According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a fallacy is in the most general sense "a kind of error in reasoning." The error in reasoning can involve the use of an invalid argument where the conclusion one intends to support does not have to follow from the set of premises they are using, but it does not have to. It could just involve trying to distract who you're arguing with with things that have nothing to do with the argument, or even just the use of bad inductive reasoning.
One example of a fallacy that is often committed by many politicians is known as the slippery slope argument. Slippery slope arguments take this form : A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to D, and D is bad so A is bad. This kind of argument is not always a fallacy, but generally is due the fact that insufficient reasons are given to think that each link in the chain will inevitably lead to the next. This is something I think that many people overlook and as a result other people are too often charged with committing this kind of fallacy. It can be legitimate to rule out allowing for A because it will inevitably lead to F, you just have to specify the mechanism by which it will happen or provide some other reasons to think that A will in fact lead to F. An example of someone actually committing this fallacy involves politicians who argue against the legalization of things like euthanasia with a slippery slope argument. They may say that if we let anyone like say, terminal patients be euthanized, we will have to let people in a lot of pain be euthanized, and then we will just have to let anyone who wishes to be euthanized to be euthanized. Since it would be bad to let anyone who wants to die to be euthanized, it's bad to just let terminal patients be euthanized. This is a fallacy, at least as it stands because little reason is given to think that allowing for euthanasia in certain instances like with terminal patients would have to lead to allowing it for everyone. On top of that, there seems to be obvious principled reasons that could be given that could justify laws which only allow euthanasia for specific cases.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3185895/
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ReplyDeleteHi Cody, I agree with your definition of a fallacy and I agree that many slippery slope arguments can produce fallacies, but are you saying that every slippery slope argument is a fallacy? I agree that in your example about euthanasia it may be a fallacy, but what if we were talking about something like global warming? In that case, warming temperatures will lead to stronger storms, stronger storms lead to more disasters, and more disasters leads to our government needing to set aside more money each year for support of recovery processes. In this case, A leads to B and so forth, but I would argue that A does and will indeed lead to D in the future. Although your example is a fallacy, I would contend that mine and many other slippery slope arguments are not fallacies.
ReplyDeleteHi Andrew and Cody, I found both of your comments interesting so I took the liberty to learn a bit more about the slippery slope argument, and whether or not it always constitutes a fallacy. You can think of this kind of logic (or lack thereof) as a chain of events which are claimed to directly cause one another, resulting in the outcome presented as Argument D, caused by C caused by B caused by A, as you both said. I think the term slippery slope itself does in fact always constitute a logical fallacy because it means that the causal linkage, shown as a probability of one event causing the next, is less than 100% perfect, therefore causing a downward slope in the overall likelihood of the next event occurring.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtmAw9Ia7LA
This YouTube video provides a fun graph to show that the argument from beginning to end is "only as strong as its weakest link", but mathematically even weaker than that. So you could further examine Andrew's argument and determine whether those events are actually causes or simply strong associations. For example, stronger storms may not lead to more disasters in the future if humans learn to adapt to the state of those storms, using money as a preventative method first to save the future burden of restarting affected cities from scratch. There are always loopholes such as that, so I argue that it actually is a fallacious slippery slope to say warmer temperatures will absolutely cause the government to increase expenditures on emergency recovery.
If each event 100% directly causes the following event in all cases, only then can you really claim the first causes the last. And then the graph would be a flat slope instead.