> Voice a concern over the direction some policy appears to be taking? Slippery Slope. Most of the time I see people calling out a "slippery slope fallacy", th

> Voice a concern over the direction some policy appears to be taking? Slippery Slope. Most of the time I see people calling out a "slippery slope fallacy", they're often applying it erroneously. The actual fallacy is in asserting that a step in a particular direction logically entails a further step in that direction; it is fallacious in most situations to assert the slippery slope as a deterministic necessity. But that has no bearing on whether or not the slippery slope actually exists; just because it isn't logically entailed doesn't mean that, in the empirical context of the matter, a step in one direction doesn't actually make a further step in that direction more likely. There is an empirical slippery-slope phenomenon in political debate, related to the concept of the "Overton Window" [1], and it exists contingently irrespective of whether or not it's logically necesssary. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window