Recently we've seen a fair few of these cropping up on GD so I thought it'd be a nice time for us to revisit the wonderful world of fallacious arguments.
Probably the most widespread fallacies are versions of ad hominem and ad verecundiam. These are, respectively, arguments that statement X is false because the person who stated it is biased and that statement X is true because person X stated it. An example for the first would be "oh you're just saying it's a good idea to invest in that company because you own it". The premise-proposition-conclusion chain here goes thusly: premise: you own the company, proposition: because you own the company you want it to succeed, conclusion: because you want the company to succeed all statements from you praising, promoting or otherwise leading to an improvement of the value of the company are false. Here we can clearly see that while the premise is obvious, the proposition most likely correct, the conclusion is a logical fallacy because you're not actually saying anything about the statement. Remember using ad hominem and ad verecundiam doesn't mean the viewpoints being supported through the use of these fallacies are necessarily wrong, it just means the person using them is an idiot.
Another fallacy that frequently crops up is that of the false dichotomy. This is derived from simple two-valued logic systems, the statement that x is either p or not(p). The problem with the fallacy is that the choice you offer is between p and a subset of not(p). So not all the options are covered. This fallacy has cropped up recently in politics rather famously where we've all heard the statement that "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists". This statement denies the existence of a "neutral" position. An interesting consequence of this argument being refuted has been the introduction of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The NTS fallacy, in its original form is
Quote:
Macdougal: You know, laddie, no Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.
You: Is that so? I seem to recall my cousin Angus puts sugar in his porridge.
Macdougal: Ah... but no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.
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This is a fallacy because you are redefining A until it conforms to B. So you move from a statement, there is not a scotsman who puts sugar in his porridge, which is an interesting sociological observation on the state of scottish dietary habits to a truism, there is not a true scotsman, where true scotsman means someone who is scottish and does not use sugar on their porridge, who uses sugar on there porridge. This has been used by defenders of the false dichotomy I mentioned above as the position "with the terrorists" is redefined to mean "people not actively supporting the war on terrorism" and the position "with us" is redefined to mean "people not actively supporting the terrorists". This is a failure in properly defining your premises before beginning your argument.
Then we have the naturalistic fallacy, which is a form of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The naturalistic fallacy infers "ought" from "is". So "there exists a state of affairs such that x" becomes "there should be a state of affairs such that x". This is obviously gibberish because the state of affairs such that x could be the existence of slavery or the criminalisation of homosexuality, or anything you'd like to propose as "not a good thing".
I might add more later but there are all these people milling around me and I've just realised I'm in work. Remember the existence of a fallacy doesn't disprove the argument, but if people run out of arguments to offer which don't contain fallacies then their argument should not be accepted.
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