Abstract
Logical fallacies are common mistakes in reasoning that are commonly deceptive. Their main types are thus inter-derivable with the main criteria of good reasoning. It is a mistake to construe them either as violations of rules for argumentative discussion or as unsatisfactory answers to critical question of argumentation schemes. The teaching of critical thinking should not be structured around a list of fallacies, but one could constructively incorporate them in the context of teaching students how to think well. Faults that deserve mention include belief bias, biased sample, confirmation bias, confusing correlation or sequence with cause, hasty generalization, jumping to conclusions, loss and risk aversion, red herring, slippery slope, stereotyping, and straw man. Ad hominem appeals are not fallacies, but one could well deal with personal attacks in the context of teaching how to find good sources of information.
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Notes
- 1.
The Oxford English Dictionary (Murray et al. 1971) gives this as chronologically the fourth meaning of the word ‘fallacy’ to have developed in English, being first attested in Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors in 1590. The earliest two meanings are now obsolete, and the third oldest meaning, the logician’s meaning, is first attested in 1562, in the second of three volumes of a comprehensive catalogue of English plants. Readers may test for themselves my impression of the ordinary meaning of the word ‘fallacy’ in contemporary English by asking people who are not scholars of reasoning and argument, “What is a fallacy?”.
- 2.
For an informal explanation of the concept of dark matter and the reasons for postulating its existence, see https://home.cern/about/physics/dark-matter; accessed 2016 07 24.
- 3.
See http://blog.penningtonpublishing.com/reading/the-top-15-errors-in-reasoning/, accessed 2016 07 18.
- 4.
The terms ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ were introduced by Stanovich and West (2000). Dual-processing theorists do not suppose that the two systems are necessarily instantiated in physically separate modules. The labels are shorthand for two different ways that humans think. System 1 includes both innate and learned abilities.
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Hitchcock, D. (2017). Postscript. In: On Reasoning and Argument. Argumentation Library, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53562-3_27
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