1) ad populum fallacy: Appealing to popularity to support a claim. Appealing to the fact that many people do something or believe something to validate your claim.
example: “everybody around me believes this, of course it must be True.”
another example: ”This has been around for thousands of years, not everyone could have been wrong.”
The number of people that believe something tells us nothing about the validity of the claim. This may be easier to understand if we look at one of those “other” societies. Another question: If we were the last person on the planet to still hold our faith-based religious belief, then would we still believe it?
2) Fallacy of not having enough time to understand, or not being able to understand a claim, or not liking the idea of the claim, etc.- suggesting that our lack of understanding or attitude towards a claim has anything to do with the possible Truth of a claim.
example: “I don’t understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, therefore it must be wrong.” or “I don’t believe Darwin’s Theory of Evolution because I don’t want to be related to a gorilla”. This is one we will run into very often when discussing complicated things. This type of fallacy is often associated with willful ignorance As a reminder, Reality doesn’t require any one individual’s approval or recognition for its existence. Did anybody hear that tree fall?
Particularly valuable here is the phrase, “I don’t know (yet)”.
We will discuss this idea in more depth in other posts. This fallacy described here is often referred to as the fallacy of personal incredulity or the argument from ignorance.
3) burden of proof fallacy- attempting to shift the burden of proof to justify our position.
example: “You cannot seem to disprove my claim that the blue 7-legged unicorn is real. Because you can’t disprove it, it therefore must be real….duh!“
It is critical we understand exactly where the burden of proof rests when discussing the Truth of any claim. This may seem relatively simple, but this idea often becomes very lost and distorted in conversation.
4) confidence fallacy - suggesting the amount of confidence we have is somehow relevant to how True our claim is.
example: “My friend was unable to explain the Theory of evolution to me. Because of his lack of confidence I am going to assume evolution isn’t a real thing.”
another example: “My friend was able to talk at length about how the Earth is exactly 5012 years old. He was so eloquent plus he had charts and graphs and everything. I am going to believe him because he was so confident!”
This one is a big league part of our conversations surrounding faith. Because we are asked by our religious institutions to have complete 100% confidence in god, we will often feel as though we are right. Feelings are not an indicator of Truth. Likewise, if we have conversations with people who are not 100% confident, we may feel as though we “won” the conversation because of our confidence in our belief.
reminder: the only thing that matters in the determination of Truth is logical reasoning and evidence.
No comments:
Post a Comment