Appeal to Authority
Appeal to someone as an authority in
areas where they lack relevant expertise
(either by appealing to someone with no
recognizable expertise, or appealing to
someone outside their area of expertise).
 Be on the lookout for experts that
nevertheless have recognizable biases in
the area in question.
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Appeal to Authority:
Social Norms, Customs, and Law
All of these may be vague or be in conflict
with each other
 There is diversity both between and within
cultures
 Any of these could be the product of bias,
prejudice and preconceptions
 All of these are open to revision
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Ad Populum Fallacy
Appeal to mass belief, mass sentiment or
mass commitment
 Fallacious because none of these are
relevant to considering whether a claim is
true
 False Consensus: presentation of a
controversial view as if it has received
general consensus
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Appeal to Authority: God
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Diversity of available scripture, both between
and within religious traditions
Scripture does not always carry its meaning on
its face—interpretation is always involved. (This
could include changes in the meaning of certain
terms.) Even literalism is an interpretation.
We tend to lift scriptural passages out of context
if they say what we want.
We tend to be selectively obedient to the
passages that support what we already believe.
There is evidence that scriptures have been
editorially revised over the years—some of these
may be morally significant.
Appeal to Authority: God (cont’d)
Our western religious scriptures
themselves have passages that present
humans as co-creators and present
“arguing with God” as legitimate.
 Appeals to God rely on a common, but
questionable, idea about the relationship
between God and humanity: one of
profound inequality that calls for
obedience on our part.
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Ad Hominem
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Literally: “against the man”
Replaces evaluation of ideas or evidence with a
critique of some irrelevant characteristic of the
person whose beliefs or evidence they are
Ad Hominem Circumstantial: group-based
version of the ad Hominem
Personal attacks are not fallacious if they are
relevant to evaluating such things as the
reliability of one’s evidence
Straw Man
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Deliberate misrepresentation of an opposing
viewpoint; distorts or caricatures for ease of
refutation
Look for attributions of extreme views: this is a
red flag for a Straw Man
Look for attributions of absurd views: this is a
red flag for a Straw Man
Different from a Reductio argument, which tries
to show that an opponent’s viewpoint leads to
patently false or absurd conclusions
Hasty Generalization
Hasty Generalizations occur when an
inference is made from a small or atypical
sample. Not all fallacious generalizations
are HASTY generalizations.
 This results in a misrepresentation of the
actual data
 Use of single case studies and single
examples tends to lead to hasty
generalizations
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Availability Bias
We tend to overestimate how likely an
event is to occur based on how easy it is
to recall to memory
 Events that are startling, emotionally
evocative or otherwise salient will be
recalled easier
 This helps to create hasty generalizations
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Confirmation Bias
Our tendency to search out confirming
evidence and ignore possible
disconfirming evidence
 Includes our tendency to treat
disconfirming evidence more critically than
confirming evidence
 This tends to reinforce hasty
generalizations
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Fallacy of Misleading Vividness
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Overlooking strong evidence due to a
salient counterexample—basically,
rejecting a generalization on the basis of a
small or atypical example
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statistics
Begging the Question (Circularity)
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Directly circular reasoning (Begging the
Question) assumes what it is out to prove; the
evidence already assumes the truth of the
conclusion
Indirectly circular reasoning appeals to evidence
that would only be accepted by those who are
already in agreement with your conclusion; the
evidence is controversial but not treated as such
Question-begging arguments are
unsalvageable, indirectly circular arguments are
not—they call for MORE argumentation
Slippery Slope
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Predictive story without supporting evidence, or
where the only evidence is “common sense”
Connections in the story are assumed, not
demonstrated
Can be progressive (if we just do X, all these
great things will happen!) or gloom-and-doom (if
we do X, the sky will fall!)
Related to Golden Age Fallacy (things were so
much better in the past) and Utopian Fallacy
(things are so much better than they once were)
Slippery Slope continued
Predictive stories are never more certain
than their first step
 This is because with each additional step
in the story that isn’t CERTAIN, the
likelihood that the whole story is true
DECREASES
 The irony: the features that make a
slippery slope a good story undermine the
likelihood of the story’s truth
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Bifurcation (aka False Dichotomy;
False Dilemma)
Artificial limitation of options; typically to 2
 Often linked to other fallacies
 Brainstorming as a way to overcome
bifurcation
 Value Dichotomies: WE value x, while
THEY don’t
 Commonality and compromise are ways to
overcome value dichotomies
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