Logical Fallacies Flashcards
False dilemma
Either/or
A fallacy in which the speaker presents two extreme options as the only possible choices.
- Either we agree to higher taxes, or our grandchildren will be mired in debt.
Straw man
A fallacy that occurs when a speaker chooses a deliberately poor or oversimplified example in order to ridicule and refute an idea.
- Politician X proposes that we put astronauts on Mars in the next four years. Politician Y ridicules this proposal by saying that his opponent is looking for “little green men in outer space.”
Hasty generalization
A fallacy in which a faulty conclusion is reached because of inadequate evidence.
- Smoking isn’t bad for you; my great aunt smoked a pack a day and lived to be 90.
Circular reasoning
A fallacy in which the writer repeats the claim as a way to provide evidence.
- You can’t give me a C; I’m an A student!
False authority
This fallacy occurs when someone who has no expertise to speak on an issue is cited as an authority. A TV star, for instance, is not a medical expert, even though pharmaceutical advertisements often use celebrity endorsements.
Bandwagon
This fallacy occurs when evidence boils down to “everybody’s doing it, so it must be a good thing to do.”
- You should vote to elect Rachel Johnson — she has a strong lead in the polls!
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
This fallacy is Latin for “after which therefore because of which,” meaning that it is incorrect to always claim that something is a cause just because it happened earlier. One may loosely summarize this fallacy by saying that correlation does not imply causation.
- We elected Johnson as president and look where it got us: hurricanes, floods, stock market crashes.
Red herring
An idiom that misleads or detracts from the actual or otherwise important issue; leads readers or characters towards a false conclusion
