Bad Logic

How can you even use bad logic? Is it facts and statistics gone wrong? According to this book (my new holy bible), bad logic is used all the time by the one and only teen enemy: parents. I mean who hasn’t refused to eat their oatmeal when all of sudden children are starving in Africa, and how about the extreme loaded questions that are thrown at the American public during Election Day! And let’s not even get started with syllogisms.

Mayor Premise:  If Johnny is eating sweets every day, he is placing himself at risk for diabetes.

Minor premise:   Johnny does not eat sweats everyday

Conclusion:       Therefore Johnny is not placing himself at risk for
                              Diabetes

I know, I know duh its stupid that’s what we all say, but marketing company stake advantage of such obvious logistics and once set into a Venn diagram it all makes sense. The biggest circle represents Johnny eating sweets every day and placing himself at risk for Diabeties. Place the circle for him not eating sweets inside it, and then a dot for Johnny not placing himslef at risk for Diabeties.

In order to avoid the boredom, Aristotle edited the rhetorical logic into a neatly packed enthymeme. Basically what I does is it takes a commonplace (we learned what it was in my previous blogs) in the

Audience’s mind, and uses it to support a choice. By taking out the middle line and emphasizing on the “if-then” part, then we have a perfectly used example of logic. Let’s take his own reasoning to explain this.

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man – The enthymeme would skip the obvious line

Therefore, Socrates is mortal

There we go! Suddenly it’s not all that bad right? Another useful figure is the paralipsis. What it does is it mentions something by saying you’re not going to mention it. It may sound once again plain old stupid, but you will be surprised by how much we use it in our daily lives.

• I surely need not remind you to get your Christmas shopping done early (Now you are actually reminding him!!).
• I need not mention that everything should be done within the deadline.

I don't have to remind you that it is really urgent, right?

 This video is the perfect example of how commercials use enthymemes in order to get a clear message across. The commercial starts off with a simple argument about an extremely annoying brat who wants candy at a supermarket. His dad refuses and the kid just goes shananigans! At the end a simple text is displayed saying “Use Condoms”. It’s no surprise this video was banned because it really makes it seem as if kids were just sent from hell to ruin your life. Apart from that it uses a commonplace, in this case the belief or value that people should use condoms to avoid pregnancies and diseases.