[general_re]

Previous installments:

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

[general_re]

Part 12 - test your knowledge.

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" ;)

[RightWhale]

A test? Is this a take-home? Can we work in groups?

[VadeRetro]

Number one bears some relation to: "Your mission will be to travel to the Sun. You won't burn up, however. We'll wait until night."

[VadeRetro]

The most blatant occurrence of recent years is all these knuckleheads running around protesting nuclear power — all these stupid people who do not research at all and who go out and march, pretending they care about the human race, and then go off in their automobiles and kill one another. (Ray Bradbury)

Don't see the fallacy and, at any rate, he ain't wrong.

[jennyp]

LI>Time heals all wounds. Time is money. Therefore money heals all wounds.

— "Ask Marilyn," Parade, 12 April 1987

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.

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!

[jennyp]

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.

— C. D. BROAD, Five Types of Ethical Theory

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.

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.

[PatrickHenry]

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.
— ALFRED J. AYER, "Freedom and Necessity," Polemic, no. 5, 1946

Other than placing the premise last, what in the world is wrong with that?

[T'wit]

"Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like to put it more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise." -- Lewis Carroll

[PatrickHenry]

24. Clavius, who wrote in 1581:
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.

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.

[PatrickHenry]

All right. I'll tackle this one:

1. Which is more useful, the Sun or the Moon? The Moon is more useful since it gives us light during the night, when it is dark, whereas the Sun shines only in the daytime, when it is light anyway.
— GEORGE GAMOW (inscribed in the entry hall of the Hayden Planetarium, New York City)

Although Gamow was -- presumably -- saying this as a joke, it's entirely in accord with Genesis:

1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
[Thus, there was light before the sun, as Gamow assumes.]
1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
1:17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
1:18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
1:19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

So I'd say that Gamow's statement is logical in form. It is, however, based upon the premise that the Genesis model is a scientifically accurate description of day and night and the function of the sun and moon.