Posted on 01/12/2004 1:22:14 PM PST by general_re
Part 1 - Introduction and the Argument From Ignorance
Part 2 - the Appeal to Inappropriate Authority
Part 3 - the Argument Ad Hominem
Part 4 - the Appeal to Force and the Appeal to Emotion
Part 5 - the Irrelevant Conclusion
Part 6 - Fallacies of Presumption and the Complex Question
Part 7 - False Cause and Begging the Question
Part 8 - Accident and Converse Accident
Part 9 - Fallacies of Ambiguity and Equivocation
Part 10 - Amphiboly and Accent
Part 11 - Composition and Division
Some selections may not contain true fallacies. Some selections may contain fallacies that are debatable or questionable as to whether it's really a fallacy. Some selections may contain more than one fallacy. Some may contain unusually subtle errors. That's life, so if you can spot most of the errors in the erroneous passages with a bit of effort, you should be well-armed to spot them "in the wild" ;)
25. All of us cannot be famous, because all of us cannot be well known.It may not be logical, but it's certainly consistent with everything else I've ever heard from that source.
JESSE JACKSON, quoted in The New Yorker, 12 March 1984
Don't see the fallacy and, at any rate, he ain't wrong.
LI>Time heals all wounds. Time is money. Therefore money heals all wounds.Hmmm... This depends on Time really equalling money. Now, the expression "time is money" really means there is an opportunity cost to spending time on something. So, does money cost time? Yes! You must spend time to earn money. So the expression works both ways. IOW, time & money really are equivalent in some sense that's important to us. "Ask Marilyn," Parade, 12 April 1987
So what about the first part? "Time heals all wounds." That's intuitively true, but is it because of time acting alone, or is it because of all the other things we do during that time that let us get on with our lives? If it's the latter, then maybe money - which makes many new distracting activities possible - really does heal all wounds!
If Utilitarianism be true it would be one's duty to try to increase the numbers of a community, even though one reduced the average total happiness of the members, so long as the total happiness in the community would be in the least increased. It seems perfectly plain to me that this kind of action, so far from being a duty, would quite certainly be wrong.I think the fallacy here is assuming that you can assign an amount of happiness or unhappiness to the state of never having been born in the first place. If a never-been-born child represents total unhappiness, then yes, producing him/her would increase the total H, no matter how unhappy their life was. C. D. BROAD, Five Types of Ethical Theory
But you really can't assign a value, good or bad, to the life that never existed in the first place. So the equation is invalid.
13. . . . it is only when it is believed that I could have acted otherwise that I am held to be morally responsible for what I have done. For a man is not thought to be morally responsible for an action that it was not in his power to avoid.Other than placing the premise last, what in the world is wrong with that?
ALFRED J. AYER, "Freedom and Necessity," Polemic, no. 5, 1946
You may find the context of that passage interesting. The full text of Broad's Five Types of Ethical Theory is available here, and the passage in question is in this section.
Who said that every passage was fallacious? ;)
24. Clavius, who wrote in 1581:Hmmmmm ... this is a difficult one. Nevertheless, I shall stick my neck out and suggest that the red flag went up when I spotted a poisoning of the well; and the green flag is for a woeful appeal to authority.
Both [Copernicus and Ptolemy] are in agreement with the observed phenomena. But Copernicus's arguments contain a great many principles that are absurd [ding, ding, ding!]. He assumed, for instance, that the earth is moving with a triple motion . . .[but] according to the philosophers [ding, ding, ding!] a simple body like the earth can have only a simple motion. . . . Therefore it seems to me that Ptolemy's geocentric doctrine must be preferred to Copernicus's doctrine.
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