Hey hey! I want to talk to again you about logical fallacies! There are oh so many and I'd like to go over them. We are now on to part 8 of my series on Steem. In this series, we are only covering the actual fallacies and what they are, not the application of them or anything outside of the basics.

Remember for your argument to be logical, THOU MUST NOT COMMIT LOGICAL FALLACIES! Instead of just pointlessly copying and pasting, I will describe these in my own words for you, if that isn't your thing, check out the bottom for references. Otherwise, kindly read on...

Some of these are very specific and or very informal fallacies, nevertheless, let's dive in!

Draw Your Own Conclusion Fallacy

Just like the name suggests, in this fallacy the speaker tries to trick an uninformed audience by presenting biased information and then letting them decide for themselves knowing that they will almost surely side with you. This is almost the exact same as leading the witness in a court of law this is objectionable because you are leading the witness to produce an answer that may not be true. For example if I say "a particular group of people have a crime rate twice as high as another group and we have extra funding for the police, where do you think we should allocate those funds?" You are grooming them to answer in a specific way when you present information from only one side.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

This is a fallacy of ignorance where someone who has little knowledge on something believes their depth and or skill is much greater than it really is. For example someone might tell you the first 100 numbers of Pi and then claim to be the best mathematician and that all of their calculations must be accurate because they know this. Well this is a fallacy as anyone can memorize numbers, but it has no correlation to your understanding and application of mathematics.

"E" For Effort

We see this a lot in school for youth where because someone has put a lot of effort into something that is must be right or worthy of respect. So when we see a student struggling and putting forth extreme effort we give them praise for trying to hard. The problem with this as Alan Watts would detail is that we create an atmosphere where results do not matter, only that you appear to trying hard. This is used more fallaciously when dealing with patriotism and other things closely related to honor. For example you might question whether or not 9/11 was an inside job or not, but a patriot might angrily shut that notion down as if you were questioning and dishonoring those who died and the many who sacrificed their lives to save others, when really you are questioning the narrative and the media.

False Binary Fallacy

This has many many many names. I have referred to it before as the black and white fallacy, the either or, false dilemma, among many others... Essentially what this fallacy is, is stating two options and if you do not go with the one option, the other is absolutely going to happen. For example to create a polarized audience, you could say "are we going to help the American veterans who fought for this country or the refugees just showing up now?" This makes it seem like you can't help both when you easily could. This is used very often in politics and you'll probably notice it much more now.

Equivocation

This is where you purposefully misuse a term. This could be failing to define your terms, or using it in a different sense than what the audience might have expected. We see this a lot today where in debates people are now asking their opponents to define the terms they are using to ensure this fallacy doesn't come into play. An amazing example of this in today's debates is the term "racism" which we know means making claims or assumptions based on someone's race. However, today there are many people who claim that racism is only related to white people and the patriarchy and that someone who isn't white cannot exhibit racism which is completely fallacious. When this originated typically when people were forced to swear loyalty to a new king they might swear allegiance to the king and afterwards say well I really meant Jesus as he is the king of kings. It's misusing a term on purpose to trick the audience. This doesn't happen today because there are few monarchies now and we have perjury penalties in a court of law.

Check out these 2 resources I like to use and often refer to:

http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl1311/fallacies.htm
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

If you love philosophy as much as I do, feel free to give me a thumbs up and share your thoughts.

If you want to make sure people aren't committing logical fallacies be sure to REMIND them!

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