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LordJashin

Our Fallacies example sheet

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Made this in our English class.

 

Ad hominem: “against the man”; attacking the person’s character instead of the issue; the sayer, not the said

 

Ad ignorantium: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”; “You can’t prove there’s no God.” “But you can’t prove there is one.”

 

Ad misericordium: appeal to pity; “Your honor, hasn’t Kasey Anthony suffered enough?”

 

Ad populum: using both positive (family values, freedom) and negative (socialists, big government) buzz words, emotions, to bypass a rational response to an issue.

 

Bandwagon: If everyone believes it, it must be true. “The No. 1 movie in America!!” Quantity = right

 

Begging the question: Writer makes an assertion as if she has already proven it. “Aliens must exist b/c there can be no other explanation for the many UFO sightings.”

 

Either/or: Oversimplifies an argument by reducing it to only 2 sides. “Either you support the Patriot Act or you support Al Quaeda!”

 

False analogy: Claiming more parallels between 2 things than actually exist. “If I can run a business, I can run a government.” “Filling out your taxes is just like riding a bike; once you do it, you never forget how.”

 

Hasty generalization: Conclusion based on biased or insufficient evidence. “I wouldn’t buy a BMW. My friend had one and it was always in the shop.”

 

Hypostatization: Treating an abstraction such as history as if it were a human with human motives and such.

 

Non sequitur: Means “doesn’t follow.”“My you’re tall. You must make great milkshakes.””Ed played basketball for us for years. I’d let him work on my car any day of the week!”

 

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: Claiming that something that happened before something else caused something else just b/c it happened before it. Almost always an insufficient cause. “My car never made that funny noise until I started going out with Myrtle.”

 

Red herring: shifts attention from an issue by pointing out a new issue; deliberately sidetracking; “Maybe I did make a D in economics, but Billy’s been climbing out his bedroom window every night.”

 

Slippery slope: Exaggerating possible consequences of an action: “If we let gays marry, next thing you know, people’ll be marrying their pets.”

 

Straw man: select’s the opposition’s weakest or most insignificant point to divert attention; attributing an argument to the opponent when the opponent never argued it.

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I'll take the definition straight from google, a fallacy is: "A failure in reasoning that renders an argument invalid."

 

If you watch debates you can see this at work, or even just in advertising.

 

All the terms above are used to describe certain fallacies. Like Ad hominem, homi could be interpreted as a morpheme for human.

Edited by LordJashin
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