Fallacies I
George Soros is famous because he broke the Bank of England. It follows that the Bank of England must have spent a lot of money on construction costs to fix all the broken parts of the bank.
Equivocation
Everything written in that book is 100% accurate. It has to be, since nothing in it is false.
Begging the Question
Macrobiotic diets and gluten-free foods are the hottest trends among today’s health-conscious and savvy people. Therefore, you should join the smart set.
Appeal to the People: Bandwagon
Do you still look for discarded food in dumpsters?
Complex Question
That physician is a male, so he couldn’t possibly know anything about female health problems
Ad Hominem: Circumstantial
Biology 1 was easy for me. Physics 1 was no problem. I think I’m going to change my major to social work.
Chicken eggs do not weigh very much. So if I eat an omelet made from fifty eggs, it will not weigh very much.
Composition
I’m going to buy some stock in that new genetic engineering company because my plumber said that its stock price should triple this year.
Appeal to Unqualified Authority
Every football player at Crestfallen High School can run two miles in under 15 minutes, so all the students at that school must be in great physical condition.
Biased Sample
Either we cut school funding or we raise taxes. Nobody wants to cut school funding, so we must raise taxes.
False Dichotomy
Statistics show that people with a college degree earn 50% more during their lifetime than those without a degree. So, you should begin investing in blue chip stocks.
Missing the Point
Should we not assume that just as the eye, hand, the foot, and in general each part of the body clearly has its own proper function, so man too has some function over and above the function of his parts?
Composition
The community of Pacific Palisades is extremely wealthy. Therefore, every person living there is extremely wealthy.
Division
The anti-stem-cell argument goes like this: If you permit scientists to destroy human embryos for the purpose of research, [then it goes] from there to killing human fetuses in order to harvest tissue, and from there to euthanizing disabled or terminally ill people to harvest their organs, and from there to human cloning and human-animal hybrids, and if making chimeras is okay, well then Dr. Frankenstein must also be okay, and Dr. Mengele, too, and before you know it, it’s one long hapless inevitable slide from high-minded medicine to the Nazis.
Slippery Slope
Dan Quayle: I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency. I will be prepared to deal with the people in the Bush administration, if that unfortunate event would ever occur.
Lloyd Bentsen: I served with Jack Kennedy; I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.
Ad Hominem: Abusive
The producer presented his budget for the movie. However, a lot of newspapers are going bankrupt, and so are many magazines. The cost of printing presses, newsprint, and ink is rising. Thus, we should reject his budget proposal.
Red Herring
In one of my dreams last week, I saw a car wreck, but I was not in the car. I just heard that my aunt had a fender-bender in the mall’s parking lot. This shows that dreams are videos sent from the future to warn us of dangers in the present.
Post Hoc: Coincidence
That is the type of movie you don’t like, so I’m sure you will hate it.
Begging the Question
Ninety-five percent of a sample of registered Republicans in one state district said that they will vote for the Republican nominee for Congress from their district. So, we can expect that all the Republican nominees in the state will get around 95% of the total votes this fall.
Biased Sample
There is no record of how the Egyptian pyramids were actually constructed. So, the only possible explanation is that aliens from another planet must have built them.
Appeal to Ignorance
I do not have much information on this case except the general statement of the agency that there is nothing in the files to disprove his Communist connections.
Appeal to Ignorance
How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?
Hasty Generalization
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
Rigid Application of a Generalization
Twenty-seven years ago, Luis Alvarez first proposed that the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event was caused by an asteroid that struck the earth 65.5 million years earlier. This means the dinosaurs died out 65,500,027 years ago.
Misleading Precision
My boss caught me playing video games on my office computer during work hours. She said that it was a violation of office policies, and she warned me to stop or I would be fired. However, there are government protections to prevent employers from any discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation. Do we want to give up these protections? No. So we must fight to change the office policies.
Straw Man