Fallacy

Logical Fallacy:-
Is a flaw in the structure of a deductive argument which renders the argument invalid.
The flaw can neatly be expressed in standard system of logic. Such an argument is
always considered to be wrong.

“A logical fallacy is a false statement that weakens an argument by distorting an issue,

drawing false conclusions, misusing evidence or misusing language.”
Dave Kemper.
A fallacy is a flaw or error in reasoning that can make an argument invalid, unsound, or
weak. Fallacies can be intentional or unintentional.

Intentional fallacies are used to manipulate or persuade through deception.

Unintentional fallacies can be caused by human limitations, such as carelessness, cognitive
or social biases, ignorance, or limitations of language and understanding.
(

Nature of Fallacies:

Logical Errors: Fallacies often involve errors in logical reasoning. For example, assuming that because two
events occur together, one must cause the other (a fallacy known as "post hoc ergo propter hoc“meaning “after
this, therefore because of this.” ).

Manipulation: Some fallacies exploit emotional appeal, personal attacks, or distraction to win an argument,
rather than engaging with the actual issue (e.g., ad hominem attacks or red herrings is an attempt to discredit
someone’s argument by personally attacking them.).

Deceptive: Fallacies can be persuasive and convincing, which makes them dangerous in debate or discussion.
They often appear plausible on the surface but fall apart under scrutiny.

Unintentional or Deliberate: Fallacies can be made unintentionally, due to a lack of knowledge or

understanding, or deliberately, to deceive or manipulate others.
 Types of Fallacy.
• A) Faulty Cause:
• The questionable cause—also known as causal fallacy, false cause, or non causa pro causa ("non-
cause for cause" in Latin)—is a category of informal fallacies in which a cause is incorrectly
identified. ... Therefore, my going to sleep causes the sun to set." The two events may coincide, but
have no causal connection.
• the false cause fallacy occurs when the “link between premises and conclusion depends on some
imagined causal connection that probably does not exist”. this fallacy is guilty of trying to establish
a causal connection between two events on dubious grounds.
• Every day, I eat cereal for breakfast. One time, I had a muffin instead, and there was a major
earthquake in my city. I've eaten cereal ever since.
• "Every time I go to sleep, the sun goes down. Therefore, my going to sleep causes the sun to set."
 Sweeping Generalization.

• The fallacy of sweeping generalization is committed when a rule that is generally accepted to be correct is
used incorrectly in a particular instance.
• An argument is constructed in which a simplistic general rule is assumed to be more widely true, therefore
an exception is ignored.
• Its Form is:Some X are Y
Therefore All X are Y.
•Example
• Some cats are orange. Therefore all cats are orange.
• Some people who own guns are murderers, therefore all gun-owners are murderers.
• Some people who drive pick-up trucks are rednecks, therefore all people who drive pick-up trucks are
rednecks.
• Some rich people are parasitic, swindler greed-heads. Therefore they all are thus.
• This fallacy combines two mistakes:
• Ignoring evidence
• Insisting on a simple rule (the sweeping generalization) when the situation calls for a more
complex understanding.

• The fallacy of sweeping generalization is also at work when a statistical average is applied to
specific people. Example: "Divorce is rampant in America, Mary. I heard that 50% of
marriages end in divorce within three years. So I've decided not to marry you because the odds
are against us."
 Faulty Analogy

• This fallacy consists in assuming that because two things are alike in one or more respects, they
are necessarily alike in some other respect.
• People who have to have a cup of coffee every morning before they can function have no less a
problem than alcoholics who have to have their alcohol each day to sustain them.
Smoking cigarettes is just like ingesting arsenic into your system. Both have been shown to be
causally related to death. So if you wouldn't want to take a spoonful of arsenic, I would think that you
wouldn't want to continue smoking.
1. Because human bodies become less active as they grow older, and because they eventually die, it is
reasonable to expect that political bodies will become less and less active the longer they are in
existence, and that they too will eventually die.
2. People who buy stocks are no different from people who bet on horse racing. They both risk their
money with little chance of making a big profit.
 Equivocation Fallacy
The fallacy of equivocation occurs when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in
an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another
meaning in another portion of the argument. Examples: I have the right to watch "The
Real World." Therefore it's right for me to watch the show.
Commonly known as “doublespeak,” equivocation (pronounced ee-QUIV-oh-KAY-shun)
is the use of vague language to hide one’s meaning or to avoid committing to a point of
view. It’s often used by dishonest politicians who want to seem like they agree with
everyone. It can also be used in legal contexts, for example where a defendant wants to
avoid admitting guilt, but also does not want to lie openly – so they use equivocation to
escape the true answer.
The two essential elements of equivocation are:
1.Ambiguous language
2.An effort (conscious or unconscious) to deceive others
example of equivocation is the following:
Interviewer: Your company has been accused of using various legal loopholes to avoid paying taxes.
Can you say how much your company paid in taxes last year?
CEO: We paid all the taxes that we owed.
In this example, the CEO equivocates by giving a vague answer to the question; the notable issue here is
that saying that they paid all the taxes they owed doesn’t necessarily contradict the accusation that
they’ve used loopholes to avoid owing taxes in the first place, and as such this answer is entirely
ambiguous.
Parent: Who broke the vase?
Kid: Someone.
Here, the kid is equivocating by giving an ambiguous answer, that is technically true,
but that doesn’t contain the information their parent is looking for.
 Tautology.
A tautology is an expression or phrase that says the same thing twice, just in a different way. For this
reason, a tautology is usually undesirable, as it can make you sound wordier than you need to be, and
make you appear foolish. Occasionally, a tautology can help to add emphasis or clarity, or introduce
intentional ambiguity, but in most cases it's best to choose just one way to state your meaning and
eliminate the extra verbiage.
Sometimes a tautology involves just a few words that mean the same thing. Consider the following
sentence:
•I went to see him personally.
This is an example of tautology, because the adverb "personally" repeats the idea already expressed in
the single word "I". In everyday conversation, the addition of "personally" is used for emphasis to
point out that the subject of the sentence is invested in the action, has overseen something, etc.
Technically, the word "personally" doesn't add any new information and could be cut from the
sentence without changing its meaning.
 Tautology Fallacy.
A tautological fallacy is when an argument claims to have proved something simply by defining it as true.
This can be done very simply, in which case it’s usually very easy to spot:
1.God is the source of all goodness.
2.Therefore, you can’t be good without God.
This is fallacious because the conclusion is just restating the premise (which hasn’t been established as true — it’s
just being asserted as true).
It can also be done more subtly using more premises, which can be a lot harder to spot:
1.God is the most perfect being that can possibly be imagined.
2.A being that exists is more perfect than a being that doesn’t exist.
3.Therefore, God necessarily exists. Here, the tautology is broken into two parts: God is defined as the most
perfect being imaginable and existence is defined as being more perfect that non-existence. The end result,
however, is essentially the same as simply defining God as “a being that exists” and then claiming that you have
somehow proved that God exists because he exists.
 Bifurcation (False dilemma).

A person commits the fallacy of bifurcation when he or she claims that there are only two mutually
exclusive possibilities—when, in fact, there is a third option. For this reason the fallacy is also known
as the either-or fallacy and the false dilemma.
Is a type of informal fallacy, more specifically one of the correlative-based fallacies, in which a
statement falsely claims an "either/or" situation, when in fact there is at least one additional logically
valid option.[1]
1)“Either the traffic light is red, or it is green.”
This is obviously fallacious, since the light could be yellow.
2)Either you have faith or you are rational.”
This commits the fallacy of bifurcation, since there is a third possibility: we can have faith and be
rational. In fact, faith is essential in order to have rationality (e.g., to make sense of laws of logic).2
 Association Fallacy

An association fallacy is a faulty generalisation which asserts that the qualities of one thing are
inherently qualities of another, merely via an irrelevant association. Association fallacies come in
various shapes and sizes; but most of them are a type of red herring fallacy that introduces irrelevant
premises into an argument and draws an invalid conclusion.
The formal structure of the association fallacy is:
Premise 1: A is a B
Premise 2: A is also a C
Conclusion: Therefore, all Bs are Cs.
Guilt by Association Situations
There are many examples of guilt by association including:
•Having close family members who are in a terrorist organization and thus being thought of by
everyone to also be a part of the terrorist organization.
•Having a lot of friends who cheat on their spouses and thus having your spouse fear that you will
also be a cheater just like your friends.
•Hanging out with troublemakers who never do their homework and thus being disliked by your
teacher because of your friends and so even though you tend to do OK in school and do your
homework you are considered the same.
 Appeal to Popular
Opinion

An Appeal to Popular Opinion is an argument that begins with premises about the popularity of a
particular claim, and ends with a conclusion endorsing that claim.
Roughly, an appeal to popular opinion is an argument of the form; well everyone believes it so it
must be true. Now, some arguments of that form are actually good arguments.
Examples of Appeal to Popularity:
1. Everyone says that it's okay to lie as long as you don't get caught.
2. It might be against the law to drink when you are 18 years old, but everyone does it, so it's okay.
3. 75% of the population believes that Hillary Clinton is corrupt, and I just can't vote for a liar.
4. Everyone already believes that the defendant killed her husband, and that many people can't be
wrong.
 Appeal to ignorance
This fallacy occurs when you argue that your conclusion must be true, because there is no
evidence against it. This fallacy wrongly shifts the burden of proof away from the one
making the claim.
An appeal to ignorance fallacy, also known as an argument from ignorance, is a type of
informal logical fallacy that occurs when someone claims that a statement is true or false
because there's no evidence to the contrary. For example, someone might say "There are
ghosts in our attic because nobody's been able to prove they aren't there". Or, someone
might say "Since there is no evidence of the man's innocence, he must be guilty
•"Masha's doing a great job as team captain since nobody complained about her"
•"There's no way to prove the lost city of Atlantis didn't exist, which is a reason to believe it could have existed"
•"There is no proof that God exists; therefore, God does not exist"
•"Science has not proven time travel is possible, which means it is not"
•"Unicorns exist because there is no evidence that they don't"
The university never sent you a rejection letter, so you’ve probably been accepted.
I always leave my car unlocked, and nobody’s ever broken in. It’s fine to leave your car unlocked.
Doctors can’t explain how he recovered. It must have been through our prayers.
 Red Hearing

A red herring fallacy refers to an attempt to change the subject and divert attention from the original issue. In other words, a
seemingly solid but ultimately irrelevant argument is introduced into the discussion, either on purpose or by mistake.
Examples of Red Herring:
1. When your mom gets your phone bill and you have gone over the limit, you begin talking to her about how hard your math
class is and how well you did on a test today.
2. When you are late getting home-past curfew-you distract your parents by talking to them about the weather-how cold it is,
or how rainy it is.
3. The mother of a young child tells him to go to bed, and he begins to ask questions, say that he is hungry, or say that he
needs to go to the bathroom-all to avoid bed and distract mom.