The Fallacy Project

We might not even realize it but as Gabriela Aldana said in her blog,” we use fallacies all the time, and many times we do so unintentionally.” I must say it is really sneaky when we decide to use a fallacy in most of our rhetorical arguments, but  the fact that my audience didn’t notice that there was absolutely no relationship between my choice and my proof is really not my fault. My error in reasoning may or may not be caught because it’s not that I am wrong about the facts, but rather my premise isn’t exactly the best support for my conclusion.  There are a bunch of different fallacies that we use every day in our arguments so I took out my favorite ones so together we can understand what a fallacy is exactly.

Hasty generalization

When we tend to make those risky generalizations about groups or samples of people or things we are stepping into a dangerous zone. Stereotypes are a perfect example of a hasty generalization such as saying “Math Club is for nerds” or “Colombians are drug dealers.”

Slippery slope

This happens when you defend your argument by claiming that a type of chain reaction will take place followed by a consequence, but there’s not enough evidence to make such assumption! For example, I might write in my Economy paper about the perks of not going to school,

“If students in the U.S are constantly dropping out of high school they will never get any stable jobs, If they don’t get good jobs they won’t be able to sustain their families, and they might as well end up working in McDonalds the rest of their lives before they realize stealing is an easy escape.”

Appeal to Authority

We tend to refer to sources of high authority in order to make our arguments sound more professional and therefore valid, but the truth is we are just trying to impress our audience with cool and famous names. We try to sound like experts, but instead we are committing the fallacy of appeal to authority.

“We should legalize drugs in all the states. Time magazine and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper have agreed publically it is the correct thing to do.”

In Gabriela Aldana’s video Harry Styles was trying to make a point about how it is to walk out on the streets being famous and all, but he got kind of nervous and just said, “London’s quite big.” LOL Gabriela is right I mean there was absolutely no relationship between the interviewers question and his answer.

Any way there are a billion (hyperboleJ) videos on YouTube and there are like twenty more examples of fallacies in chapter 15 and 16. I had a bad day so I won’t show all of them because I’m a fearless bastard. Any way I did take my time in finding the coolest video on fallacies because it’s like commercials and political campaigns that use fallacies to persuade and audience.

TIS EPIC ENJOY!