Saturday, October 23, 2010

Post 3 10/23

   A concept from Epstein that can be difficult to understand is in Chapter 11, which talks about different types of fallacies. According to Epstein, a fallacy is "a bad argument of one of the types that have been agreed to be typically unrepairable" (199). This definition from the book seemed to be somewhat confusing, and another description I found from the website http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ describes a fallacy as "an error in reasoning." There are two types of fallacies, in which a deductive fallacy is an invalid fallacy whose premises are true and the conclusion is false. An inductive fallacy is "less formal" and "the premises do not provide enough support for the conclusion."
   For the project, I worked on the fallacies part of the paper and a new fallacy which i found is "mob appeal." The website http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/041105 describes mob appeal as a fallacy which "encourages the viewer to join the preverbial throngs of people who are doing a particular act."

1 comment:

  1. I really like how you broke down all the different types of fallacies and compared them next to each other. It made it much easier to understand and much more clear to me. I actually do not remember reading about the mob appeal, but it is a very common fallacy, especially to people around college age. It was also very common in most of our projects this week too I bet because a lot of the time these websites for large organizations have pictures and passages that insinuate that they have a bunch of super happy, super engaged members. This makes people more inclined to join, which is so stupid.

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