Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Content Fallacies
A fallacy is a bad argument of one of the types that have been agreed to be typically unrepairable. I will be discussing content fallacies. A lot of arguments are considered bad because there is a need for repair to a false premise. But some arguments look like ones that we should definitely be suspicious of. When one of those arguments comes up, you should look for thr generic premise, which is the one that usually need to be repaired. Just because you use one of those premises, it doesn't really mean that your argument is really that bad. Sometimes, the premise is plausible and can even be true. The argument is a fallacy when the premise is suspicious and it is not supported by any other premises. An example is to say that almost everything someone says is probably not true. This is a content fallacy because there is a lot of doubt in what that person is saying. It would be a lot better to say " anything your friend says is not true". That is much more believeable simply because it does not use the words "almost" and "probably".
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You explanation of content fallacies really cleared up the concept for me. I was really confused reading the book but you made it a lot easier to understand. I actually did not like how the book explained the content fallacies because there were no examples but rather just explanations of each type of fallacy. You explain content fallacies in full detail which will help a lot of people. The topic is pretty confusing too because there are so many different times of fallacies, it is easy to get mixed up. Your example is also explained very well and you showed your understanding of the concept
ReplyDeleteThe definition of a fallacy at the beginning of this post was helpful because it supports and leads up to what this post was about: content fallacies. I like how you said that a bad argument has a false premise and that we should be suspicious of some arguments. I like how your post tells readers to look for a generic premise that probably needs to be repaired and that some premises are not that bad because of this. This post clearly informs readers that an argument is a fallacy when the premise is suspicious and has no support from other premises. The example of a content fallacy was good because you tell us what is wrong with it and how to improve it.
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