Maybe this helps, it has some good examples on what the various fallacies look like, and combining that knowledge with a hunch of “something here sounds fishy” is basically what I do I think.
I taught my daughters the usual logical fallacies from a young age. While doing that I learned that while occasionally, they appear in pristine form (looking at you, Slippery Slope and No True Scotsman), usually, they come rather nuanced, often clustered together, and difficult to identify.
A great way to get good at them is watch Fox News and identify them as they come. You can watch other networks and find them, but for a constant stream, Fox is a goldmine.
A great way to get good at them is watch Fox News and identify them as they come. You can watch other networks and find them, but for a constant stream, Fox is a goldmine.
Honestly a great way to learn them is to argue with people online in places like Lemmy / Kbin. When people argue against you on something you know to be right, it forces you to either a) reconsider your own stance or b) think about why they’re wrong or why their argument is invalid and how to point that out, either way it often leads to logical fallacies, and the more you intentionally try to identify examples of them, the easier they are to intuitively recognize.
All news is a goldmine, you just find them easier to identify on Fox because you disagree with them, which sets off your alarm bells. It’s A LOT harder to identify fallacies that support your own biases.
Your final statement is very true, however there is a reason that Fox News had to defend themselves by claiming they are entertainment. Anyone who believes that Fox News does not have more logical fallacies than most other news really needs to assess their own cognitive biases. I can see logical fallacies on topics I agree with and they piss me off more because I believe that they throw discredit on the perspective that can be argued on it’s own merits.
The trouble with ‘Slippery Slope’ and ‘No True Scotsman’ is that they themselves are not fallacies. Invoking them without proper justification is the fallacy. The same sort of thing happens all the time with ‘Appeal to Authority’, you can probably trust a scientific consensus about a subject in which they are all experts, but you probably shouldn’t trust an individual expert on a topic for which they are not recognized as an expert.
For an example of Slippery Slope: Fascists will absolutely try to demonize the most available target, and then because they always need an out-group, they continue cutting at what they consider the ‘degenerates’ of society until they are all that remain. (And then they find some new definition of degenerate)
“No True Scotsman” is valid in that there is at some point by definition after which you are no longer talking about something. “No true vegetarian eats meat” is valid, as this is definitional. “No true member of Vegetarians United eats meat” lacks proper justification, and refers to an organization, not a proper definition. This gets really messy when people conflate what group people are in with what they ‘are’ or what makes them a good example of a group. Especially when religion is involved.
No true Scotsmanis a fallacy, more specifically ad hoc while defending a generalisation about a group defined by another criterion. Easier shown with an example:
[Alice] Vegetarians don’t eat cheese.
[Bob] I know plenty vegetarians who eat cheese. They just don’t eat meat.
[Alice] Those who eat cheese are not true vegetarians.
If we accept the definition of vegetarian that you implied (someone who doesn’t eat meat), “not eating cheese” is at most a generalisation. As such, when Alice says “Those who eat cheese are not true vegetarians”, she is incurring in the fallacy.
The slippery slope is an interesting case, because it’s both a fallacy and a social phenomenon. And evoking the social phenomenon doesn’t automatically mean that you’re using the fallacy.
As a fallacy, it’s failure to acknowledge that the confidence in the conclusion is smaller than the confidence in the premises - so if you’re chaining lots of premises, your trust in the conclusion will degrade to nothing. Here’s a simple example of that:
if A happens, then B will happen 90% of the time. if A doesn’t happen, B never happens.
if B happens, then C will happen 90% of the time. if B doesn’t happen, C never happens.
[…C then D, D then E, E then F, in the same fashion as above]
if F happens, then G will happen 90% of the time. if F doesn’t happen, G never happens.
So if A happens, what’s the likelihood of G also happening? It is not 90%, but (90%)⁶ = 53%. Even with rather good confidence in the premises, the conclusion is a coin flip. (Incidentally, a similar reasoning can be used to back up Ockham’s Razor.)
As a social phenomenon, however, the slippery slope is simply an observed pattern: if someone (or a group, or an entity) does something, it’s likely to do something similar but not necessarily identical in the future. That covers your example with fascists.
The same sort of thing happens all the time with ‘Appeal to Authority’, you can probably trust a scientific consensus about a subject in which they are all experts, but you probably shouldn’t trust an individual expert on a topic for which they are not recognized as an expert.
The reason why appeal to authority is a fallacy (more specifically, a genetic fallacy) is because the truth value of a proposition does not depend on who proposes it. If an expert said that 2+2=5 (NB: natural numbers), it would be still false; and if the village idiot said that 2+2=4, it would be still true.
We can still use authority however, but that requires inductive reasoning (like the one I did for the slippery slope), that is considerably weaker than deductive reasoning. And it can be still contradicted if you manage to back up an opposing claim with either 1) deductive logic, or 2) inductive logic with more trustable premises.
I think part of it is they’re logical fallacies. For instance, the scientific consensus on climate change is not technically proof of climate change; rather, it’s all the observations, statistics, etc. that are the evidence for climate change. Thus, it is true that claiming an argument is true solely because of scientific consensus is indeed a logical fallacy, as logical fallacies are relating to, well, logic.
For all practical purposes, however, we live in a complex world with lots of uncertainty, and we can generally trust expert consensus if for no other reason than they’re more likely to understand the facts of a certain technical matter better than us, and thus more likely to be able to ascertain the truth. And when discussing complex, technical concepts, I’m generally going to trust expert consensus so long as I am reasonably assured that they are indeed experts and that they have no systemic conflict of interest.
‘Appeal to Authority’, you can probably trust a scientific consensus about a subject in which they are all experts, but you probably shouldn’t trust an individual expert on a topic for which they are not recognized as an expert.
That in itself is the ad hominem fallacy: you need to judge the claim based on its merits, not the merits of the person making the claim.
For example when David Suzuki talks about climate change and people say “well he’s just a biologist, he’s not qualified!” That may be true but it doesn’t invalidate his statements.
I recommend using your fallacy is as both a handy reference and a shortcut for explaining it to the person committing one of the most common fallacies as well as anyone else reading.
By using that, you’ll be able to spot a lot of bullshit you might otherwise miss and eventually get to the point where you’re able to spot the ones you come across most often without looking it up 🙂
Sometimes, it’s surprising how life unfolds. I remember back in my second year at boarding school, we were all set to return for another term, standing on the train station platform. Fooling around, we missed the train.
With no other options and perhaps a bit of youthful audacity, we found dads old ford and we ended up driving it all the way to school.
The car broke down, we almost got caught. Then crazily, we crashed into a famous tree on campus.
However, as wild as that was, missing that train might just have saved us.
We later found out that the Chamber of Secrets had been opened around the time we were meant to be on that train. A deadly monster, a Basilisk, was slithering around the castle, able to kill just by meeting your gaze.
Who’s to say we wouldn’t have bumped into it, had we made that train? With our track record of stumbling into trouble, it seems more than likely. It’s a chilling thought.
Nestlé is responsible for misleading African mothers into thinking formula is better than their own breast milk. They lied to expectant mothers just to sell formula.
Was a golden strategy though, give young mothers just enough formula to “try out” so they stop producing milk themselves and now they have to buy their formula. How could there be anything wrong with that? /s
Visited Thailand for 2 weeks and left 2 weeks before the phuket tsunami. We were stay on an island that I can’t remember the name of but we would have most likely got wiped out.
I have seen countless arguments in Reddit threads and I couldn’t figure out who was in the right or wrong unless I looked at the upvote counts. Even if the person is uttering a blatant lie, they somehow make it sound in a way that is completely believable to me. If it weren’t for those people that could exactly point out the irrationality behind these arguments, my mind would have been lobotomised long ago.
Upvotes on a comment or thread are absolutely not the way to determine which person is right, and it’s not even the way to determine which point of view is more popular. All those numbers give you is how many upvotes the comment got. In two separate communities, you’ll see completely contradictory statements be most popular because the people who feel a certain way tend to congregate.
If you want to become a more discerning information consumer, you can look up the common logical fallacies and keep them in mind, but nothing beats actually being informed, and forming your own opinion. Now, this is pretty hard because all news media is inherently biased, and so many things happen all the time that it’s hard to keep up.
What I’ve found helpful, is when it comes to things I don’t know about, I read the discussion as “this person says this, and that person says that”, rather than “this person is saying the truth, and that person is lying”. If it’s a subject that matters to me, I’ll have a look at some news, see where the general consensus is, analyze it from my own point of view, and form my opinion like that. If it doesn’t really matter to me, I don’t really do that, and just relay information as “I heard it might be either X or Y, but I don’t know for sure”, “I heard from Z that something or other”.
Edit: Of course, it’s not like I’m some paragon of unbiased information crunching. I have my own biases that I’m aware of, but naturally I think I’m right, so I think they’re not a problem, which is probably a problem. Everything you experience is relative.
I would suggest getting a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, and reading it slowly and deliberately, less than 5-10 pages a day. It not only tells you how to find these kind of fallacies but also why you’re likely to fall for them and how.
I’m a bit new to self-studying logic (and rhetoric) but I think you should learn about “Formal fallacies” and “Informal fallacies”. Formal fallacies are those that arguments that are systematically false, like all A is B, some C is A, some C is not B, therefore all C is A. But in real arguments you have to convert those organic arguments into these terms (which could be the hardest part), and then you find out if it is a fallacy… I remember there was a way to find out if arguments are valid based on adding stars, I’ll probably send it later… But be warned, an argument can be “valid”, but still have the wrong premises! You can say, All cats are on fire, therefore some things on fire are cats… and the argument would still be valid, but rest on false premises… Informal fallacies, I think, are somewhat out of the scope of formal logic, but they are still considered faulty arguments, like Strawman…
It helps to remember that the mind is not a truth machine, but a survival machine.
I recommend learning some psychology. The more you know about how the mind works, the easier it is to understand and spot logical fallacies, both in yourself and others.
Edit: also, you should practice those critical thinking skills instead of just keeping them in theory. You could apply them to past situations, for example.
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