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Fallacies of Argument

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Do these editorial cartoons strike a chord with you? All three are complicated. The first panel pokes fun at slippery slope arguments, which aim to thwart action by predicting dire consequences: chase that Frisbee and you’ll soon be pulling milk carts. The second item uses a scare tactic (a potential fallacy of argument) to raise opposition to the educational reform called “Common Core,” suggesting ominously that the program’s cookie-cutter approach will produce children who all think alike. And the third cartoon points to a fallacy of argument that a prominent politician has perhaps slipped into — the sentimental appeal; it alludes to Hillary Clinton’s comment in a 2014 interview with Diane Sawyer that she and husband Bill “came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt.”

Fallacies are argumentative moves flawed by their very nature or structure. Because such tactics can make productive principled argument more difficult, they potentially hurt everyone involved, including the people responsible for them. The worst sorts of fallacies muck up the frank but civil conversations that people should be able to have, regardless of their differences.

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Yet it’s hard to deny the power in offering audiences a compelling either/or choice or a vulnerable straw man in an argument. For exactly that reason, it’s important that you can recognize and point out fallacies in the work of others — and avoid them in your own writing. This chapter aims to help you meet these goals: here we’ll introduce you to fallacies of argument classified according to the emotional, ethical, and logical appeals we’ve discussed earlier (see Chapters 2, 3, and 4).