[Part 1 is available here, and it is a prerequisite for todays second part if you want to follow along.]
Hopefully what you took away yesterday with the addressing of formal fallacies should not have been their names, but instead why they were fallacious. All of the statements I'm going to quote today have at least one example of a fallacy in them. The minor, less common formal fallacies are for the most part just special cases of the major ones. As such, your goal today shouldn't always be able to name the reason the statement is fallacious, but rather why they are fallacious. Name's are extra credit ;)
All these examples were gathered from bits and pieces of online news posts and examples from the world of politics. I'll try to stick to that, as a political context is where we would be most likely see it, this being a political blog.
Democrat Hillary Clinton urged women voters on Thursday to rally behind her campaign against "the boys club of presidential politics" two days after male rivals attacked her repeatedly at a debate.
This is an Appeal to Pity, combined with a touch of ad Hominem. An Appeal to Pity in a political context involves suggesting that people back you because of an unfair or disadvantageous situation without advancing any particular reason you would be a good choice. It's a variation of an Appeal to Emotion. To explain better:
Appeal to Pity Explained
The appeal to pity is a fallacy that fits both reasons well. It uses pity, whether for the speaker or for some other group, in the place of a sound premise. For example, consider the following:
Mommy, I should not have to ride the bus to school anymore, because it makes me sad when you don't take me to school.
The argument certainly is appealing; parents do not want anyone to make fun of their children. On the other hand, the child's sadness or happiness has little to do with why the child is riding the bus, so the appeal does not lead logically to the conclusion.
Next:
It’s not uncommon to find political arguments that commit the [removed, figure it out you cheaters] fallacy. This may be because so many people are simply unfamiliar with basic logical fallacies, but an even more common reason may be that a person’s commitment to the truth of their political ideology may prevent them from seeing that they are assuming the truth of what they are attempting to prove.
Here are some examples of this fallacy in political discussions:
- Murder is morally wrong. Therefore, abortion is morally wrong. (from Hurley, p. 143)
- In arguing that abortion is not really a private moral matter, Fr. Frank A. Pavone, National Director Priests for Life, has written that “Abortion is our problem, and the problem of every human being. We are one human family. Nobody can be neutral on abortion. It involves the destruction of an entire group of human beings!
This is known as Begging the Question, and it presumes an answer already to the statement at question. X is true because X is true. In the example numbered 11, the debate is whether abortion is equivalent to murder, or at what point it's equivalent. The answer begs the question again because it presumes the answer to that question.
A bit of George Will for today:
In their new book, “SuperFreakonomics,” Steven D. Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a journalist, worry about global warming but revive some inconvenient memories of 30 years ago. Then intelligent people agreed (see above) that global cooling threatened human survival
This is a combo of an Appeal to Popularity and Appeal to Authority. Call it an Appeal to Popular Authority. There's nothing wrong with saying something's out of your league but here's an expert who says it for me. The problem is that you then have to illustrate why they believe this for a logically sound argument. Will skips over the logical part of the argument and declares as fact something based only on Popularity, Authority, and believed by fiat.
Next let's look at Chris Wallace's interview with Bill Clinton:
Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaida out of business when you were president?
This ones persnickety. It's known as the Fallacy of the Complex Question. You may have seen it as 'Did you stop beating your wife?'. Looking at the question (Why didn’t you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaida out of business when you were president?) you'll notice there are actually two questions in it, and one of them is begging:
- Was there more you could have done to stop al Qaida?
- If yes, why didn't you?
Now, the first is the one that presents the Begging the Question problem. The answer to this is presumed yes and indirectly asserted but not shown or defended by the person asking, and it moves on to the second question.
Let's use the 'Did you stop beating your wife?' example to illustrate it. it has two questions in it.
- Have you beaten your wife?
- Did you stop?
If you answer no to the first one, it will appear instead like you answered no to the have you stopped portion. If you answer yes to the stopped part, it will appear as though you admit to previous wife-beating.
Anyway, that's it for now. I don't expect for this to include a part 3, hopefully everyone had fun learning a bit here and yesterday and can carry on better prepared and armed for intellectual combat with your opponents.