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An overview of common reasoning fallacies, including smokescreen/red herring, subjectivist fallacy, appeal to popularity, and more. Students in the phl 204 honors great books course can use this guide to better understand and identify these fallacies in philosophical arguments.
Typology: Study notes
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PHL 204: Honors Great Books
Farmer • Winter 2004 Smokescreen/red herring: Bringing up an irrelevant topic to draw attention away from the issue at hand. Subjectivist fallacy: Asserting that a claim may be true for one person but not for another. Appeal to popularity: Urging acceptance of a claim simply because some selection of other people believe it (when those believers have no more knowledge or expertise in the subject than you do). Variants of appeal to popularity include: Common practice: Justifying an action or practice on the grounds that lots of people engage in it. Peer pressure: Urging acceptance of a claim on the grounds it will gain the listener approval from friends or associates, where the approval is irrelevant to the truth of the claim. Bandwagon: Supporting a position, candidate, or policy on the grounds it is going to win or become the dominant alternative. Wishful thinking: Urging acceptance of a claim on the basis of the listener’s desire that it be true. Scare tactics: Accepting or urging acceptance of a claim on grounds of fear, when the threat is not relevant to the issue addressed by the claim.
Appeal to pity: Accepting or urging acceptance of a claim on grounds of pity, when the appeal is not relevant to the issue addressed by the claim. Apple polishing: Accepting or urging acceptance of a claim on grounds of vanity; allowing praise of oneself to substitute for judgment about the truth of a claim. Appeal to anger or indignation: Substituting anger or indignation for reason and judgment when taking side on an issue. Two wrongs make a right: Justifying doing X to somebody because they would do X to you given the chance, or justifying an action against someone as “making up” for something bad that happened to you. Warning: instances of this occur that are not considered fallacious. Ad hominem: Attacking the person offering a claim or argument rather than attacking the claim or argument. Personal attack: Saying bad things about the individual’s character, history, and so forth. Circumstantial ad hominem: Basing the attack on the individual’s situation, job, or other special circumstance. Pseudorefutation: Basing the attack on the claim that the individual has spoken or otherwise acts as if he or she doesn’t believe the claim; a charge of inconsistency. Poisoning the well: Committing an ad hominem before the individual even has a chance to make the claim in question; an “ad hominem” in advance.