Classic Flaw ID Flashcards
- Necessary / Precondition / required
- Sufficient / enough / ensure
“Mistakes something that is necessary to bring about a situation for something that in itself is enough to bring out that situaation”
Bad Conditional Reasoning
- Effect / Result & Cause / Causal
- Two things occur in conjunction
- One thing happens after another
“Mistakes the cause of a particular phenomenon for the effect of that phenomenon”
Bad Causal Reasoning
- Individual member of a group
- Parts of a whole
- Group as a whole
“assuming that because something is true of each of the parts of the whole it is true of the whole itself”
Whole-to-part / Part-to-whole
- Generalizing illegitimately
- few instances to all instances
- particular case / atypical cases
“makes a sweeping generalization… based on evidence drawn from a limited number of atypical cases”
Overgeneralization
-small / biased / unrepresentative sample
“uses evidence drawn from a small sample that may well be unrepresentative”
Survey Problems
- merely possible… actual
- probably true… certainty
- has not been shown… not true
“confuses an absence of evidence for a hypothesis with the existence of evidence against the hypothesis”
Possibility ≠ Certainty
- excludes alternative explanation
- only two possibilities
“assumes without warrant that a situation allows only two possibilities”
False Dichotomy
- misdescribes
- easier to challenge
“misdescribing the… position, thereby making it easier to challenge”
Straw Man
- impugns / questions / attacks
- character / motives of proponents
- source argument
“rejects a claim by attacking the proponents of the claim itself rather than addressing the claim itself”
Ad Hominem
- presupposes what it seeks to establish
- restates claim / conclusion
“presupposes what it is set out to prove”
Circular Reasoning
- term / word in two senses
- imprecise / ambiguous / vague
“relies on two different uses of the term”
Equivocation
- appeals to / cites
- outside area of expertise
“cites the evidence… in direct support of a claim that lies outside their area of expertise”
Appeal Fallacies
-irrelevant / not relevant
“uses irrelevant facts to justify a claim”
Irrelevant!
- percentages / absolute numbers
- relative frequency
“takes no account of the relative frequency of… in the population as a whole”
Percentages ≠ Numbers
