Beware of the study of fallacies. The study has some serious problems. It invites a kind of oversimplification if one adopts the goal of being able to deploy the fallacy labels (rather than the goal of saying in each individual argument what its weaknesses are). It is a surprisingly difficult study, because it involves being able to read, and read subtly. There are way too many fallacies to master (Prof. Perry Weddle, who wrote one of the best books in Critical Thinking used to claim that medieval scholars had distinguished two thousand fallacies). Mastery of the falllacy approach has a bad effect on character, tending to turn one into a killer in argument and an unsympathetic listener, with a tendency to miss the positive value in most arguments. And mastery of the fallacy approach does nothing to teach one what a good argument is, only what to avoid. All the judgments resulting from this approach are negative, and no positive judgments are justified based on this approach. And what must be avoided in one setting may be required in another, so that what is a fallacy in Planning Commission meetings may be perfectly appropriate when one is addressing the issue of whether a witness is credible in court. Finally, students usually like the study of fallacies too much because the approach is teachable--students feel they have learned something, and that, they assume, is a good thing. Usually, though, what they learn are not the good things (being able to recognize some kinds of bad argument might help one to avoid endorsing or articulating those arguments, and finding that one was tempted to reason fallaciously may help with humility.) but rather the use of the fallacy approach to bludgeon others into submission and to win in arguments. Outline, Individual fallacies
I. THE FALLACIOUS APPEAL TO AUTHORITY is committed when we use as crucial support for our position the fact thatsomeone endorses that position who is not a good authority. In other words, the argument is based on the fact that someone said our position is the right one, but that person's saying so is not good support. The form of Fallacious Appeal to Authority is the same as any appeal to authority, whether sound or fallacious: "My position is the right position on this issue because So-and-so says it is." As soon as you can boil down an argument to this form, you should checkfor Fallacious Appeal to Authority. That is, as soon as you can justly say to the arguer, "You then are basically saying that your position is the correct position because So-and-so says so," you have a candidate for this fallacy.
There have been some varieties of Fallacious Appeal to Authority based on the idea that some groups of people are cited as authority but are probably not good authority:.
Popularity or the Bandwagon Fallacy is one example: we commit this fallacy when we decide our position based on its popularity: e.g., "I have decided that I am pro-choice on abortion after all, because I just read the Oregonian story which shows that college students are overwhelmingly pro-choice." A second variety of Fallacious Appeal to Authority is usually called Traditional Wisdom. Here the authority is taken to be the historical position of some group (church, political party, interest group, family, etc.). e.g., "A state income tax would be a mistake in Washington, because Washingtonians have never bought an income tax." The third variety of bad authority is called Provincialism, and turns on the use of "we," "our," or "us." This may overlap with the fallacy just previous, or with Popularity. It is the fallacy of taking an otherwise unqualified group as an authority on the basis that we are members of that group. e.g., "Eugene Water and Electric Board's proposed route for their high-tension line, cutting through the South Hills, is a bad idea whose time has come and gone long ago, because our neighborhood is strongly against it."
These varieties of F.A.A. have been given first in order to have examples we can use to understand a more general account of the fallacy. The fallacy is committed when a cited authority is not a good authority. A good authority should have all of the following and a bad authority lacks one or more of the following:
EXPERTISE, usually based on education, experience, and a good record in the field or discipline where the issue arises.
LACK OF BIAS, which means that the person cited has no monetary or emotional investment which would lead to a particular position on the issue.
AGREEMENT with the other authorities in the field; this means the person cited cannot be a maverick, nor can the issue be an issue among good authorities in the discipline, nor can authorities be cited to settle an issue when the discipline is divided.
Let's take each of those in turn. We commit a Fallacious Appeal to Authority when we buy a Toyota on the advice of our neighbor because he is mechanically inclined and has a good record as a major appliance repairman. He is out of his field and lacks expertise--at least so far.
Many congressmen committed F.A.A. when they believed research reports claiming that asbestos was not the cause of high disability and disease rates among asbestos workers in the early 70's, when the researchers were being paid (indirectly) by Owens-Corning, a major miner and processor of asbestos. The researchers were not unbiased.
We would be committing F.A.A. if we were to argue that sociologists are by their euphemisms responsible for our nation neglecting the problems of poverty, because Herbert Gans says so (in the piece we read). It is clear even in that piece that Gans has opposition among sociologists, and so no appeal to authority on this issue can be good.
So far we have one main fallacy with some subspecies. Before we can see what fallacies are like in general, we need to have more of a variety before us.
II. FALLACIOUS (or FALSE) ANALOGY is committed when we support our position by relying on a comparison which is misleading regarding the issue. This diagnosis requires care; many analogies may not play the role of support in an argument so much as they help the audience understand the issue or understand how the speaker is thinking. The form of false analogy is usually explained as, roughly,
"My position is correct because the situation with the issue is like this other situation, where we can agree that this other position is correct."
That is, the argument takes a pattern of reasoning from one situation and relies on our being able to fit the present issue into that pattern. Perhaps an example will help:
Abortion most certainly is permissible for any woman with an unwanted pregnancy, because it is her body. The situation is like a homeowner with an unwanted guest, where we would all agree that a homeowner has the right to require the unwanted guest to leave.
This is a fallacious appeal to analogy because (in large part) of the differences; to name one, the homeowner's guests presumably can continue to live outside the homeowner's home but a fetus's situation in this way is not similar. (At least among philosophers, a great deal of the debate about abortion issues has concerned itself with what would be a good analogy to abortion. This may strike us as ironic; it is as though among philosophers pregnancy and birth were difficult to figure out, and had to be approached by way of comparable examples.) Another example:
If one were to walk through the woods and found lying in the path a watch without knowing what it was, it would be impossible to examine it without coming to the conclusion that something with all those intricate parts and intertwined functions had a designer or maker. Yet, when we look in the right frame of mind at the woods and the earth we shall see in every leaf and every flower and living thing, and in the relationships among the sun and its satellites just the same kinds of intricate relationships. So the earth as well has a Maker.
III. HASTY GENERALIZATION is committed when we jump to conclusions on the basis of evidence which is not enough to justify us. Usually this is inductive, that is, reasoning from a sample to the whole, in which case the form is
"In these few cases I have found that this is the case, so this is the case, period." This is common enough to our experience that it perhaps does not take much teaching. Indeed, it can be taught easily with no real examples but with jokes. The one used when I learned this fallacy years ago traded on a racist stereotype: e.g., "All Indians walk single file; at least the one I saw did."
--which probably serves as well as a real example to illustrate the fallacy, and serves as well to remind us that stereotyping is not a form of this fallacy, but rests on a deeper pathology. That is, (watch out for the Hall of Mirrors effect here) it would be another example of Hasty Generalization to use this stereotype to conclude that stereotyping is a kind of Hasty Generalization.
IV. GENETIC FALLACY is committed only in answer to an argument (or a piece of an argument) when, instead of replying to the argument we direct our attention to something about the source of the argument in order to discredit it. The form is "My opponent's argument is not worthwhile because it comes fromSuch-and-such a source."
Thus, when the arguments of right-to-lifers are discounted by pro-choice advocates because some RTL's are religious fundamentalists, and arguments of pro-choice advocates are disparaged because some PCA's are political liberals--both commit the Genetic Fallacy. A standard subspecies of Genetic Fallacy is Ad Hominem ("against the man/person") in which we commit the fallacy by mounting a personal attack instead of addressing the issue raised by our opponent, e.g., "My opponent claims my tax proposal will be unfair to the middle class, but he cannot weasel his way out of his inability to defend himself against the tabloids who accuse him of violating the sexual values of that same middle class."
V. BEGGING THE QUESTION is a family of related fallacies, characterized generally by our taking our position as the only serious position and neglecting to provide real support. We can do this in several ways, but the cure is to take our opposition seriously and to try to address their needs.
One classic case of begging the question is when we do not realize that what we intended as support is the position in other words or in disguise. e.g. Soviet sociologist Guanadi Gerasimov was quoted a couple of years ago in the press as saying, "Communism will replace capitalism because private ownership of the means of production is obsolete." Another is Circular Reasoning, in which our support is good support only if our position is granted: "The Bible is the word of God, because in Paul's second letter to Timothy he says, 'all scripture is inspired of God and is beneficial for teaching, for reproof, and for setting things straight.'" False Dichotomy is another way to beg questions, in which we require that the only proper positions are artificially limited (usually to one we endorse and one other clearly false). "The fetus is a human being, of course. If it is not a human being, what is it? A frog? a fish?" That is, (there may be other ways to read this argument) "What is a fetus?" is taken to have only the possible answers, a) it is a human being, or b) it is some other kind of animal. Persuasive Definition is a way of arguing in which the support for our argument is placed in a definition in order to make it immune from attack. That is, the definition does the work of support, but looks as if it is not part of the issue. Any time a definition winds up being important in an argument, we should check for this fallacy. Thus, an argument for making some courses self-support courses at the University (P.E., Intermediate Algebra, Developmental Composition, English as a Second Language) might claim that the core of a college education just is knowledge of the values and facts which have shaped our civilization's greatest accomplishments, and these courses try to teach skills rather than those values and facts, and so the courses should not be part of the University unless students pay for them separately.
Straw Man is the fallacy of misrepresenting someone's arguments to make them easier to attack. Like the genetic fallacies, the fallacy of Straw Man can be committed only in answer to someone else. Unlike the genetic fallacies, Straw Man does pay attention to the argument of the opponent--but the fallacy is committed when that argument is set up to make it weak and vulnerable to attack. Thus, one of the Democratic campaign workers in the New Hampshire primary last month said on National Public Radio that "Pat Buchanan advocates a return to the economic atmosphere of the 1940's, in which people with money and power are free to be predators and the rest of us wind up being their prey." We do not need to know much about Pat Buchanan's positions to know that he is very unlikely to have put his position in these terms--he is likely to have been attacking government regulation rather than advocating setting loose rich predators on the poor.
Inconsistency is the fallacy of claiming two things at different times (we hope within one train of thought or one argument) when both cannot be true. Writers on this fallacy sometimes include inconsistency between words and actions, so that when our actions show that we do not believe what we say we are guilty of inconsistency. One example might be the person who says, "Men should butt out of the abortion debate. Women are the only ones who should have a say in the debate, and the only ones who should be pointing out whether an individual woman is making a good decision or a bad one." The hidden inconsistency is that if a woman is capable of making a bad decision, then women are not the only ones who have standing on the issue; rather anyone who can see that a particular decision is a bad one, or who can offer arguments that a particular decision is bad, has standing on the issue.
Causal Fallacies: Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc (abbreviated as Post Hoc, and translated as After This, Therefore Because of This) is committed when we take one event as caused by another just because it comes afterward. Many athletes' superstitions, as when the coach has to wear the same hat he was wearing when the winning streak started, are examples. The average number of hours middle school students watch TV has gone up by 75 percent over the last fifteen years, and their math performance on standardized tests has dropped alarmingly. So TV watching causes poor academic performance in math. This is fallacious, even if it is worth following up on, because there are too many other things going on for us to reason so simply--it may be that there is another reason (lack of interest or lack of availability on the part of parents, mercury in the tuna sandwiches) which causes both of the events. Effect for Cause is the fallacy of taking one event for the cause of another, reversing the actual relationship. In one comedy sketch a policeman at the scene of an accident is writing up tickets, including one for causing the traffic signal to burn out, when the burned out signal was what caused the accident. Tipper Gore's campaign against licentious lyrics in rock songs because they cause kids to be attracted to sex and violence may be based on the same fallacy. One news account which suggested that the use of beta-blocker inhalers for asthma may be dangerous, based on research which show that those who use the inhalers have a higher death rate than those who do not, is mistaking an effect for a cause--those who use the inhalers do so because they are asthmatic or allergic, which is the cause of their higher death rate. (This last example can also be read as Post Hoc.)
J.W.Powell