New Blog Topic

Thank you all for your thoughtful and interesting contributions to the previous blog topic. I found it very interesting, and I learned a lot!

If you have more to post on the previous topic, or if you've not posted yet, you still can, anytime. Consider that topic an open one...

Meanwhile, let's take up a new topic. We will soon turn our attention to logic, and along with it, the question of a type of argument known as a "logical fallacy." A logical fallacy is an argument that might be true, or it might not be...or it might, or not...but the argument does not present enough information to decide whether it's true or false, BUT the argument is persuasive.

We will study some of these logical fallacies in the next week or two. They include arguments like the argumentum ad absurdum - an argument used by both Socrates (or Plato, at least) and Zeno (the disciple of Parmenides). Another fallacy is the slippery slope argument: this event will lead to this next event, which will lead to this next event, and then APOCALYPSE! In both fallacies just mentioned, the problem is that it might be true, or it might not be true, but we don't have enough evidence to decide one way or another. In the case of an argumentum ad absurdum, the one absurd consequence that results from the argument or definition does not prove that all consequences are absurd. To make the stronger claim (that the definition or argument is absurd), we need more evidence. Likewise, in a slippery slope argument, it might be that 'A' will lead to 'B', and 'B' to 'C,' and so forth, but it might not, therefore, we need more information.

Okay, enough theory. I want you to "research" a bit about logical fallacies, and then post some examples of the fallacies you find. Wikipedia is a (bad) starting point, but I recommend using the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or the Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (from the University of Tennessee, I believe). If you need other sources, please let me know.

One more 'hint': there are a number of books of fallacies, including Jeremy Bentham's Handbook of Political Fallacies. Feel free to be creative. I recently encountered a fallacy I didn't know the name of (never heard of it before). In a text I was reading, the author presented a metaphor for something in one paragraph, and in the next paragraph, took the metaphor as if it was fact. I don't even know what that fallacy is called, yet.

Rhetoric = the art of persuasion.
Persuasion can be used to convince people of the true or the false.
Therefore, it can be used by unscrupulous people for their purposes.
But remember, rhetoric, like fallacies, might be true, or not...or....