Florida Tech Melbourne Burning Your Witch Logically The Witch Case Study

Take another look at this example of logical argumentation and try to identify all the logical fallacies in it.

indicate specific passages and arguments for each fallacy you find.

She’s a witch

Ad hominemargument:attacking a person’s character or circumstances rather than focusing on the relevant facts. The Latin term ad hominem means “against the man.”

Appeal to false authority:citing the expertise of someone who lacks appropriate credentials

Bandwagon appeal:recommending a course of action on the grounds that everyone else is following it

Begging the question:making a claim on grounds that can’t be accepted as true because those grounds themselves are in question

False dilemma (also called aneither-or choice):misrepresenting an issue by offering only two possible alternatives, one of which is made to seem vastly preferably to the other

Equivocation:using ambiguous language to mislead someone

Faulty analogy:making a comparison between two things on the basis of merely superficial similarities while ignoring significant dissimilarities

Faulty causality (also calleddoubtful cause or post hoc fallacy):making the unwarranted assumption that because one event follows another, the first event causes the second. The entire Latin term for this fallacy is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, meaning “After this, therefore because of this.”

Hasty generalization:drawing an inference from insufficient data

Non sequitur:using irrelevant proof to buttress a claim. The Latin term non sequitur means “it does not follow.”

Red herring:an attempt to divert attention away from the subject at hand

Slippery slope:predicting without justification that one step in a process will lead unavoidably to a second, generally undesirable step

Straw man:oversimplifying or mischaracterizing an argument to more easily refute it