An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity - always yours

182 FALLACIES
• Non sequitur: Non sequitur in Latin means "it does not follow." A non sequitur
is any argument for which the conclusion does not follow from the
premises. Of course, this applies to lots of arguments, including many of the
fallacies on this list, and the reasons the conclusions do not follow might be
very different in each case. Non sequitur is more often used by a speaker
to point to an an obviously bad argument—for example, "Britney is a great
singer because I love her."
• Personal attack (ad hominem): The fallacious mode of attacking an argument
by attacking the character of the person supporting the argument. An
example would be to say that Newton's laws of physics should not be accepted
because Newton was a nasty person.
• Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: The fallacy of assuming that because X followed
Y, Y caused X. For example, the fact that after John kissed a frog, his
wart disappeared does not prove that kissing the frog cured John's wart. It
could just be an accident. Even cases in which X reliably follows Y, however,
do not show that Y causes X. (See Section 15.1.)
• Red herring: An issue that is brought up in an argument but that is actually
irrelevant to the main issue under discussion and that serves to distract
attention from the main issue. A red herring often seems to provide some
additional force for the argument in a misleading way. If, for example, in
the course of an argument about the unhealthiness of eating meat, a supporter
was to say that eating animals is cruel, this would be a red herring, as
the ethical issue of eating meat has no bearing on the health implications of
eating meat.
• Slippery-slope: A slippery-slope argument is an argument to the effect that
if one accepted a claim C\, then one should also accept a related claim C2,
and accepting C2 would commit one to claim C3, and so on, until one ends
up committed to a claim Z that is obviously unacceptable.
An example of a slippery-slope argument is the argument that one should
not take aspirin to relieve a headache, because taking a drug to relieve a unpleasant
feeling necessarily leads to taking sleeping pills for sleeplessness,
and then Valium for anxiety, followed by Prozac for depression, cocaine for
sluggishness, ecstasy for boredom, and so on, until all of one's life is reduced
to a drug-induced haze, buffered from unpleasant experiences.
In itself, a slippery-slope argument need not be objectionable. It becomes a
fallacious argument when the connections between the intermediate claims
are dubious or when there are so many steps between C\ and Z such that it
is not plausible that C\ is likely to lead to Z.
• Strawman: Attributing to an opponent an exaggerated and indefensible
claim that seriously misrepresents the opponent's position for the purpose
of defeating her. An example would be for an opponent of euthanasia to
argue that it is just wrong to kill the old and the sick to get rid of them. But