We have a Hall of Shame thread and a Hall of Wit and Epicness thread in the Off-topic. Now, I thought to myself, well, why not a fallacy thread. So, here it is.
The purpose of this thread is to mainly better understand and be able to spot common logical fallacies that people make during discussions. Having this skill, I believe, can somewhat improve our own logical reasoning abilities and thereby make us better debaters as well. Recently, I've been looking at some of these fallacies and I'm interested to learn more about them as the days go by.
We don't necessarily have to learn all these fallacies in order to refute arguments, of course. And, surely, there are other important elements of having a good discussion/debate with someone aside from just knowing a bunch of fallacies. Nonetheless, I think that it's a good thing to have these little mental tools in our bags, especially for those of us who frequently participate in the myriad of discussions in this forum or anywhere else, for that matter.
Basically, in this thread, you just have to post a member's quote that you came across in a different thread which you think is a logical fallacy, and then write the name of that fallacy. You may also give a short description of that particular fallacy as well as why you think that the comment that you quoted in your post falls under that fallacy, if you wish.
Also, be aware that the member that you quoted might get into a small argument with you about it, but that's okay. You just explain to him calmly why that was a fallacy.
Don't get too fallacy happy, though, because sometimes you may not realize that you misused a fallacy, which happens quite often - so try to be careful. Some of the fallacies are trickier than others. And if anyone does misuse a fallacy, then that person will be sent a private message where I will post a short fallacy quiz which he then has to complete and get a score of 100 before he is allowed to post in my thread again. I'm not kidding! Well, yes, I am.
Anyways, here are two links that have a list of many logical fallacies along with explanations and examples for each of them:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html
http://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/
There was another thread - Logic 101 - that was created for the purpose of dealing with certain aspects of logic including logical fallacies.
Hopefully this thread will include more than just ad hominems and straw mans.
The purpose of this thread is to mainly better understand and be able to spot common logical fallacies that people make during discussions. Having this skill, I believe, can somewhat improve our own logical reasoning abilities and thereby make us better debaters as well. Recently, I've been looking at some of these fallacies and I'm interested to learn more about them as the days go by.
We don't necessarily have to learn all these fallacies in order to refute arguments, of course. And, surely, there are other important elements of having a good discussion/debate with someone aside from just knowing a bunch of fallacies. Nonetheless, I think that it's a good thing to have these little mental tools in our bags, especially for those of us who frequently participate in the myriad of discussions in this forum or anywhere else, for that matter.
Basically, in this thread, you just have to post a member's quote that you came across in a different thread which you think is a logical fallacy, and then write the name of that fallacy. You may also give a short description of that particular fallacy as well as why you think that the comment that you quoted in your post falls under that fallacy, if you wish.
Also, be aware that the member that you quoted might get into a small argument with you about it, but that's okay. You just explain to him calmly why that was a fallacy.
Don't get too fallacy happy, though, because sometimes you may not realize that you misused a fallacy, which happens quite often - so try to be careful. Some of the fallacies are trickier than others. And if anyone does misuse a fallacy, then that person will be sent a private message where I will post a short fallacy quiz which he then has to complete and get a score of 100 before he is allowed to post in my thread again. I'm not kidding! Well, yes, I am.
Anyways, here are two links that have a list of many logical fallacies along with explanations and examples for each of them:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html
http://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/
There was another thread - Logic 101 - that was created for the purpose of dealing with certain aspects of logic including logical fallacies.
Hopefully this thread will include more than just ad hominems and straw mans.
