Andrew Badham 2018-04-17 11:40:27
Logical fallacies are mistakes in the way that we or other people construct their arguments. If you familiarise yourself with these, you will be better able to see when you or someone else is making sense.
False Cause
Basically, the reason something is happening is not necessarily what it appears to be. We presume that a relationship between things means that one is the cause of the other. One subset of this fallacy is the assumption that correlation proves causation.
e.g. You come down with a cold and it lasts a whole week. Frustrated, you complain to your friend about your poor health. She recommends that you drink lots of orange juice. After a day or two of drinking orange juice, you start to feel better, and so you assume the orange juice must have restored you. Maybe it did, but maybe your immune system finally finished off the intruder and you would have gotten better anyway.
False Dilemma
Two alternative choices are presented as the only possibilities, when in fact more possibilities exist. This often presents itself in a kind of you’re either for me or against me message. In reality, you can often decide to pick neither side and go for a more nuanced position.
e.g. During the cold war in America, if you seemed to disagree with the government’s actions, you were labelled a communist. Of course, you could be in favour of neither side, or even agree with parts of both sides.
Slippery Slope
Asserting that if we take step A it will automatically lead to further undesirable outcomes, and therefore we should not take step A.
e.g. Your manager might say to you that, If we allow our staff to work flexi-hours, we will soon have to let them work from home. That’s not necessarily the case. You could easily allow one and forbid the other.
Straw-Man
A straw man is a weaker form of an argument that someone who is against that argument would use to make the argument seem silly, or easily refuted.
e.g. Someone who is against renewable energy sources might say something like, “renewable energy fans want to shut down all our coal stations and rely on solar energy, but what about when the sun goes down?” In reality the renewable energy fan might not want all coal stations shut down. Their argument is probably more complicated and nuanced than it is represented by the opposition.