Docsity
Log inSign up
Docsity
Prepare for your exams
Prepare for your exams

Study with the several resources on Docsity

Earn points to download
Earn points to download

Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan

Guidelines and tips
Guidelines and tips
Sell on Docsity
Sell on Docsity
Log inSign up

Prepare for your exams

Study with the several resources on Docsity

Find documents

Prepare for your exams with the study notes shared by other students like you on Docsity

Search Store documents

The best documents sold by students who completed their studies

Search through all study resources
Docsity AINEW

Summarize your documents, ask them questions, convert them into quizzes and concept maps

Explore questions

Clear up your doubts by reading the answers to questions asked by your fellow students

Earn points to download

Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan

Share documents
download point icon20 Points

For each uploaded document

Answer questions
download point icon5 Points

For each given answer (max 1 per day)

All the ways to get free points
Get points immediately

Choose a premium plan with all the points you need

Study Opportunities

Choose your next study program

Get in touch with the best universities in the world. Search through thousands of universities and official partners

Community

Ask the community

Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts

University Rankings

Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users

Free resources

Our save-the-student-ebooks!

Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors

From our blog

Exams and Study
Go to the blog

Monty Python and the Quest for the Perfect Fallacy, Study notes of Reasoning

Bangor University (BU)Reasoning

Monty Python and the Quest for the Perfect Fallacy. Teacher's Guide: Sample Fallacies and Booby Traps. 1. Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass: ...

Typology: Study notes

2021/2022

Uploaded on 09/27/2022

rexana
rexana 🇬🇧

4.7

(11)

215 documents

1 / 4

Toggle sidebar

This page cannot be seen from the preview

Don't miss anything!

bg1
Monty Python and the Quest for the Perfect Fallacy
Teacher’s Guide: Sample Fallacies and Booby Traps
1. Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass: “ ‘You couldn’t have [jam] if you did want
it,’ the Queen said. ‘The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday — but never jam today.’
‘It must sometimes come to jam today,’ Alice objected. ‘No it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s
jam every other day: today isn’t any other day, you know.’ ”
Equivocates on ‘other.’ Uses the word to mean “alternate” in the first mention and
“not this one” in the second mention.
2. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look at the bloody clothes, the murder weapon.
Imagine the helpless screams of the victim. Such a crime deserves no verdict except
guilty, guilty!
Red herring. The fact that the crime was horrible doesn’t imply the defendant’s
guilt.
3. I’m not a doctor, but I play a doctor on TV, and I wouldn’t dream of using anything but
Tylenol for my toughest headaches.
Appeal to inappropriate authority. More commonly (in this case) known as
quackery.
4. According to Freud, your belief in God stems from your need for a strong father figure.
So don’t you see that it’s silly to continue believing in God?
Genetic fallacy. The origin of your belief in God has nothing to do with whether or
not God exists.
5. How can you possibly believe in evolution? That would mean that you believe that an
elephant evolved from a mouse, and that’s just ridiculous.
Straw man. Reducing the (very complex) theory of evolution to “elephants evolved
from mice” is to create a distorted and oversimplified view of the theory.
6. The nuthatch was discovered by Tilly Turnow in the woods, while hopping from branch
to branch of an elm tree, singing happily.
Vagueness. Who was hopping from branch to branch singing happily?
pf3
pf4

Partial preview of the text

Download Monty Python and the Quest for the Perfect Fallacy and more Study notes Reasoning in PDF only on Docsity!

Monty Python and the Quest for the Perfect Fallacy

Teacher’s Guide: Sample Fallacies and Booby Traps

  1. Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass : “ ‘You couldn’t have [jam] if you did want it,’ the Queen said. ‘The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday — but never jam today .’ ‘It must sometimes come to jam today,’ Alice objected. ‘No it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every other day: today isn’t any other day, you know.’ ”

Equivocates on ‘other.’ Uses the word to mean “alternate” in the first mention and “not this one” in the second mention.

  1. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look at the bloody clothes, the murder weapon. Imagine the helpless screams of the victim. Such a crime deserves no verdict except guilty, guilty!

Red herring. The fact that the crime was horrible doesn’t imply the defendant’s guilt.

  1. I’m not a doctor, but I play a doctor on TV, and I wouldn’t dream of using anything but Tylenol for my toughest headaches.

Appeal to inappropriate authority. More commonly (in this case) known as quackery.

  1. According to Freud, your belief in God stems from your need for a strong father figure. So don’t you see that it’s silly to continue believing in God?

Genetic fallacy. The origin of your belief in God has nothing to do with whether or not God exists.

  1. How can you possibly believe in evolution? That would mean that you believe that an elephant evolved from a mouse, and that’s just ridiculous.

Straw man. Reducing the (very complex) theory of evolution to “elephants evolved from mice” is to create a distorted and oversimplified view of the theory.

  1. The nuthatch was discovered by Tilly Turnow in the woods, while hopping from branch to branch of an elm tree, singing happily.

Vagueness. Who was hopping from branch to branch singing happily?

  1. You can hardly blame President Clinton for having extramarital affairs. Many presidents, when faced with similar situations, have yielded to the same temptations.

Red herring. The fact that others have had affairs is not really relevant to whether or not Clinton ought to be blamed for having affairs.

  1. There are more laws on the books than ever before, and more crimes are being committed than ever before. Therefore, to reduce crime, we must eliminate the laws.

False cause. The mere fact that more crime followed the creation of more laws does not entail that the new laws caused more crime. (Interestingly, the argument does work in one sense: Eliminating laws would reduce crime since, by definition, something is a crime only if it is against the law. So no laws would equal no crime.)

  1. We should pass a constitutional amendment making it illegal to burn the American flag. Anyone who thinks otherwise just hates America.

Straw man. Many who oppose a constitutional amendment banning flag burning do so for fairly sophisticated reasons (e.g., a belief in the importance of free speech even when the speech is unpopular).

  1. Radio talk show host, on learning that an association of critical thinking professors had suggested his show as a source of fallacious reasoning: “Who are these people? They talk to maybe 30 people at a time. I talk to 5 million people every day. They could not begin to do what I do. They are just gnats flying around getting in the way.”

Red herring. The number of people whom one talks to has nothing to do with whether or not one is guilty of reasoning fallaciously.

  1. U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn says that lesbianism is rampant in the Oklahoma schools. This must, indeed, be true, because surely the senator couldn't be mistaken about the schools in his own state.

Appeal to inappropriate authority. It’s not clear that Coburn is an expert on lesbianism or on life in public schools.

  1. Do most Americans believe in God? To find out, we asked over 10,000 scientists at colleges and universities throughout America. Less than 40 percent said they believed in God. The conclusion is obvious: Most Americans no longer believe in God.

Questionable use of statistics (unrepresentative sample). The sample is pretty unrepresentative of the general American public.

  1. Before he died, poet Allen Ginsberg argued in favor of legalizing pornography. But Ginsberg's arguments are nothing but trash. Ginsberg was a pot-smoking homosexual and a thoroughgoing advocate of the drug culture.

Genetic fallacy. Rejects the argument based on the fact that Ginsberg is unsavory.

  1. You’re a vegetarian? You do realize that Hitler was a vegetarian, too?

Genetic fallacy. The fact that Hitler held a particular belief doesn’t make that belief wrong.

  1. Most heroin users started out smoking pot. If you start smoking pot, you’ll end up a heroin user, too.

Undistributed middle. The claim is that heroin users smoke pot and you smoke pot, so you’ll be a heroin user. That’s the A is B and C is B so A is C pattern again.

  1. Really exciting novels are very rare. And since rare books are expensive, I can’t afford to buy any really exciting novels.

Equivocation. The word “rare” has different meanings in the two sentences. The first sentence is really saying that most novels aren’t exciting. The second premise is saying that hard-to-find books are expensive to purchase.

  1. Middle-class families are paying more taxes than ever.

Vagueness. The claim is unclear between three very different sorts of interpretations. (1) Individual families have a higher tax bill than they used to, or (2) Middle-class families are paying a larger percentage of the tax bill than they used to even though their individual tax bills are lower than they used to be, or (3) Middle- class families are paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes than they used to even though their total tax bills and their share of the total tax burden are lower.

  1. The war in Iraq has been a complete success. After all, Saddam Hussein is dead, and the Iraqis had their first free election in years.

Suppressed evidence. The argument leaves out the fact that Iraq is on the brink of a civil war.