Love is a fallacy

-Make notes of the fallacies in the following video:



-Dicto Simpliciter:

Exercise is good. Therefore everybody should exercise.

You mustn’t take all these things so literally. I mean this is just classroom stuff. You know that the things you learn in school don’t have anything to do with life.

Explanation: Dicto Simpliciter means an argument based on an unqualified generalization.

-Hasty Generalization:

You can’t speak French. Petey Bellows can’t speak French. I must therefore conclude that nobody at the University of Minnesota can speak French.

We have now spent five evenings together. We have gotten along splendidly. It is clear that we are well matched

Explanation: When a generalization is reached too hastily. There are too few instances to support a conclusion.

-Post Hoc: Let’s not take Bill on our picnic. Every time we take him out with us, it rains.

Explanation: Believing that temporal succession implies a causal relation

-Contradictory Premises: If God can do anything, can He make a stone so heavy that He won’t be able to lift it?

Explanation: Conclusions are drawn from the interactions of premises: where two premises contradict each other, there can be no interaction and hence no conclusion.

-Ad Misericordiam:

A man applies for a job. When the boss asks him what his qualifications are, he replies that he has a wife and six children at home, the wife is a helpless cripple, the children have nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, no shoes on their feet, there are no beds in the house, no coal in the cellar, and winter is coming.

Polly, I love you. You are the whole world to me, the moon and the stars and the constellations of outer space. Please, my darling, say that you will go steady with me, for if you will not, life will be meaningless. I will languish. I will refuse my meals. I will wander the face of the earth, a shambling, hollow-eyed hulk.

Explanation: An appeal to pity is a fallacy in which someone tries to win support for their argument or idea by trying to cause pity.

-False Analogy:

Students should be allowed to look at their textbooks during examinations. After all, surgeons have X-rays to guide them during an operation, lawyers have briefs to guide them during a trial, carpenters have blueprints to guide them when they are building a house. Why, then, shouldn’t students be allowed to look at their textbooks during an examination?

Five dates is plenty. After all, you don’t have to eat a whole cake to know that it’s good.

Explanation: In an analogy, two objects (or events), A and B are shown to be similar. Then it is argued that since A has property P, so also B must have property P. An analogy fails when the two objects, A and B, are different in a way which affects whether they both have property.

-Hypothesis Contrary to Fact:

If Madame Curie had not happened to leave a photographic plate in a drawer with a chunk of pitchblende, the world today would not know about radium.

You do owe me something, don’t you, my dear? If I hadn’t come along you never would have learned about fallacies.

Explanation: This fallacy consists of offering a poorly supported claim about what might have happened in the past or future if circumstances or conditions were other than they actually were or are. The fallacy also involves treating hypothetical situations as if they were fact.

-Poisoning the Well:

Two men are having a debate. The first one gets up and says, ‘My opponent is a notorious liar. You can’t believe a word that he is going to say.’ ... Now, Polly, think. Think hard. What’s wrong?

You can’t go with him, Polly. He’s a liar. He’s a cheat. He’s a rat.

Explanation: This sort of "reasoning" involves trying to discredit what a person might later claim by presenting unfavorable information (be it true or false) about the person.

Go to this site: http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/rgass/fallacy3211.htm for more kinds of fallacies, explanations and examples of them.