It is a matter of taking one or two instances of something and turning them into a trend. Hasty Generalization: This is the fallacy of jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence. At worst, they are a convenient way to lie with data. Should I support gun control based on a precedent that is no precedent at all? At best, post hoc, ergo propter hoc arguments undermine their proponents’ credibility.
The problem with this fallacy in terms of civility is that it can easily put us in the realm of misleading arguments. It’s possible that it is true, but without data to back it up, it’s simply bad reasoning. Or it is the fallacy that tells us that just because there was a drop in crime when the state of Connecticut passed tougher gun laws in 2013, the gun laws caused the drop in crime. It is the fallacy that tells us that because I touched a toad then got a wart, the toad must have caused the wart. Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc: This is a fancy Latin name for a simple fallacy – the misconception that just because one event follows another, that first event is the cause of the second. And by doing that, ad hominem attacks shut down communication. They suggest that because of who a person is (or who we perceive them to be), their positions don’t count and their voices don’t deserve to be heard. She meant it as an insult to Obama’s person, attacking him rather than the positions he stood for.Īd hominem attacks undermine civility by making an argument personal. In 2008, for example, when a woman at a John McCain campaign event in Minnesota yelled out to the candidate that Obama is an Arab, that was an ad hominem attack. It is probably the most common fallacy in American politics, and it is certainly the most pernicious. And all of them (I say, and hope you don’t think I’m wagging my finger) should best be avoided.Īd Hominem: This is the fallacy of attacking the author of an argument rather than the positions that they hold. So here below are four key logical fallacies to look out for. And all the civility runs out of the room.
And in doing so, we go from negotiation to hostage-taking. We run the risk of dismissing others’ needs out of hand – or of overvaluing our own.
When we make bad arguments about why we want what we want, or when we make bad assumptions about why other members of our community want something different, we run the risk of disrespecting the other people with whom we are in dialog. To get trapped in a logical fallacy is to undermine that kind of civility. And we meet somewhere in the middle – where neither of us gets everything we want, perhaps, but everybody gets something and all of us get respect. So what, you may ask, do logical fallacies have to do with civility? If you take as your premise (as we here at the Institute do) that civility is claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process, then civility is in a sense a negotiation. According to another, they are clearly defined error in reasoning used to support or refute an argument, excluding simple unintended mistakes. They are errors in thinking – missteps in making an argument that lead us down the wrong path and cause us to draw bad conclusions.Īccording to one definition, a logical fallacy occurs in an argument when the premises fail to logically support the conclusion. They aren’t like bad grammar or unclear prose. Avoid these things, perhaps someone once threatened, or your grades will surely suffer.īut the thing is that logical fallacies are not actually errors in writing. Most of us, if we think of logical fallacies at all, remember them as some obscure concept from a years-old college rhetoric class, or as a list of stern don’ts given to us by a finger-wagging high-school English teacher bent on instilling in us the ‘right’ way to write an essay.
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