Show Notes The Association Fallacy occurs when a person or information source is dismissed because of their connection to, or their similarity to another person or source which is already viewed negatively for some established reason. The examples used in this episode will be coming soon. Here are the links to the stories...
Show Notes This is more accurately called the Argument from Improper or False Authority. After all, it’s entirely valid to support your argument by invoking a relevant authority like, say, climate scientists opinions on climate change. However, when the authority you invoke is not an authority on the subject at hand, or...
Show Notes The Ad Nauseam logical fallacy refers to a situation where someone asserts a claim repeatedly, often even after the claim has been debunked, in the hope that people will start to believe it through sheer repetition and that people will get sick of trying to refute it so they...
Show Notes The fallacy of Hasty Generalization is committed when an assumption is made based on too little information. It may, for example, be that a small sample of a large group has been observed, and the properties of this sample are assumed to be present in the larger group. This is...
Show Notes Latin for ‘after this, therefore because of this’, this fallacy is committed when people confuse correlation for causation and assume that because one event followed another, the former was caused by the latter. Of course, while this may be the case, it is by no means certain. The two...
Show Notes Tu Quoque is another Latin one - it literally means “You too.” It’s a particular type of Red Herring fallacy where the speaker avoids responding to a criticism by distracting the listener with claims that other people (ideally the one doing the criticizing) have also done similar bad things. It...
Show Notes Conspiracy theorists often create unfalsifiable arguments, using a combination of goalpost moving, arguments from ignorance and circular logic. The examples used in this episode will be coming soon. Here are the links to the stories we talked about DNA is not a logical fallacy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/18/just-about-everything-youve-read-warren-dna-test-is-wrong/?utm_term=.381dfa57a77b And finally, some things we really didn’t have time...
Show Notes The Slippery Slope fallacy is committed when a person assumes if one bad thing happens, then more, and often worse, bad things will inevitably follow. It is often applied to changes in the law that some groups are campaigning for, and others find distasteful. It is fallacious because to accept...
Show Notes When someone claims that the fact that everyone is called them crazy means they must be right, because 'they called Galileo crazy' (or some other person who was historically dismissed then turned out to be right), they are committing a fallacy. They are forgetting that the vast majority of...
Show Notes Moving the Goalposts is such a common tactic that I’m sure everyone has come across it at some point. When someone makes an argument; you refute that argument with valid logic; and then they move on to a different argument without acknowledging that their first one failed, they’ve just moved...