There’s a war raging in America. The war on logic. Nothing is true anymore, yet nothing can be falsified. Take this entire past presidential campaign. There were flat out lies and over-exaggerations on both sides. No one holding onto truth, because telling lies was more entertaining and made it easier to discredit that individual. While it can be challenging to distinguish truth from falsehood without dedicating hours of research, there’s a few tricks to integrate logic into our everyday lives.
Logic can be broken down into two main categories. The first being what kind of argument it is. What is the arguments foundation? The second is inspecting those arguments and looking for logical fallacies. The three main foundations of arguments are ethos, pathos, and logos. There is probably some part, way down in your subconscious that is telling you you’ve heard these before.
Ethos is using credibility as the foundation for making an argument. The most prominent example is parents using their authority over a child as their credibility.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever had the response “Because” from your mom or dad. Now raise your other hand if you accepted that as a good enough point and moved on.
Now say “wee” going down the roller-coaster.
Gotcha!
Pathos is an argument that is founded on emotion- usually one that attempts to evoke an emotion from you to make an argument.
A prime example is those commercials of all the beaten, abused, and sad looking animals. They attempt to evoke the emotions of pity, sadness, and sympathy- and then ask you to act…by sending money.
They almost get me every time. I just want to go to a shelter and adopt all the animals!
Pathos is by far the most predominant foundation in people’s arguments. I challenge you to see if you can pick it out the next time you watch/read the news!
The last of the argument foundations is Logos. Logos is the use of logic, numbers, and factual information to form an argument.
Logos is by far the least appealing for, and least effective on, most people.
I mean who wants to just hear “Sea-levels are going to rise by this much in this many years” or “Unemployment is down from this percentage to this percentage”?
Like, who cares? Why does it matter? How does that affect me?
This is what scientists struggle with all the time. There is no emotion, no connection to anything else. Everything is implied, but what we really need is to just be told what’s up and have some emotion evoked.
While logos may be the most “pure” form of argument, it’s by far the least convincing for most- because numbers just don’t tell a story.
Embedded within each of these three foundations (ethos, pathos, logos) are arguments that are well structured and logical; however, the majority are littered with logical fallacies. Many of these logical fallacies fall under one of the three foundations and can help to identify themselves and the foundation. There is something like 24 logical fallacies; however, I am only going to focus on ten of them. There is this amazing website, YourLogicalFallacyIs, that has compiled all of them with examples if you want to learn more about them.
The first logical fallacy is called “Bandwagon”.
I’m sure some of you have heard this term used before, but probably not used as the name of a logical fallacy.
This logical fallacy is used when someone calls on popularity or the fact that many people do or believe something as validation that this “thing” is truth. “Thing” being an action, belief, etcetera.
An example would be how a great majority of people used to believe that the Earth was flat. While we know now that the Earth is not flat, people believed it to be true because so many others believed it to be true.
Statements such as “well everyone is doing it, so it must be right” or “everyone seems to think that, so it must be true” are common ways for the Bandwagon logical fallacy to show itself.
The second logical fallacy is called “Special Pleading”.
This logically fallacy is applied when someone decides to create an exception to something or by stating that things only work or happen under their choice of circumstances.
An example is if some psychic claims that they can perfectly guess what someone secretly writes on a piece of paper, but then when they guess wrong, say that the person didn’t believe in them so they couldn’t have guessed it right.
This logical fallacy shows up typically when referring to the supernatural, as a justification of why something didn’t happen as the person said that it would.
The third logical fallacy is called “Burden of Proof”.
The fourth logical fallacy is called “The Texas Sharpshooter”.
Honestly, this title is in no way intuitive as to what it represents. So, I’m going to tell you what it means, and then you should pick a new name to remember it by.
“The Texas Sharpshooter” should just be called “cherry-picking” in my opinion. “Cherry-picking” can be applied to anything, anytime that a consideration of the whole document or dataset is violated.
It’s when someone misrepresents what someone else said by only taking one sentence and not providing context.
It’s when someone takes the truth of an entire document off only a few passages.
It’s when a data set is misrepresented by changing the boundaries or parameters until the data represents their bias.
This one is obvious if you look for it. It will show itself in justification for the whole as a sum of its parts.
The fifth logical fallacy is “Appeal to Authority”.
This one is intuitive as to what it means. “Appeal to Authority” is when an individual uses their position, power, and/or authority as the justification to their argument.
An example, a rather morbid one, is when people were ordered to test the bodily limitations of Jews for “medical research” purposes. Most of the orders came from people simply ordering these horrendous things to be done simply based on authority- and those individuals listened.
If anyone ever tells you to do something because “they told you so”- don’t listen!
That means you moms and dads- now you have to come up with a good reason why Johnny needs to clean his room.
The sixth logical fallacy is the “Appeal to Emotion”.
I bet you can guess what this one is!
When someone’s argument is entirely based on getting you to feel something, and then trying to validate their argument based on your feeling something! This is the underlying logical fallacy to most arguments that use Pathos.
Remember Pathos? Argument formed on emotion.
Think of all the times your emotions have led you to do something that you later regretted.
Yeah. That’s why you shouldn’t believe anyone when they try to just get you pissed or crying and then tell you they obviously have a good argument.
No. No they don’t.
The seventh logical fallacy is “Personal Incredulity”.
This is another that makes sense if you know the definition of “incredulity”.
I’ll refresh you (and myself).
Incredulity: the state of being unwilling or unable to believe something.
Basically, a person will use their lack of understanding as an argument against another argument.
I met this lady the other day that didn’t believe that you could calculate the precise moment to let go of a ball from a plane in the sky to get it to land in a moving car through the moon-roof.
Spoiler Alert: You can. Physics. That’s how.
Because she didn’t know that you can calculate this using equations, she didn’t believe me. Period.
Have your kids take physics if you want to keep them occupied the whole day trying to calculate this. You’re welcome in advance for the time to take a nap, do laundry, grocery shop, take another nap, make a month’s worth of food- you know the essentials.
Just because someone doesn’t understand something, also applicable to ourselves, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
The eighth logical fallacy is “Slippery Slope”.
Slippery Slope is when one moves toward extreme hypotheticals in defense against another argument.
An example is when I was told that “marijuana is a gateway drug and if you use it, you will end up doing heroin and will die of a heroin overdose”.
Pretty clear to see, huh?
Obviously, this is a vast over exaggeration, one that is entirely unsupported by anything, but attempts to pull an “Appeal to Emotion” and use fear.
Extreme hypotheticals are the culprit in this one, and are often easy to pick out.
The ninth logical fallacy is called “Anecdotal”.
This is basically when a person states something as truth based on one personal experience they had.
Typically, these arguments are just dripping with pathos and “Appeal to Emotion”.
Typically, it is an experience that sounds completely incredulous and too good to be true.
What have you been told about things that seem to go to be true?
Yeah. Probably are too good to be true.
While these experiences can be true, usually there is no proof to what happened, no witnesses, no anything.
I have found that personal experience is an extremely compelling reason for people to believe in something.
Just remember that there is, more often than not, a perfectly good explanation for what happened, if you just search for it.
Now. Here comes the Catch-22.
You ready?
Brace yourself. This is going to blow your mind.
The tenth logical fallacy is called “The Fallacy Fallacy”.
“The Fallacy Fallacy” is when one presumes that an argument has no validity because it is poorly worded or argued, and/or contains a logical fallacy.
Boom.
I know. Just when you think you’re getting the hang of figuring out what you should or shouldn’t listen to by using the logical fallacy checklist, I pull the rug out from under you.
What does this all mean then?
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