Week 4 Informal Fallacies M Knachel

That’s Bogus! Have you ever heard a claim that just didn’t seem right? Were you ever convinced of a belief that you later came to doubt?

In this chapter by Matthew Knachel we consider some of the most common mistakes that people make in reasoning about the world. These mistakes are called fallacies, and they are categorized as informal because they involve mistakes having to do with the content of the reasoning, not the form of the reasoning. We will consider four categories of informal fallacies–fallacies of distraction, weak induction, illicit presumption, and linguistic emphasis. The first error involves premises that distract from the conclusion. The second involves premises that only weakly support the conclusion. The third involves premises that hide unsupported assumptions that fail to support the conclusion. The fourth involves premises that go awry in their use of language to defend the conclusion.

The ultimate goal of this chapter is to help you to become a stronger reasoner by recognizing errors in the logic of others and avoiding them yourself!