PHL 204: Honors Great Books
Common Reasoning Fallacies
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.
