week 7 - Fallacy

Week 7

Fallacy

This week I had study about fallacy. As I cover in previous chapter, fallacy is a bad argument and should be rejected. There are three types of fallacy, Ad hominem, Ad populum and Petitio Principii.

Ad hominem fallacy means attacking a person in an attempt to get people to believe our premises. We can divide Ad hominem fallacy into three types. First is Ad hominem Abusive. It means attacks the other person’s character. Second is Ad Hominem Circumstantial which attacks the person’s credibility someone who can’t be believed. Lastly, Tu Quo Que means a person gives comment to other person without see the same fault in him.

 Moreover, Ad populum fallacy involves emotions which are appeal to pity, appeal to fear, appeal to shame, appeal to vanity, appeal to authority, appeal to ignorance and appeal to spite. The persuader hopes listener will incline to agree with the argument by implement the right emotion. Appeal to force is a scare tactic and it used as a force to accept a conclusion as correct. Appeal to pity evokes sympathy or pity which makes us to accept the conclusion. Next, appeal to shame happen when people try to make us agree to conclusion by lowering down self-esteem and creating sense of shame about being wrong.

Appeal to vanity is polish other’s mind in order to get something from them. Appeal to authority means inappropriate authority force us to agree with their conclusion. Besides that, appeal to ignorance is the arguer asserts a claim is true because no one proven it to be false and a claim is false as no one proven it to be true. Lastly, appeal to spite (two wrongs make a right). It’s like revenge towards an individual because in the past they did the same bad thing.    

Additionally, I had learnt about three special Ad populum fallacies. First, appeal to common belief which means think like the others. Second is appeal to common practice means do what others are do. Lastly, appeal to tradition means follow the traditions or customs.

Besides, petition principia is people try to persuade by means of avoiding actual discussions and when it happens, sometimes, the premises are missing or the actual issues are side tracked by irrelevant issues. There are three types of petition principii which are begging the question, circular argument and red herring. Begging the question is repeating the same meaning in a sentence. Circular argument means the premises bring the same meaning to conclusion and red herring is arguer tries to side track his audience by raising an irrelevant issue and then claims that original issue settled by irrelevant diversion.

The lessons I gained through this week is very useful because before this I rate 3 for the question I am good at identifying patterns. Now I can score fully for this question after I learnt this week’s lesson. Then I score 3 for question; I can spot inconsistencies in an argument easily. So, here I must practice more to spot inconsistencies in an argument. For the question, if I am not sure about something, I will research to find out more, I score fully. I improve my score from 0 to 2 for the question; I find it easy to weigh up different points of view fairly. Here I must put more effort to score fully for this question. These are what I learnt this week.