ROGUES’ GALLERY OF VILLAINOUS FALLACIES



ROGUES’ GALLERY

OF

VILLAINOUS FALLACIES

By E. Jerome Van Kuiken

Welcome to the Rogues’ Gallery of Villainous Fallacies! In these pages, I’m going to introduce you to a number of dirty, rotten scoundrels of informal logic. They kill critical thinking, maim good discussions, and steal value from both persons and ideas. By studying their profiles, you’ll become an expert detective, able to track down these thugs and lock ‘em up!

Here’s a quick checklist of the fallacies we’ll be profiling:

1. Line-Drawing Fallacy

2. False Cause

3. Hasty Generalization

4. Justified Wrongdoing

5. Shifting the Burden of Proof

6. Appeal to Emotion

7. Ad Hominem

8. Appeal to (Expert) Authority

9. Appeals to Other Authorities & Reverse Appeals

10. Straw Man

11. Circular Reasoning (Question-Begging)

12. Guilt By Association

13. Innuendo

14. Red Herring

15. Spin

16. False Dilemma

Grab your magnifying glass and notepad, and let’s enter the gallery!

1. Line-Drawing Fallacy

This fallacy says, “Accept (or reject) this, because it’s only different in degree from what you already accept (or reject).” Take this example: “Eating a candy bar makes me happy. Eating two candy bars should make me happier. And eating three candy bars should make me even happier yet. And eating twenty-five candy bars should make me unbelievably happy.” Of course, if you follow through on this line of reasoning, you’ll end up with an unbelievable stomachache. It may be difficult to draw the line as to just when your happiness peaked and unhappiness set in during your candy bar binge, but no doubt the line is there. Here’s another example: “At what point does a worker officially cross the line into loafing on the job? Is it when they aren’t productive for half a minute? A full minute? Five minutes? Fifteen minutes? Since the line between loafing and non-loafing is so hard to draw, employers shouldn’t fire employees for loafing.” Sounds plausible, right? But I suspect that if you find yourself doing all the work while your co-workers just stand around, then you have a pretty good idea about what constitutes loafing, even if you can’t pin down the precise moment it began.

2. False Cause

This is my handy label for a whole family of fallacies. Their common trait is seeing a cause where it’s not. One member of the family goes by the name Post Hoc Fallacy, from the Latin phrase, post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“after this, so because of this”). When one thing happens after another thing, people may mistakenly think that the first thing made the second thing happen. For over a thousand years, Europeans believed in the spontaneous generation of some types of animals. They were sure that rats, for instance, came from dirty rags. Why? Because they would throw their dirty rags in a corner, and pretty soon they’d notice rats among the rags. But in the 1800’s, the great scientist Louis Pasteur disproved the idea that dirty rags caused rats to exist. Now we take it for granted that, while rats may be attracted by rags, they aren’t produced by rags.

A cousin of the Post Hoc Fallacy is the “Common Traits Prove Common Cause” Fallacy (I’ll let you come up with the Latin name for this one!). You may have heard about the rumored “curse” on the U.S. Presidency: Presidents elected on years ending in zero die in office. Look at the evidence below:

President Election Year Cause of Death*

William Harrison 1840 Natural Causes

Abraham Lincoln 1860 Assassination

James Garfield 1880 Assassination

William McKinley 1900 Assassination

Warren Harding 1920 Natural Causes

Franklin Roosevelt 1940 Natural Causes

John Kennedy 1960 Assassination

Ronald Reagan 1980 Assassination*

(*Reagan survived an assassination attempt, thus breaking the “curse.”)

Should we conclude, then, that being elected in a year ending with zero causes presidential fatalities? No. For one thing, the list of evidence above ignores the fact that another President, Zachary Taylor, died in office, yet he was elected in 1848. The list also neglects to mention that Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe were both elected in years ending in zero, yet they survived their presidencies.

Yet another member of the False Cause family confuses a circumstance with a cause. Just because something happens along with or at the same time as something else, it doesn’t mean the one causes the other. An athlete may be wearing a favorite pair of underwear and also be on a winning streak, but that doesn’t mean the “lucky undies” can take the credit for the wins.

The final False Cause family member I’d like you to meet is the slippery slope fallacy. Imagine a cartoon character on a snowy mountain. The character slips or gets bumped and rolls head over heels down the mountainside, picking up snow along the way until, by the time they reach the bottom of the slope, they’re encased in a giant snowball. That’s the image behind this way of thinking: If you do A, it’ll cause you to end up at Z. Look at two examples of a slippery slope:

If you smoke one cigarette, you’ll end up addicted to cigarettes.

Dating leads to physical involvement, which leads to premarital sex, which leads to unplanned pregnancies; so don’t date!

Not all slippery-slope thinking is fallacious; the question is, Is there good reason to believe that one thing will cause another thing to happen? In the first example above, it is highly likely (though not absolutely guaranteed) that experimenting with cigarettes will lead to a tobacco addiction. The first example, then, is only fallacious if it’s intended to claim that smoking one cigarette must cause addiction; as a statement about what generally happens, though, it’s not fallacious.

What about the second example? For one thing, it depends on your definition of “dating.” If your definition includes sex, then by definition dating leads to sex, just like deciding to boil an egg leads to hot water (and yes, premarital sex leads to hot water, too!). But the standard definition of dating doesn’t include sex. Besides, notice how overstated the sequence is in Example 2: you can date (according to the standard definition) without physical involvement; you can kiss or hold hands without going to bed together; and sex doesn’t always lead to babies. There may be some persons whose background is such that dating is too slippery a slope for them. In that case, they’re wiser to avoid it altogether. But as a comprehensive statement of reality, Example 2 is a fallacy. The causal chain that it claims has too many weak links.

As you can probably tell from some of the examples above, False Cause fallacies are a main ingredient for a witch’s brew of superstitions and conspiracy theories. Establishing a causal relationship isn’t always simple. Take an illustration from history: the ziggurats of the Assyrians and Babylonians and the stepped pyramids of the Maya and Aztecs look a lot alike and all functioned as temples, yet appear on opposite sides of the world, separated by oceans and centuries. How do we account for their similar architecture and purpose? Logically, there are four possible explanations. Either 1. the Old World ziggurats provided the inspiration for the New World pyramids; or 2. the reverse is true, and the pyramid-builders influenced the ziggurat-builders; or 3. both share a common source (UFOs? Refugees from Atlantis?); or 4. there is no causal connection: the similarities are coincidental. When you’re trying to figure out causes, it’s important to keep all the possible connections in mind.

3. Hasty Generalization

Suppose the family dentist you visited while you were growing up always smiled and laughed a lot. Would you be justified in assuming that dentists in general are smiley and laugh a lot? What if your high school hosted three foreign exchange students from, say, South Korea, and this trio of Koreans were all very smart, very wealthy, and very stuck up? Should you reasonably conclude that all Koreans, or even all Asians or all foreigners, share those characteristics?

The answer is No. The reason is that your sample (of dentists or of Koreans) is too small for you to generalize that the whole group is like the sample. Instead of hastily jumping to conclusions about dentists or Koreans as a whole, you need to hold off until you get a larger sample. Maybe your dentist just inhaled too much laughing gas! In the case of the Koreans, the fact that they are foreign exchange students helps explain why all three are smart: you aren’t likely to be allowed to study abroad if your grades are lousy.

Hasty generalization can lead to prejudice against various groups of people. Hasty generalization can also be used by advertisers to manipulate you into buying their products. For instance, suppose an ad claims, “Nine out of ten doctors surveyed recommend X-Zit acne removal cream to their patients.” Wow! It sounds like most doctors think X-Zit is a really good product, right? Wait a minute, though: notice the word surveyed in the script. What the ad doesn’t tell you is how many doctors were surveyed, or where these doctors are. Suppose only ten doctors were surveyed. Or suppose X-Zit is manufactured in Louisville, Kentucky, and that all the doctors surveyed practice medicine in Louisville. In either of these cases, the sampling of doctors is far too small for you to conclude that most doctors recommend X-Zit.

4. Justified Wrongdoing

Suppose you’re a Senator who’s been charged by your colleagues with seducing female interns. What do you do? Here’s a quick playbook of responses:

1. Accuse your accusers of doing the same thing – or worse: “My fellow Americans, some of the Senators who are accusing me have divorced their wives in order to marry their mistresses. Besides, these same Senators have voted against tougher laws against child pornography. How can they attack my weakness for women when they won’t even defend helpless children?”

2. Calculate that two wrongs make a right: “The American people should know that my wife has had a string of affairs, so I felt justified in evening the score.”

3. Use double standards: “Of course it was wrong when Bill Clinton had that ‘inappropriate relationship’ with Monica, but he was the President, for goodness’ sake. His conduct reflects on America and all Americans. I’m just a Senator. What I do reflects only on myself.”

4. Appeal to the ends to justify the means: “The Senate is holding hearings on the decline in morality among American youth, so I was just doing some personal research.”

What all of these responses have in common is that they try to downplay or distract from the bottom line: the action in question was wrong. It’s wrong whether the people around you, including your accusers, do right or wrong; it’s wrong whatever your motives, status, or uprightness on other issues may be; it’s simply wrong. To see that this is so, try this thought experiment: If one of the interns were your sister or daughter or girlfriend, would you accept any of the Senator’s responses above?

5. Shifting the Burden of Proof

Picture a pair of scales. These scales weigh the likelihood of a belief being true. If the scales are tipped far to the left by the number of people who hold to a belief, or by good evidence for a belief, then someone who doesn’t share that belief is going to have to give some very weighty reasons in order to tip the scales in their favor. The burden of proof is on the one who doesn’t share the accepted belief. If, however, the scales are evenly balanced, meaning that public opinion or expert opinion is divided or that there’s good evidence both ways, then both sides share equally the burden of proof: both sides have to work just as hard to defend their claims. One fallacious method of reasoning is to unfairly shift the burden of proof so that one side doesn’t have to work as hard as it should. Suppose a philosopher demands that you prove that you exist. You have every right to respond, “Prove that I don’t exist!” The burden of proof lies on the philosopher’s side of the scales, not yours.

One way to unfairly shift the burden of proof is called the argument from ignorance. If we don’t know (or can’t prove) that something’s false, does that mean it’s true? That’s what the argument from ignorance claims. It’s like someone saying, “No one’s ever proved that Bigfoot doesn’t exist, so I’m justified in believing in Bigfoot.” Really, the burden of proof is on those who believe Bigfoot exists to prove it, not on those who don’t believe to disprove it.

An extreme form of the argument from ignorance is an untestable claim. This is a claim that it’s impossible to ever test or disprove. Here’s an example: “You have been hypnotized. Every thought you have is being controlled by a master brainwasher.” How would you go about refuting such a claim? Anything you think, say, or do to try to test or disprove the claim may just be the hypnotist toying with you.

For a belief to usefully be considered true, it must be falsifiable – that is, it must be capable of being tested so that, if it’s false, it can be proven false. Even religious truth-claims should be falsifiable. In 1 Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul gave support for his claim that Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead. Then Paul wrote, “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” (v. 14 NIV) For Paul, it did no good to believe in Christ’s resurrection if that belief was contrary to fact. Belief in the Resurrection is falsifiable, not because it’s false, but because we can test it to see if it’s true or false: find Jesus’ bones, and Christianity is disproved.

6. Appeal to Emotion

One easy way to avoid giving a rational argument is by substituting feelings for facts. Consider the range of emotions you can play upon:

Pity – “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I don’t deny that my client stabbed his classmate in order to steal a pair of gym shoes. But my client grew up poor in a single-parent home. Shouldn’t you feel sorry for him and give him a second chance at life?”

Fear – “Give me your lunch money or I’ll beat you up.” (This is also called an appeal to force.) “Vote for me or the economy will go belly up!”

Anger – “How dare any nation on earth criticize us! We’re America!”

Pride – The example just above illustrates this, too. Flattery also works.

Greed – “Couldn’t you get used to a life of luxury? Buy a lottery ticket today!”

Lust – “Sex appeal” sells breath freshener, hair product, cars, etc.

There are various ways to appeal to emotion. One way is by the use of emotionally loaded words. If you want to make a politician sound good, call him a “statesman” or a “public servant.” If you want to make him sound bad, call him a “bureaucrat” or “a cog in the Big Government machine.”

Another way to appeal to emotion is through the use of images and music. If you want to make a politician look good, run a full-color TV ad showing her shaking workers’ hands and reading a book to a classroom full of attentive children, then superimpose her image over an American flag fluttering majestically, and play stirring, dignified orchestral music in the background. If you want to make a politician look bad, find a black-and-white still photo of her frowning or with her mouth wide open, then superimpose this picture over newspaper clippings with unpleasant headlines (preferably with words like “SCANDAL,” “CRISIS,” or “DECLINE” – see the comments on emotionally loaded words above), and play a discordant electric-guitar solo as background music.

It’s important to stress that not all appeals to emotion are fallacious. If a rabid pit bull gets loose and someone yells, “Mad dog! Run!”, they’re appealing to fear – with just cause! What separates fallacies from non-fallacies is whether there’s good reason for the appeal. If the appeal to emotion is unsupported by sound reasons, or if the appeal goes beyond the reasons given (e.g., “It took three minutes for my burger to be served to me! This is an outrage! It’s lawsuit time!!!”), then it becomes a fallacy.

7. Ad Hominem

The Latin name for this fallacy is so widely used that you really should know it. Here’s a way to remember it: You go to a restaurant and your omelet gets overcooked. What do you do? If you’re a Southerner, you add hominy. If you’re a philosopher, you ad hominem! The Latin phrase ad hominem means, “to the man,” and the idea is that you attack the person instead of the topic under discussion. For instance, suppose you’re debating gun control. You can commit an Abusive Ad Hominem by simply calling names: “People who oppose gun control are a bunch of right-wing, lunatic-fringe idiots!” Or you can commit a Circumstantial Ad Hominem by bringing up facts about the person that are irrelevant to the point under debate: “Gun-control advocates also frequently believe in global warming. If you don’t believe in global warming, you shouldn’t believe in gun control, either.” What’s missing in both of these cases is any talk about good reasons for or against gun control.

8. Appeal to (Expert) Authority

When you were a kid, did you ever ask a parent, “Why?” and get the response, “Because I said so”? In this case, your parent was appealing to his or her own authority. This is fine when it comes to issues of behavior, but not good enough (at least not for long) when it comes to issues of belief. The only way to really find out whether something is true or false is to look at the evidence that supports or refutes it.

But here’s the problem: none of us has the time, material resources, or brainpower to master every field of knowledge and investigate every last truth-claim. In order to live a normal life, we have to rely on the opinions of others who are experts in their fields. So when is an appeal to authority fallacious, and when is it not?

A crucial point to keep in mind is this: an appeal to authority is bogus if the authority figure is speaking about a matter outside of their field of expertise. A sports star whose TV ad urges you to use the same deodorant that keeps her dry and sweet-smelling through the whole game may have a measure of expertise. A sports star who tells you to eat a certain brand of cereal, though, probably has no more authority than you do in the realm of breakfast foods, unless she works as a nutritionist during the off-season.

Another point to remember is that experts often disagree, and the more disagreement there is among authorities, the less convincing an appeal to authority is. In the end, it all comes down to the evidence: how strong is the evidence that the authority is using to arrive at their conclusions?

9. Appeals to Other Authorities & Reverse Appeals

In addition to an “Ask the Experts” approach to deciding truth, there are other authorities to which people can appeal. Here are some of them:

1. Appeal to Tradition – “We’ve always believed this, so it must be true.”

2. Appeal to Popular Opinion – “87% of Americans think so, so it must be so.”

3. Snob Appeal – “The cultural elite do it, so it must be right.”

As with the appeal to (expert) authority, the real issue is not how many people, living or dead, cool or uncool, believe or behave in a certain way, but what the evidence is for that way’s correctness. If something breaks longstanding or widely-held standards, it should be thought through carefully before we adopt it; after all, maybe there are good reasons why tradition or popular opinion is against it. On the other hand, tradition and popular opinion were on the side of idolatry, polygamy, and the sun’s going around the earth for a lot of human history, and owning numerous slaves was something the culturally elite from the ancient world to the antebellum American South did. Once more, the question boils down to, what are the reasons for believing this?

All of the various appeals to authority can be reversed, too: you can claim that because something’s traditional, or popular, or elitist, it must be wrong for that reason alone. This, too, is fallacious reasoning.

10. Straw Man

Whom would you rather fight: a man of straw or a man with flesh and bones? The straw man would be easier to knock down, which is why he’s given his name to this particular fallacy. The Straw Man Fallacy presents a caricature or misrepresentation of the position being argued against. When Christianity first began, the pagans around misunderstood the Lord’s Supper celebrations that early Christians had, and the rumor got started that Christians ate babies. During the Middle Ages, Christians accused the Jews of eating babies. In modern times, it’s been claimed that Jehovah’s Witnesses are baby-eaters. This is one really old straw man that keeps coming back to life!

One way to create a Straw Man is through misleading analogies. Here you compare a position with something else that may appear similar, but is actually quite different. I’ve seen a bumper sticker that read, “War is just terrorism with a bigger budget.” The idea, I assume, is that both soldiers and terrorists use weapons and kill people, so they’re basically the same. What’s ignored in this analogy is that, among other differences, terrorists intentionally target civilian populations, while rules governing military action seek to protect civilians in enemy territory.

11. Circular Reasoning (Question-Begging)

You reason in a circle (also known as begging the question) when you assume what you’re trying to prove. Suppose someone asks you why you believe in God, and you reply, “Because the Bible says so.” Then your conversation partner asks you, “Why do you believe what the Bible says?” If you respond, “Because it comes from God,” you’ve just gone in a circle: You’re sure about God because of the Bible, but you’re sure about the Bible because of God. Or consider this question-begging question: “If the theory of evolution is true, why do scientists try to prove it?” What this questioner fails to realize is that it is through scientific inquiry that theories are shown to be true or false. The questioner is essentially saying, “I’ve already made up my mind. Don’t bother me with the evidence.”

It’s important to note another fallacy at this point, but it’s a fallacy of language rather than of logic. The term “question-begging” is often incorrectly used. If there’s a question that needs to be asked, but is not asked, this IS NOT a case of question-begging. Here’s a sample of a WRONG use of the term:

“I guess it’s just human nature to hate,” Rosey sighed. But her words just begged

the question, “Why is it human nature?”

In the sample above, Rosey is only making a statement, not an argument. She’s not trying to prove anything, so she’s not guilty of assuming what she’s trying to prove, which is the definition of begging the question. Make sure you understand what question-begging/circular reasoning is and what it isn’t. The word “question” in “question-begging” basically means “what you’re trying to prove.” So there doesn’t have to be a question mark anywhere in the neighborhood for an argument to beg the question. I could rewrite the examples above to get rid of the questions, and they would still be question-begging:

I believe in God because the Bible says so, and I believe the Bible is true because it

came from God.

If the theory of evolution is true, scientists shouldn’t need to prove it.

Confused? I hope not, but because there is so much abuse of the term “question-begging,” I prefer to use the term “circular reasoning.”

12. Guilt By Association

Just as the Circumstantial Ad Hominem Fallacy tries to discredit a person because of irrelevant circumstances in their life, so also the Guilt By Association Fallacy tries to discredit a thing because of irrelevant circumstances surrounding it. But just because Hitler promoted youth programs and wrote an autobiography (Mein Kampf) doesn’t mean youth programs or autobiographies are inherently evil! A special form of the Guilt By Association Fallacy is the Genetic Fallacy, which condemns an idea or activity based on its origins. Since the Olympic Games and Christmas started out as pagan festivals, they must be irredeemably wicked. (On such a view, only individuals can be converted and sanctified by God; institutions can’t be.)

13. Innuendo

Rather than baldly accusing someone of doing wrong or directly claiming an idea is stupid, you can simply imply it. Watch the power of suggestion at work in this example: “You always see Floyd and Walt together. They’re both from San Francisco, too. It makes you wonder why they like being around each other.”

What do you think the speaker is hinting at?

What’s handy about this fallacy is that, if the speaker were confronted about spreading rumors, they could (technically truthfully) deny saying that Floyd and Walt were gay.

Innuendo works well with other fallacies, such as the Genetic Fallacy and (Circumstantial) Ad Hominems. Innuendo just adds its own special twist on these fallacies by leaving some things unsaid and up to the hearer’s imagination.

14. Red Herring

How do you get bloodhounds off your trail? Distract them with a red herring! What works for dogs can work in discussions, too. If you’d rather avoid a tough question or if your opponent makes a good point, just change the subject. There are various ways to do this. One is by telling a joke that is loosely related to the subject but that gets people laughing instead of thinking. For instance:

NARAL member: “Governor, do you support a woman’s right to choose?”

Governor: “Well, I’ve never said no when my wife redecorates our house.”

Another Red Herring is to talk about motives or feelings instead of facts or reasons. Here are three examples rolled into one:

Sports Reporter: “Coach, is it true that your star players are doping?”

Coach: “It really bugs me the way the rumor mill works in this town. It’s like folks

don’t have anything better to do than get a twisted sense of joy out of tearing down whoever’s in the limelight. As for my boys, I think they have good hearts, and if they

did make some bad choices, you know, as the saying goes, ‘Everybody makes mistakes.’”

Notice that the coach talks about his own feelings, the motives of townspeople, and the motives of his players, without ever giving a straight “Yes,” “No,” or even “I don’t know” to the question.

15. Spin

In the last quote above, the coach spun his players’ possible drug abuse as “mistakes.” What the coach was doing was downplaying the importance of illegal acts which have serious consequences. You spin facts when you manipulate how those facts are presented so that they fit with your agenda. Suppose that a study shows that 3% of able-bodied, adult Americans are unemployed. If you wanted to downplay the number of unemployed, you could say, “Unemployment figures are only at 3%.” (By using the term, “unemployment figures,” you also keep people thinking about numbers rather than real persons without jobs – a reverse appeal to emotion!) On the other hand, if you wanted to play up the number of unemployed, you could say, “Thousands of people are lacking jobs!” or “The jobless rate has soared to close to 5%!” It’s always important to check the facts when you can to see if they support the significance being claimed for them.

16. False Dilemma

This fallacy misrepresents reality by offering you fewer options than there really are. A local church, for instance, may be considering whether its morning worship service should be “traditional” or “contemporary” in style. The reality is that there are more options than just these two: the church could have a blended worship service or have two morning services, one traditional and one contemporary. Whenever you’re confronted with unattractive options, use your imagination and see if you can think of additional options.

One special form of False Dilemma is the Complex Question. Also known as a Loaded Question, this fallacy is a question phrased in such a way that it’s really two or more questions in one. Look at this question: “What don’t you understand about the concept of speeding?” It’s really two questions:

1. “Do you understand the concept of speeding?” (Assumed answer: “No”)

2. “What about the concept don’t you understand?”

The problem is with the assumed answer. If you unthinkingly reply to a Complex Question, you may end up admitting to more than what you mean to. A classic example is the question, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Whether you answer “Yes” or “No,” you’re stuck with the label, “Wife-Beater”! By lumping two questions together into one, the Complex Question unfairly offers the answerer fewer options for replying than there really are.

Another special form of False Dilemma is the Perfectionist Fallacy. Imagine a ruler that measures true and false, right and wrong. The Perfectionist Fallacy, as its name suggests, demands that everything measure up perfectly or else be thrown away. Here are some samples of this fallacy: “If I can’t know everything with absolute certainty, then I can’t know anything at all.” “It’s unfair to flunk one student for cheating when so many others cheat and aren’t caught.” What’s missing in this “all-or-nothing” mentality is a place for practical, imperfect reality. Between “knowing everything” on one end of the ruler and “knowing nothing” on the other end, there are plenty of degrees of “knowing something.” Between “absolute certainty” and “absolute uncertainty,” there are degrees like “highly improbable,” “somewhat improbable,” “somewhat probable,” and “highly probable.” This is the everyday world in which we must live: if I wait for absolute certainty and knowledge of simply everything before I eat breakfast, I’ll starve to death! Likewise, chaos would reign if no rule-breaker were ever punished because not all rule-breakers get punished. If someone stole your stereo, you’d want them held accountable even if a thousand other thieves get away! The reality is that each time someone is punished for an unethical act, the world inches that much closer to perfect justice.

Now that you’ve met all these roguish fallacies, you’re ready to arrest them on sight when you run into them. Make the most of your critical thinking skills, and not only won’t you be fooled yourself; you’ll also be able to help others think more clearly, too!

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