Hello!
So
today is Sunday, and I’m supposed to be starting my 1200 words of blogging for
this week. Well, I suppose I’m supposed to be finishing them, but we’re going
to throw an argument from tradition out there and say that it’s now a trend for
me to both begin and end my blogging for the week on a Sunday. Anyways, as I sat
down at my little laptop to do my writing, I realized that I have absolutely
nothing to blog about. So instead of ranting about my life, or making lists of
things I dislike, or talking about the weather, or whatever else it is I do
when I don’t have “real” topics to talk about, I’m going to talk about school.
Madness,
you say? Yes, this is madness – or is it Sparta? I never talk about school,
because I figure those people that actually read this blog are going to be
students in either my AP Language and Composition class or the students from
our neighboring classrooms. Therefore, repeating information that I get from
the classroom would be both boring and redundant. Regardless, I’m going to talk
about some logical fallacies, because I thought that they were pretty
interesting, and I definitely use them enough in everyday life without
realizing it.
There
are a lot of fallacies that we’ve learned about in our class, but a lot of them
are really just common sense. I mean, when you hear a slippery slope argument,
it’s pretty obvious. “If you have sex you will get pregnant and you will die.”
Definitely a legitimate argument right there. Another fallacy that seems like
common sense is post hoc. It says that
since ‘A’ occurs before ‘B,’ ‘A’ is also the cause of ‘B.’ An example of this
is “I ate a cheeseburger. Then my house exploded, my cat died, and my
girlfriend left me. I will never eat a cheeseburger again because it must have
caused all of these terrible things.” These are some pretty obvious logical
fallacies that most people can spot right away.
A
lot of fallacies get used in conversation every day that my eyes have recently
been opened to. One common example of this that I see is argument from
tradition. This means that since ‘A’ happens frequently, it must be good and
should continue to happen. You hear this all the time from us teenagers. For
example, “I haven’t done my homework at all this week and nothing’s happened to
me yet. I should probably continue to not do my homework.” That’s a more
obvious example of the fallacy, but here’s one that I’ve actually seen used: “We’ve
always had the dance in the cafeteria before, having it in the gym would be a
bad idea.” Something else that we see a lot during election season is a
combination of “straw man” and “argument ad hominem.” The fallacy “straw man”
is a rhetorical device that draws the attention away from the topic at hand.
For example, when a politician is asked a question about his future policies on
the economy and he responds with a long-winded story about his time in the
Army. The argument ad hominem fallacy
means “argument to the man.” That’s when you attack your opponents character
during a debate, instead of what he actually says. So during debates between
politicians the two people might be talking about economy when politician ‘A’
attacks ‘B’ by saying “Oh, but during high school you smoked marijuana, and you
cheated on your first wife!” That’s not
a valid argument.
So
that’s just a few examples of some logical fallacies that we see a lot in our
everyday lives. Honestly, I was pretty surprised by a few of them that we
learned about. They’re things that you see all the time, and I guess I didn’t
think that they were really fallacies. I guess I’ll still probably use them
when I talk, but only because it’s a habit. I mean, I’ve used them this far and
nothing’s gone wrong for me, so they must be okay. Totally not an appeal to
tradition there. It’s interesting though, just try and go an entire day being
really conscious of the arguments that you and your friends make, and see if
you can point out some logical fallacies in them. You might find that you make
more than you’d think.
Thanks
for reading
Matt
Finley
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