Fallacies Flashcards
Emotional Appeals (like a sob story)
Use emotion to distract audience from facts and to manipulate audience into drawing unjustified conclusions
Oversimplification
Provides easy answers to complicated questions, often by appealing to emotions rather than logic
Red herrings
Use misleading or unrelated evidence to support a conclusion. Intentional deflection
Scare tactics
Try to frighten people into agreeing with the arguer by threatening them or predicting unrealistically dire consequenses
Bandwagon appeals (Ad populum)
Encourage audience to agree with the writer because everyone else is doing so
Slippery Slope
Arguments suggest that one thing will lead to another. Usually to a catastrophe
Either / or choices
Reduce complicated issues to only two possible courses of action
False Need
Arguments create an unnecessary desire for things
False Authority
Asks audiences to agree with the assertion of a writer based simply on his or her character or the authority of another person or institution who may not be fully qualified to offer that assertion
Failing to Accept the Burden of Proof
Assertion of a claim without presenting a reasoned argument to support it
Using Authority instead of Evidence (over reliance on authority)
Occurs when someone offers personal authority as proof
Guilt by Association
Calls someone’s character into question by examining the character of that person’s associates
Dogmatism
Shuts down discussion by asserting that the writer’s beliefs are the only acceptable ones
Moral Equivalence
Compares minor problems with much more serious crimes (or vice versa)
Ad Hominem
Arguments attack a person’s character rather than that person’s reasoning
Strawman
Arguments set up and often dismantle easily refutable arguments in order to misrepresent an opponent’s argument in order to defeat him or her.
Hasty Generalization
Draws general and premature conclusions from scanty evidence. From one to whole.
Faulty Causality (Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc)
Arguments confuse chronology with causation: one event can occur after another without being caused by it
Non Sequitur
Statement that does not logically relate to what comes before it. Important logical step is missing. Not Intentional necessarily
Equivocation
Half-true statement that is partially correct but that purposefully obscures the entire truth, or a word with multiple meanings that the writer manipulates and changes through the course of an argument
Begging the Question (or circular reasoning)
When a writer simply restates the claim in a different way; such an argument is circular; trying to prove one idea with another idea too similar to the first one
Faulty Analogy
An inaccurate, inappropriate, or misleading comparison between two things
Stacked Evidence (slanting)
Represents only one side of the issue, thus distorting it
