Meerkat Prompts: Logical Fallacies
Anyone who has ever debated anything with anyone else online (or for that matter, face-to-face) should be aware of logical fallacies. There are many different kind of fallacies, and they are employed to conceal, deride, and mislead. Below, I will list some of them, and perhaps offer a few examples along the way. You may want to check out an excellent site on the subject.
1. The Ad Hominin
This is the art of attacking the person making the argument, as opposed to the argument itself. This does not necessarily mean hurling insults, but rather, it’s a means of discrediting an idea or position via damaging – or attempting to damage – the reputation of the person making it. This is a common fallacy, used by many, invoked when a person is unable or unwilling to tackle the actual argument.
2. The Slippery Slope
This is another popular argument, often used as a form of scare-mongering. For example, a lot of objectors to same-sex marriage have argued that permitting same-sex marriage will lead to a rise in bestiality and paedophilia. They incorrectly link a consensual relationship between two adults to other things, in the hopes of discrediting the original position.
3. The Straw Man
This is yet another popular fallacy. It involves building a false and misleading representation of someone’s argument, and then dismantling that, declaring ‘aha!’, even though the original argument made was never actually tackled. To offer an example, if I were to argue that gun control measures make a country safer, providing evidence that the UK, Canada and Japan were all safer than the USA, and you suggested a small blip in gun crime in those countries suggested guns were still a problem in those countries, you’d be guilty of the Straw Man, since I never claimed there was no gun crime, only that gun control made those countries safer.
4. The Red Herring
Similar to the Straw Man, the Red Herring is an effort to introduce a misleading point, one that may be superficially related to the topic at hand, but not actually a part of the discussion. For example, when discussing the qualities of tea, switching up to coffee would be a red herring, since the discussion is about tea, not coffee.
5. The False Dilemma
The False Dilemma forces people to choose between two options, often extremes, even when there are other, more moderate choices available. One unique example I found of this came in the form of a debate regarding, of all things, Star Wars, though it was framed as the Alternative Syllogism. In effect, imagine being asked to choose between option A and option B, and only between those two options, even though other options exist. Person A insisted the choices with the destruction of Alderaan were either mysterious chain reaction, or direct energy transfer with no shields in place. There was a third possibility, option C, direct energy transfer with a shield, for which Person B had provided evidence. Person A was trying to create a False Dilemma.
6. The Circular Argument
This is a popular recourse of the religiously devout. ‘The Bible claims it is the inerrant Word of God, therefore it must be the inerrant Word of God.’ This is far from the only example, but I would wager it’s the most common representation of the Circular Argument.
7. The Appeal to Ignorance
This argument is to claim something is true, because it has not been proven false. You will often see the religiously devout use this. ‘Prove there is no god!’ Aside from introducing the unreasonable stance of proving a negative, it’s appealing to ignorance. No one can say, definitively, that there are no deities in existence, but no one can definitively claim they do exist either. I can just as readily claim there are aliens in my loft, no one has ever proven otherwise.
There are more forms of fallacy, but I don’t want to balloon this post too far! It would also be fair to say that virtually anyone and everyone to get involved in debates, especially online debates, has probably employed some of these fallacies, whether intentionally or by accident. It would also be fair to say that some people deliberately employ fallacies on a regular basis, obscuring facts behind a complicated web of double-speak and deception.
The challenge in any form of debate is to deal in facts, and in the absence of hard facts, to focus on logic. There is a reason that principles such as the scientific method have yielded so many discoveries.
