make sure that these are “naturally” occurring fallacies, so I don’t want anyone claiming credit for fallacies that they themselves have created or invented. Fortunately, I am fine with you reporting any fallacies that you witness from others on the Internet.
Response Fallacies
Argumentum ad Hominem
Perhaps the most common fallacy of all time is the ad hominem fallacy. Ad hominem is a Latin term which literally translates as “to the man.” Translated more descriptively, ad hominem refers to a personal attack against another arguer. This fallacy is designed to discredit an arguer’s credibility in such a way that audiences are asked to disregard the original arguer’s argument. When this credibility attack is done in response to an argument that does not depend on the original arguer’s credibility, then this attack is considered to be a fallacy. However, it is important to remember that an attack on a person’s credibility is not always a fallacy. Sometimes it is acceptable to attack another person’s credibility if that arguer relied on their own credibility to support their argument. For instance, if an arguer used an “appeal to qualified authority,” it would not be a fallacy to attack their credibility if the person rebutting that argument believed that the original arguer does not have good credibility. In the cases where an arguer has relied on their own credibility to support their argument, then attacking that person’s credibility is not a fallacy. Simply put, this fallacy is only a fallacy if the original argument to which it responds does not rely on the original arguer’s credibility.
Red Herring
A red herring fallacy is a response fallacy that creates a distraction in an attempt to make an audience overlook an argument. There are countless ways that this distraction can be done. For instance, if a person makes an argument about the existence of climate change, another person who does not want to respond to that argument might be tempted to talk about the importance of charity to help homeless people. If that discussion successfully distracts the original arguer and other audience members from the argument about climate change, then the “red herring” is successful. However, this fallacy does not actually answer that argument about climate change. Instead, it is ignored. It should also be pointed out that sometimes it is appropriate to shift the focus of an argument to something else if the original argument is not relevant or important to what is being discussed. If the original argument should be disregarded without comment, then it is not a fallacy to shift the focus of discussion.
Straw Person (or Straw Man)
A straw person fallacy is actually a special version of a red herring fallacy, but with a far more deceptive twist. The name straw person itself refers to an analogy of a human shaped figure made out of clothes and stuffed with straw. A person who exploits a straw person will thrash and beat the straw person and attempt to fool onlookers that they have fought a living person and “won.” In the context of arguing, this analogy suggests that a person who distorts another person’s argument, defeats that distorted version, and then claims to have defeated the original argument, they have made a straw person fallacy. This kind of fallacy frequently happens in political debates and attack advertisements where one candidate will distort their opponent’s position in an attempt to make their opponent an easier target to attack.
Non-Response Fallacies
The remainder of the fallacies being reviewed her are fallacies that do not need to be responding to someone else’s argument.
Many of these fallacies can disguise themselves especially well because they are designed to imitate one of the legitimate forms of inductive argument. I have sorted these kinds of fallacies to the beginning of this section. Most of these kinds of fallacies are obvious because they are named to resemble what they counterfeit. I will point out what kinds of arguments these fallacies attempt to “pass” as.
Appeal to Unqualified Authority
As the name suggests, an appeal to unqualified authority attempts to pass itself off as an appeal to qualified authority. This kind of fallacy usually uses an arguer’s credibility that is quite high in an irrelevant way. Celebrity actors and athletes are often recruited to act in advertisements for products/services that have nothing to do with acting or athletics; these are perhaps the most recognizeable form of appealing to unqualified authority. Unfortunately, many other people also do this when they make claims about specific issues that require a high degree of specialized skill, such as making conclusions about the pandemic based on their personal experience.
Hasty Generalization (and hasty prediction)
A hasty generalization is a fallacy that resembles a legitimate generalization. What makes a generalization hasty is when the arguer makes one or more key mistakes when making the generalization. The most common mistake is by using a non-representative sample of a population. It can be difficult for an onlooker to detect a non-representative sample without knowing something about it, which is what makes the hasty generalization fallacy difficult to detect. For instance, let’s say that I recently taught a class in-person recently, and there were many students in the classroom. Most of the students are sitting near the back of the room sleeping, but there are several students sitting in the front row. In the classroom, I noticed that the students who were sitting in the front row were all taking notes and paying attention. Based on my sample of only the students sitting in the front row, I conclude that all of my students are taking notes and paying attention. However, in this example, my sample is non-representative because it does not represent any of the students who were asleep in the back of the room. In that example, I am unwittingly producing a hasty generalization.
False Cause
A false cause fallacy is a fallacy that attempts to fool its audience into believing that two things that are merely correlated are causally connected. It makes us believe that one or more of the three indicators of causation (chronology, proximity, and resemblance) is present when in fact those qualities are not there. A common way that a false cause fallacy can deceive us is by claiming that an effect has been caused by something that actually occurred after the effect. Because the chronology condition of causation requires the cause to occur immediately before the effect, it is not possible for the cause to occur after the effect. However, when two events occur very closely together in time, it can be difficult to tell which one comes first and which one follows. For this reason, false cause fallacies frequently exploit confusion about when things occur. It is less common for false cause fallacies to deceive audiences about proximity and resemblance, although that does happen.
False Analogy
A false analogy is a fallacy version of an analogy argument whenever it uses as evidence a comparison between two things that have an irrelevant similarity. Once that connection is made based on the irrelevant similarity, the false analogy fallacy attempts to make a connection to another attribute from the dubious connection between those two things. An example of a false analogy would be the following:
Evidence: My friend notices that I drive a dirty pickup truck. My friend knows that I am a gardener and that I frequently use my pickup truck to move dirty gardening supplies in the bed of the truck. My friend then notices that my next door neighbor also drives a dirty pickup truck.
Conclusion: My friend concludes that my neighbor is also an avid gardener.
False Dilemma
A false dilemma is also called a “black-and-white fallacy.” It is a fallacy that attempts to claim that there are only a limited number of possible courses of action when more options are available. It usually limits the courses of action to two possibilities (hence the alternative name “black-and-white fallacy”). However, the false dilemma fallacy is sometimes used to claim that there are three, four, or more courses of action. False dilemma fallacies are seen disturbingly often in political contexts. Shortly after September 11, 2001, it was not uncommon to hear the slogan, “If you’re not a patriot, then you are a terrorist.” Another example often heard more recently, “If you’re not a Democrat, then you’re a traitor.” In addition, false dilemma fallacies, sadly are seen being used by people with personality disorders who are suffering from black-and-white thinking (also called dichotomous thinking). It is important to understand that it is not necessarily the case that a person using a false dilemma fallacy knows that they are using a fallacious argument to influence someone.
Slippery Slope
A slippery slope fallacy can be a tempting fallacy because it disguises an improbable series of events as one that is likely to occur. The main technique used by a slippery slope is to describe a long chain of events, such as A->B->C->D->E->F->G->H. It may be that the likelihood of each individual connection in the chain is high. Let’s say that the probability of A->B is 90%, and each of the subsequent links in the chain are also 90% for each one. Roughly speaking, the chance of A->H is no more likely to happen than a coin toss due to how probability multiplies. However, when these letters are replaces with descriptive parades of horribles, a fallacy can compel people to believe that the initial event must be avoided at all costs. It is important that we assess the entire chain of events for its likelihood as a whole rather than consider only one of those links.
Begging the Question
To beg the question is to make an argument in which one or more of the premises or pieces of evidence is also advanced as evidence. This fallacy is also frequently called circular reasoning when the evidence features a long string of evidence that ends with a repetition of the claim. When a boss says, “I am the Boss Because What I Say Goes!” they are begging the question.
Appeal to Popularity
An appeal to popularity is a fallacy in which an argument makes a claim based on the claim being believed by many people. When people use peer pressure to get their peers to believe a statement, they are using an appeal to popularity. It is important to recognize that there are some statements that are true because many people believe them. For instance, it is not a fallacy to claim that a certain political candidate will win an election because they are popular. Their popularity may be the very thing that will cause them to win the election, and thus the claim is made true by the popularity. However, most claims are not like this. As another example, it is a fallacy to argue that cannabis is safe because it is popular. In reality, the question of cannabis’ safety has nothing to do with how many people believe in it.
Appeal to Tradition
An appeal to tradition fallacy is similar to the appeal to popularity fallacy. Instead of using evidence of popular support, the appeal to tradition fallacy attempts to support a claim with the fact that it has been supported for a long period of time. For instance, it is a fallacy to argue that a religion’s tenets are factually true simply because it has existed for a long time. Another example of an appeal to tradition is to argue that a certain principle is correct because it has been followed for a long time. A relatively recent example of this is to say that only women give birth to children because traditionally only women have given birth. However, we know that this is a fallacy because many trans men have the ability to get pregnant and have taken children to term.
Appeal to Ignorance
The appeal to ignorance fallacy makes a claim that something is true because it hasn’t been proven false. Alternatively, an appeal to ignorance may make a claim that something is false because it hasn’t been proven true. The fallacy exploits a lack of evidence in either the for or against direction and concludes that the opposite is the case. This is a fallacy because an argument always has a burden of proof. It is not enough to cite a lack of evidence as proof. Here it is important to keep in mind that the legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty” is not an appeal to ignorance; it is instead an example of defendants being presumed innocent until there is evidence proving their guilt.
Appeal to the Stick
An appeal to force fallacy is perhaps the first fallacy that most people have been exposed to in their lives. It attempts to get an audience to accept the truth of a claim by making a threat of some kind as evidence. The reason the fallacy is called “appeal to the stick” is because of the imagery of a stick being used to punish the audience if they do not agree with the claim. An example of appealing to the stick is a bully at school telling a peer, “You had better believe that I’m the best baseball player on the team, because if you don’t, I will beat you up.”
Argumentum Non Sequitur
The non sequitur fallacy is also called the “catch-all” fallacy because it can describe every other kind of fallacy, both formal and informal. The reason it casts such a wide net is because its name literally means “argument not in sequence,” which means that the conclusion does not follow from the evidence. In other words, any defective reasoning can correctly be identified as a non sequitur fallacy. However, as your instructor, I want to make it clear that the non sequitur fallacy category should not be used to identify a fallacy that can be correctly named by one of the other fallacy labels. This last comment is especially important with respect to your fallacy files assignment. Please do not use the non sequitur fallacy label to describe, for instance, a case of appeal to unqualified authority. The non sequitur name should only be used to describe a fallacy in which none of the other labels fits.
Need 10 sources
