Preamble
http://www.don-linds...c/arguments.htm
This list has been extended from Schopenhauer's orginal list http://www.mnei.nl/s...-stratagems.htm
"The tricks, dodges, and chicanery, to which they [men] resort in order to be right in the end, are so numerous and manifold and yet recur so regularly that some years ago I made them the subject of my own reflection..."
Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, Edited by Arthur Hübscher, Translated by E.F.J. Payne, Vol. III, "Berlin Manuscripts (1818-1830)," Berg, Oxford/New York/Munich, 1989, ISBN 0-85496-540-8
Schopenhaue 1831
One uses them unconsciusly and it may be helpful to periodically purge them to derive closer truth approximations in thinking and discussion. If we can find Truth we have power.
Discovering the Truth can involve accurate observation and using an honest logic.
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Things to avoid in Philosophical debate
- Needling:simply attempting to make the other person angry, without trying to address the argument at hand. Sometimes this is a delaying tactic.
Needling is also Ad Hominem if you insult your opponent. You may instead insult something the other person believes in ("Argumentum Ad YourMomium"), interrupt, clown to show disrespect, be noisy, fail to pass over the microphone, and numerous other tricks. All of these work better if you are running things - for example, if it is your radio show, and you can cut off the other person's microphone. If the host or moderator is firmly on your side, that is almost as good as running the show yourself. It's even better if the debate is videotaped, and you are the person who will edit the video.
If you wink at the audience, or in general clown in their direction, then we are shading over to Argument By Personal Charm.
Usually, the best way to cope with insults is to show mild amusement, and remain polite. A humorous comeback will probably work better than an angry one.
- Straw Man (Fallacy Of Extension):attacking an exaggerated or caricatured version of your opponent's position.
For example, the claim that "evolution means a dog giving birth to a cat."
Another example: "Senator Jones says that we should not fund the attack submarine program. I disagree entirely. I can't understand why he wants to leave us defenseless like that."
On the Internet, it is common to exaggerate the opponent's position so that a comparison can be made between the opponent and Hitler.
- Inflation Of Conflict:arguing that scholars debate a certain point. Therefore, they must know nothing, and their entire field of knowledge is "in crisis" or does not properly exist at all.
- Argument From Adverse Consequences (Appeal To Fear, Scare Tactics):saying an opponent must be wrong, because if he is right, then bad things would ensue. For example: God must exist, because a godless society would be lawless and dangerous. Or: the defendant in a murder trial must be found guilty, because otherwise husbands will be encouraged to murder their wives.
Wishful thinking is closely related. "My home in Florida is one foot above sea level. Therefore I am certain that global warming will not make the oceans rise by fifteen feet." Of course, wishful thinking can also be about positive consequences, such as winning the lottery, or eliminating poverty and crime.
- Special Pleading (Stacking The Deck):
- Excluded Middle (False Dichotomy, Faulty Dilemma, Bifurcation):assuming there are only two alternatives when in fact there are more. For example, assuming Atheism is the only alternative to Fundamentalism, or being a traitor is the only alternative to being a loud patriot.
- Short Term Versus Long Term:this is a particular case of the Excluded Middle. For example, "We must deal with crime on the streets before improving the schools." (But why can't we do some of both ?) Similarly, "We should take the scientific research budget and use it to feed starving children."
- Burden Of Proof:
- Argument By Question:
Variants are the rhetorical question, and the loaded question, such as "Have you stopped beating your wife ?"
- Argument by Rhetorical Question:asking a question in a way that leads to a particular answer. For example, "When are we going to give the old folks of this country the pension they deserve ?" The speaker is leading the audience to the answer "Right now." Alternatively, he could have said "When will we be able to afford a major increase in old age pensions?" In that case, the answer he is aiming at is almost certainly not "Right now."
- Fallacy Of The General Rule:
- Reductive Fallacy (Oversimplification):over-simplifying. As Einstein said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Political slogans such as "Taxation is theft" fall in this category.
- Genetic Fallacy (Fallacy of Origins, Fallacy of Virtue):if an argument or arguer has some particular origin, the argument must be right (or wrong). The idea is that things from that origin, or that social class, have virtue or lack virtue. (Being poor or being rich may be held out as being virtuous.) Therefore, the actual details of the argument can be overlooked, since correctness can be decided without any need to listen or think.
- Psychogenetic Fallacy:if you learn the psychological reason why your opponent likes an argument, then he's biased, so his argument must be wrong.
- Argument Of The Beard:
However, the existence of pink should not undermine the distinction between white and red.
- Argument From Age (Wisdom of the Ancients):snobbery that very old (or very young) arguments are superior. This is a variation of the Genetic Fallacy, but has the psychological appeal of seniority and tradition (or innovation).
Products labelled "New ! Improved !" are appealing to a belief that innovation is of value for such products. It's sometimes true. And then there's cans of "Old Fashioned Baked Beans".
- Not Invented Here:
ideas from elsewhere are made unwelcome. "This Is The Way We've Always Done It."
This fallacy is a variant of the Argument From Age. It gets a psychological boost from feelings that local ways are superior, or that local identity is worth any cost, or that innovations will upset matters.
An example of this is the common assertion that America has "the best health care system in the world", an idea that this 2007 New York Times editorial refuted.
People who use the Not Invented Here argument are sometimes accused of being stick-in-the-mud's.
Conversely, foreign and "imported" things may be held out as superior.
- Argument By Dismissal:
an idea is rejected without saying why.
Dismissals usually have overtones. For example, "If you don't like it, leave the country" implies that your cause is hopeless, or that you are unpatriotic, or that your ideas are foreign, or maybe all three. "If you don't like it, live in a Communist country" adds an emotive element.
- Argument To The Future:arguing that evidence will someday be discovered which will (then) support your point.
- Poisoning The Wells:discrediting the sources used by your opponent. This is a variation of Ad Hominem.
- Argument By Emotive Language (Appeal To The People):using emotionally loaded words to sway the audience's sentiments instead of their minds. Many emotions can be useful: anger, spite, envy, condescension, and so on.
Cliche Thinking and Argument By Slogan are useful adjuncts, particularly if you can get the audience to chant the slogan. People who rely on this argument may seed the audience with supporters or "shills", who laugh, applaud or chant at proper moments. This is the live-audience equivalent of adding a laugh track or music track. Now that many venues have video equipment, some speakers give part of their speech by playing a prepared video. These videos are an opportunity to show a supportive audience, use emotional music, show emotionally charged images, and the like. The idea is old: there used to be professional cheering sections. (Monsieur Zig-Zag, pictured on the cigarette rolling papers, acquired his fame by applauding for money at the Paris Opera.)
If the emotion in question isn't harsh, Argument By Poetic Language helps the effect. Flattering the audience doesn't hurt either.
- Argument By Personal Charm:getting the audience to cut you slack. Example: Ronald Reagan. It helps if you have an opponent with much less personal charm.
- Appeal To Pity (Appeal to Sympathy, The Galileo Argument):"I did not murder my mother and father with an axe ! Please don't find me guilty; I'm suffering enough through being an orphan."
- Appeal To Force:threats, or even violence. On the Net, the usual threat is of a lawsuit. The traditional religious threat is that one will burn in Hell. However, history is full of instances where expressing an unpopular idea could you get you beaten up on the spot, or worse.
- Argument By Vehemence:being loud. Trial lawyers are taught this rule:The above rule paints vehemence as an act of desperation. But it can also be a way to seize control of the agenda, use up the opponent's time, or just intimidate the easily cowed. And it's not necessarily aimed at winning the day. A tantrum or a fit is also a way to get a reputation, so that in the future, no one will mess with you.
This is related to putting a post in UPPERCASE, aka SHOUTING.
Depending on what you're loud about, this may also be an Appeal To Force, Argument By Emotive Language, Needling, or Changing The Subject.
- Begging The Question (Assuming The Answer, Tautology):
- Stolen Concept:
This is a relative of Begging The Question, except that the circularity there is in what you are trying to prove, instead of what you are trying to disprove.
It is also a relative of Reductio Ad Absurdum, where you temporarily assume the truth of something.
- Argument From Authority:the claim that the speaker is an expert, and so should be trusted.
There are degrees and areas of expertise. The speaker is actually claiming to be more expert, in the relevant subject area, than anyone else in the room. There is also an implied claim that expertise in the area is worth having. For example, claiming expertise in something hopelessly quack (like iridology) is actually an admission that the speaker is gullible.
- Argument From False Authority:a strange variation on Argument From Authority. For example, the TV commercial which starts "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." Just what are we supposed to conclude ?
- Appeal To Anonymous Authority:
an Appeal To Authority is made, but the authority is not named. For example, "Experts agree that ..", "scientists say .." or even "they say ..". This makes the information impossible to verify, and brings up the very real possibility that the arguer himself doesn't know who the experts are. In that case, he may just be spreading a rumor.
The situation is even worse if the arguer admits it's a rumor.
- Appeal To Authority:"Albert Einstein was extremely impressed with this theory." (But a statement made by someone long-dead could be out of date. Or perhaps Einstein was just being polite. Or perhaps he made his statement in some specific context. And so on.)
A variation is to appeal to unnamed authorities .
There was a New Yorker cartoon, showing a doctor and patient. The doctor was saying: "Conventional medicine has no treatment for your condition. Luckily for you, I'm a quack." So the joke was that the doctor boasted of his lack of authority.
- Appeal To False Authority:a variation on Appeal To Authority, but the Authority is outside his area of expertise.
For example, "Famous physicist John Taylor studied Uri Geller extensively and found no evidence of trickery or fraud in his feats." Taylor was not qualified to detect trickery or fraud of the kind used by stage magicians. Taylor later admitted Geller had tricked him, but he apparently had not figured out how.
A variation is to appeal to a non-existent authority. For example, someone reading an article by Creationist Dmitri Kuznetsov tried to look up the referenced articles. Some of the articles turned out to be in non-existent journals.
Another variation is to misquote a real authority. There are several kinds of misquotation. A quote can be inexact or have been edited. It can be taken out of context. (Chevy Chase: "Yes, I said that, but I was singing a song written by someone else at the time.") The quote can be separate quotes which the arguer glued together. Or, bits might have gone missing. For example, it's easy to prove that Mick Jagger is an assassin. In "Sympathy For The Devil" he sang: "I shouted out, who killed the Kennedys, When after all, it was ... me."
- Statement Of Conversion:the speaker says "I used to believe in X".
This is simply a weak form of asserting expertise. The speaker is implying that he has learned about the subject, and now that he is better informed, he has rejected X. So perhaps he is now an authority, and this is an implied Argument From Authority.
A more irritating version of this is "I used to think that way when I was your age." The speaker hasn't said what is wrong with your argument: he is merely claiming that his age has made him an expert.
"X" has not actually been countered unless there is agreement that the speaker has that expertise. In general, any bald claim always has to be buttressed.
For example, there are a number of Creationist authors who say they "used to be evolutionists", but the scientists who have rated their books haven't noticed any expertise about evolution.
- Bad Analogy:
- Extended Analogy:the claim that two things, both analogous to a third thing, are therefore analogous to each other. For example, this debate:
- Argument From Spurious Similarity:this is a relative of Bad Analogy. It is suggested that some resemblance is proof of a relationship. There is a WW II story about a British lady who was trained in spotting German airplanes. She made a report about a certain very important type of plane. While being quizzed, she explained that she hadn't been sure, herself, until she noticed that it had a little man in the cockpit, just like the little model airplane at the training class.
- Reifying:an abstract thing is talked about as if it were concrete. (A possibly Bad Analogy is being made between concept and reality.) For example, "Nature abhors a vacuum."
- False Cause:assuming that because two things happened, the first one caused the second one. (Sequence is not causation.) For example, "Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons." Or, "Every time my brother Bill accompanies me to Fenway Park, the Red Sox are sure to lose."
Essentially, these are arguments that the sun goes down because we've turned on the street lights.
- Confusing Correlation And Causation:earthquakes in the Andes were correlated with the closest approaches of the planet Uranus. Therefore, Uranus must have caused them. (But Jupiter is nearer than Uranus, and more massive too.)
- Causal Reductionism (Complex Cause):trying to use one cause to explain something, when in fact it had several causes. For example, "The accident was caused by the taxi parking in the street." (But other drivers went around the taxi. Only the drunk driver hit the taxi.)
- Cliche Thinking:
using as evidence a well-known wise saying, as if that is proven, or as if it has no exceptions.
- Exception That Proves The Rule:
a specific example of Cliche Thinking. This is used when a rule has been asserted, and someone points out the rule doesn't always work. The cliche rebuttal is that this is "the exception that proves the rule". Many people think that this cliche somehow allows you to ignore the exception, and continue using the rule.
In fact, the cliche originally did no such thing. There are two standard explanations for the original meaning.
The first is that the word "prove" meant test. That is why the military takes its equipment to a Proving Ground to test it. So, the cliche originally said that an exception tests a rule. That is, if you find an exception to a rule, the cliche is saying that the rule is being tested, and perhaps the rule will need to be discarded.
The second explanation is that the stating of an exception to a rule, proves that the rule exists. For example, suppose it was announced that "Over the holiday weekend, students do not need to be in the dorms by midnight". This announcement implies that normally students do have to be in by midnight. Here is a discussion of that explanation.
In either case, the cliche is not about waving away objections.
- Appeal To Widespread Belief (Bandwagon Argument, Peer Pressure, Appeal to Common Practice):the claim, as evidence for an idea, that many people believe it, or used to believe it, or do it.
- Fallacy Of Composition:
Another example: "Atoms are colorless. Cats are made of atoms, so cats are colorless."
- Fallacy Of Division:assuming that what is true of the whole is true of each constituent part. For example, human beings are made of atoms, and human beings are conscious, so atoms must be conscious.
- Complex Question (Tying):
For example, "Do you support freedom and the right to bear arms ?"
- Slippery Slope Fallacy (Camel's Nose)
- Argument By Pigheadedness (Doggedness):refusing to accept something after everyone else thinks it is well enough proved. For example, there are still Flat Earthers.
- Appeal To Coincidence:
asserting that some fact is due to chance. For example, the arguer has had a dozen traffic accidents in six months, yet he insists they weren't his fault. This may be Argument By Pigheadedness. But on the other hand, coincidences do happen, so this argument is not always fallacious.
- Argument By Repetition (Argument Ad Nauseam):if you say something often enough, some people will begin to believe it. There are some net.kooks who keeping reposting the same articles to Usenet, presumably in hopes it will have that effect.
- Argument By Half Truth (Suppressed Evidence):
- Argument By Selective Observation:
- Argument By Selective Reading:
This is a relative of Argument By Selective Observation, in that the arguer overlooks arguments that he does not like. It is also related to Straw Man (Fallacy Of Extension), in that the opponent's argument is not being fairly represented.
- Argument By Generalization:
drawing a broad conclusion from a small number of perhaps unrepresentative cases. (The cases may be unrepresentative because of Selective Observation.) For example, "They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible ? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese." So, by generalization, there aren't any Chinese anywhere. This is connected to the Fallacy Of The General Rule.
Similarly, "Because we allow terminally ill patients to use heroin, we should allow everyone to use heroin."
It is also possible to under-generalize. For example,
"A man who had killed both of his grandmothers declared himself rehabilitated, on the grounds that he could not conceivably repeat his offense in the absence of any further grandmothers."
-- "Ports Of Call" by Jack Vance - Argument From Small Numbers:"I've thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can't lose." This is Argument By Generalization, but it assumes that small numbers are the same as big numbers. (Three sevens is actually a common occurrence. Thirty three sevens is not.)
Or: "After treatment with the drug, one-third of the mice were cured, one-third died, and the third mouse escaped." Does this mean that if we treated a thousand mice, 333 would be cured ? Well, no.
- Misunderstanding The Nature Of Statistics (Innumeracy):
- Inconsistency:
- Non Sequitur:
Or: "Bill lives in a large building, so his apartment must be large."
- Meaningless Questions:irresistible forces meeting immovable objects, and the like.
- Argument By Poetic Language:if it sounds good, it must be right. Songs often use this effect to create a sort of credibility - for example, "Don't Fear The Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult. Politically oriented songs should be taken with a grain of salt, precisely because they sound good.
- Argument By Slogan:if it's short, and connects to an argument, it must be an argument. (But slogans risk the Reductive Fallacy.)
Being short, a slogan increases the effectiveness of Argument By Repetition. It also helps Argument By Emotive Language (Appeal To The People), since emotional appeals need to be punchy. (Also, the gallery can chant a short slogan.) Using an old slogan is Cliche Thinking.
- Argument By Prestigious Jargon:using big complicated words so that you will seem to be an expert. Why do people use "utilize" when they could utilize "use" ?
- Argument By Gibberish (Bafflement):this is the extreme version of Argument By Prestigious Jargon. An invented vocabulary helps the effect, and some net.kooks use lots of CAPitaLIZation. However, perfectly ordinary words can be used to baffle. For example, "Omniscience is greater than omnipotence, and the difference is two. Omnipotence plus two equals omniscience. META = 2." [From R. Buckminster Fuller's No More Secondhand God.]
Gibberish may come from people who can't find meaning in technical jargon, so they think they should copy style instead of meaning. It can also be a "snow job", AKA "baffle them with BS", by someone actually familiar with the jargon. Or it could be Argument By Poetic Language.
An example of poetic gibberish: "Each autonomous individual emerges holographically within egoless ontological consciousness as a non-dimensional geometric point within the transcendental thought-wave matrix."
- Equivocation:
"The sign said 'fine for parking here', and since it was fine, I parked there."
All trees have bark.
All dogs bark.
Therefore, all dogs are trees. - Euphemism:the use of words that sound better. The lab rat wasn't killed, it was sacrificed. Mass murder wasn't genocide, it was ethnic cleansing. The death of innocent bystanders is collateral damage. Microsoft doesn't find bugs, or problems, or security vulnerabilities: they just discover an issue with a piece of software.
This is related to Argument By Emotive Language, since the effect is to make a concept emotionally palatable.
- Weasel Wording:this is very much like Euphemism, except that the word changes are done to claim a new, different concept rather than soften the old concept. For example, an American President may not legally conduct a war without a declaration of Congress. So, various Presidents have conducted "police actions", "armed incursions", "protective reaction strikes," "pacification," "safeguarding American interests," and a wide variety of "operations". Similarly, War Departments have become Departments of Defense, and untested medicines have become alternative medicines. The book "1984" has some particularly good examples.
- Error Of Fact:for example, "No one knows how old the Pyramids of Egypt are." (Except, of course, for the historians who've read records and letters written by the ancient Egyptians themselves.)
Typically, the presence of one error means that there are other errors to be uncovered.
- Argument From Personal Astonishment:Errors of Fact caused by stating offhand opinions as proven facts. (The speaker's thought process being "I don't see how this is possible, so it isn't.") An example from Creationism is given here.
This isn't lying, quite. It just seems that way to people who know more about the subject than the speaker does.
- Lies:intentional Errors of Fact. In some contexts this is called bluffing.
If the speaker thinks that lying serves a moral end, this would be a Pious Fraud.
- Contrarian Argument:in science, espousing some thing that the speaker knows is generally ill-regarded, or even generally held to be disproven. For example, claiming that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, or claiming that homeopathic remedies are not just placebos.
This is sometimes done to make people think, and sometimes it is needling, or perhaps it supports an external agenda. But it can also be done just to oppose conformity, or as a pose or style choice: to be a "maverick" or lightning rod. Or, perhaps just for the ego of standing alone:
Calling someone contrarian risks the Psychogenetic Fallacy. People who are annoying are not necessarily wrong. On the other hand, if the position is ill-regarded for a reason, then defending it may be uphill."If you want to prove yourself a brilliant scientist, you don't always agree with the consensus. You show you're right and everyone else is wrong."
-- Daniel Kirk-Davidoff discussing Richard LindzenTrolling is Contrarian Argument done to get a reaction. Trolling on the Internet often involves pretense.
- Hypothesis Contrary To Fact:arguing from something that might have happened, but didn't.
- Internal Contradiction:saying two contradictory things in the same argument. For example, claiming that Archaeopteryx is a dinosaur with hoaxed feathers, and also saying in the same book that it is a "true bird". Or another author who said on page 59, "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes in his autobiography that he never saw a ghost." But on page 200 we find "Sir Arthur's first encounter with a ghost came when he was 25, surgeon of a whaling ship in the Arctic.."
This is much like saying "I never borrowed his car, and it already had that dent when I got it."
This is related to Inconsistency.
- Changing The Subject (Digression, Red Herring, Misdirection, False Emphasis):this is sometimes used to avoid having to defend a claim, or to avoid making good on a promise. In general, there is something you are not supposed to notice.
This is connected to various diversionary tactics, which may be obstructive, obtuse, or needling. For example, if you quibble about the meaning of some word a person used, they may be quite happy about being corrected, since that means they've derailed you, or changed the subject. They may pick nits in your wording, perhaps asking you to define "is". They may deliberately misunderstand you:
It is also connected to various rhetorical tricks, such as announcing that there cannot be a question period because the speaker must leave. (But then he doesn't leave.)"You said this happened five years before Hitler came to power. Why are you so fascinated with Hitler ? Are you anti-Semitic ?"
- Argument By Fast Talking:if you go from one idea to the next quickly enough, the audience won't have time to think. This is connected to Changing The Subject and (to some audiences) Argument By Personal Charm.
However, some psychologists say that to understand what you hear, you must for a brief moment believe it. If this is true, then rapid delivery does not leave people time to reject what they hear.
- Having Your Cake (Failure To Assert, or Diminished Claim):almost claiming something, but backing out. For example, "It may be, as some suppose, that ghosts can only be seen by certain so-called sensitives, who are possibly special mutations with, perhaps, abnormally extended ranges of vision and hearing. Yet some claim we are all sensitives."
- Ambiguous Assertion:
Of course, lack of clarity is not always intentional. Sometimes a statement is just vague.
- Failure To State:if you make enough attacks, and ask enough questions, you may never have to actually define your own position on the topic.
- Outdated Information:information is given, but it is not the latest information on the subject. For example, some creationist articles about the amount of dust on the moon quote a measurement made in the 1950's. But many much better measurements have been done since then.
- Amazing Familiarity:the speaker seems to have information that there is no possible way for him to get, on the basis of his own statements. For example: "The first man on deck, seaman Don Smithers, yawned lazily and fingered his good luck charm, a dried seahorse. To no avail ! At noon, the Sea Ranger was found drifting aimlessly, with every man of its crew missing without a trace !"
- Least Plausible Hypothesis:
- Argument By Scenario:telling a story which ties together unrelated material, and then using the story as proof they are related.
- Affirming The Consequent:logic reversal. A correct statement of the form "if P then Q" gets turned into "Q therefore P".
"All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat."
Another example: "If space creatures were kidnapping people and examining them, the space creatures would probably hypnotically erase the memories of the people they examined. These people would thus suffer from amnesia. But in fact many people do suffer from amnesia. This tends to prove they were kidnapped and examined by space creatures." This is also a Least Plausible Hypothesis explanation.
- Moving The Goalposts (Raising The Bar, Argument By Demanding Impossible Perfection):if your opponent successfully addresses some point, then say he must also address some further point. If you can make these points more and more difficult (or diverse) then eventually your opponent must fail. If nothing else, you will eventually find a subject that your opponent isn't up on.
This is related to Argument By Question. Asking questions is easy: it's answering them that's hard.
If each new goal causes a new question, this may get to be Infinite Regression.
It is also possible to lower the bar, reducing the burden on an argument. For example, a person who takes Vitamin C might claim that it prevents colds. When they do get a cold, then they move the goalposts, by saying that the cold would have been much worse if not for the Vitamin C.
- Appeal To Complexity:if the arguer doesn't understand the topic, he concludes that nobody understands it. So, his opinions are as good as anybody's.
- Common Sense:
unfortunately, there simply isn't a common-sense answer for many questions. In politics, for example, there are a lot of issues where people disagree. Each side thinks that their answer is common sense. Clearly, some of these people are wrong.
The reason they are wrong is because common sense depends on the context, knowledge and experience of the observer. That is why instruction manuals will often have paragraphs like these:
If the ideas are so obvious, then why the second sentence ? Why do they have to spell it out ? The answer is that "use common sense" actually meant "pay attention, I am about to tell you something that inexperienced people often get wrong."Science has discovered a lot of situations which are far more unfamiliar than water skiing. Not surprisingly, beginners find that much of it violates their common sense. For example, many people can't imagine how a mountain range would form. But in fact anyone can take good GPS equipment to the Himalayas, and measure for themselves that those mountains are rising today.
If a speaker tells an audience that he supports using common sense, it is very possibly an Ambiguous Assertion.
- Argument By Laziness (Argument By Uninformed Opinion):the arguer hasn't bothered to learn anything about the topic. He nevertheless has an opinion, and will be insulted if his opinion is not treated with respect. For example, someone looked at a picture on one of my web pages, and made a complaint which showed that he hadn't even skimmed through the words on the page. When I pointed this out, he replied that I shouldn't have had such a confusing picture.
- Disproof By Fallacy:if a conclusion can be reached in an obviously fallacious way, then the conclusion is incorrectly declared wrong. For example,
"Take the division 64/16. Now, canceling a 6 on top and a six on the bottom, we get that 64/16 = 4/1 = 4."
"Wait a second ! You can't just cancel the six !"
"Oh, so you're telling us 64/16 is not equal to 4, are you ?"Note that this is different from Reductio Ad Absurdum, where your opponent's argument can lead to an absurd conclusion. In this case, an absurd argument leads to a normal conclusion.
- Reductio Ad Absurdum:showing that your opponent's argument leads to some absurd conclusion. This is in general a reasonable and non-fallacious way to argue. If the issues are razor-sharp, it is a good way to completely destroy his argument. However, if the waters are a bit muddy, perhaps you will only succeed in showing that your opponent's argument does not apply in all cases, That is, using Reductio Ad Absurdum is sometimes using the Fallacy Of The General Rule. However, if you are faced with an argument that is poorly worded, or only lightly sketched, Reductio Ad Absurdum may be a good way of pointing out the holes.
An example of why absurd conclusions are bad things:
Bertrand Russell, in a lecture on logic, mentioned that in the sense of material implication, a false proposition implies any proposition. A student raised his hand and said "In that case, given that 1 = 0, prove that you are the Pope". Russell immediately replied, "Add 1 to both sides of the equation: then we have 2 = 1. The set containing just me and the Pope has 2 members. But 2 = 1, so it has only 1 member; therefore, I am the Pope."
- False Compromise:
"Some say the sun rises in the east, some say it rises in the west; the truth lies probably somewhere in between."
- Fallacy Of The Crucial Experiment:
- Two Wrongs Make A Right (Tu Quoque, You Too, What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander):
a charge of wrongdoing is answered by a rationalization that others have sinned, or might have sinned. For example, Bill borrows Jane's expensive pen, and later finds he hasn't returned it. He tells himself that it is okay to keep it, since she would have taken his.
War atrocities and terrorism are often defended in this way.
Similarly, some people defend capital punishment on the grounds that the state is killing people who have killed.
This is related to Ad Hominem (Argument To The Man).
from about 14 minutes in you can see British politician George Galloway using many of them.
==============================================================
How shoud we train as philosophers to debate without becoming mathematicians, and killing literature for symbols?
The effect on audiences is different in philsophical debate from pub;lic declamations like rousing a mass to a mob frenzying it enough to storm the Bastile.
An orator is not a rhetorician, and his aim can be to incite people. A politician is not a philosopher and his chief aim is to win support for his employment.
While it is true that the extreme rulers rule by oppression, without most people's support...however got...they would presumably leave office fast.
Power over men can be got by language-spoken and written - eg Demosthenes and Tom Paine respectively, but the solid work is science and technoilogy, and this is always led by philosophprs: absurd men who will not bend in their views to falsehood
euphoria or assu,edtruth.
We need to test and retest the laws - not only of science but of every tool that has given them, like experiment, logic and theory.
Philosophy moves with literature / science fiction and while it is true all men are philosophres, it is also true that all men have errors in belief and method or there would be no advance.
Computers are not immune. Like plants they make errors where the environment encroaches, or where their sysetms cant acheive perfection by innate limitations.
Edited by the hanged man, 17 September 2015 - 11:52 AM.
