January Logical Fallacies Flashcards
Red Herring
a speaker skips to a new and irrelevant in order to avoid the topic of discussion.
Ad Hominem
the attack is on the person involved with the issue rather than the issue itself. “As hominem” is Latin for “against the man.”
False Analogy
the two objects being compared are relevantly dissimilar. It is important to gauge whether the dissimilarities outweigh the similarities. Do the similarities really fit and illuminate the point, or do they simply add emotional appeal?
Appeal to False Authority
when a person uses an authority figure as evidence, but that authority figure isn’t really qualified.
Strawman Fallacy
a speaker chooses a deliberately poor or oversimplified example in order to ridicule and refute an opponent’s argument.
False Dilemma
(aka. “either/or fallacy”) speaker presents two extreme options as the only possible choices.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
“After which, therefore because of which.” It is incorrect to always claim that something is a cause just because it happened earlier; correlation does not imply causation.
Slippery Slope
insisting that a course of action will lead to a chain reaction resulting in an undesirable end or ends. The slippery slope involves an acceptance of a succession of events without direct evidence that this course of events will happen.
Hasty Generalization
there is not enough evidence to support a conclusion. (Drawing sweeping conclusions from limited evidence.)
Circular Reasoning
repeating the claim as a way to provide evidence, resulting in no evidence at all.
Appeal to Ignorance
an argument claiming that a conclusion is true if evidence has not yet disproven it, or false if evidence has not yet proven it. This is fallacious because not proving something false does not make it true (and vice versa) since something can be inconclusive or at a later time, with more information, proven true or false.
