Asking The Right Questions--Fallacies In Reasoning.

If a reason has fallacies, it cannot be relied on.

The point is we should learn to find fallacies even though we can't name them. Pay attention to reasons and conclusion and check if the reasons really support the conclusion.

Several common fallacies in this chapter are mentioned:

1. Ad Hominem: An attack on the person rather than directly addressing the person's reasons.

2.Slippery Slope: Making the assumption that a proposed step will set off an uncontrollable chain of undesireable events, when procedures exist to prevent such a chain of events.

3. Searching for Perfect Solution: Falsely assuming that because part part of a problem remains after a solution is tried, the solution should not be adopted.

4. Appeal to popularity(Ad Populum): An attempt to justify a claim by appealing to sentiments that a large groups of people have in common; falsely assumes taht anything favored by a large group is desirable.

5. Appeal to Questionable Authority: Supporting a conclusion by citing an anthority who lacks special expertise on the issue at hand.

6. Appeals to Emotions: The use of emotionally charged language to distract readers and listeners from relevant reasons and evidence. Coomon emotions appealed to are fear, hope, patriotism, pity and sympathy.

7. Straw Person: Distorting our apponent's point of view so that it is easy to attack; thus we attack a point of vew that does not truly exist.

8. Either-Or(False Dilemma): Assuming only two alternatives when there are more than two.

9. Explaining by Naming: Falsely assuming that because you have provided a name for some event or behavior, you have also adequately explained the event.

10. The Planning Fallacy: The tendency for people or organisations to underestimate how long they will need to complete a task, despite numerous prior experiences of having underestimated how long something would need to take to finish.

11. Glittering Generality: The use of vague, emotionally appealing virtue words that dispose us to approve something without closely examing the reasons.

12. Red Herring: An irrelevant topic is presented to divert the attention from the original issue and help to win an argument by shift attention from the argumet to another issue.

13. Begging the Question: An argument in which the conclusion is assumed in the reasoning(Maybe in the reason, maybe in the evidences supporting the reasons).