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It's always nice to see the fallacies of debate promoted so we can hopefully all improve in our exchanging of ideas. Ones to really watch out for IMO are Appea

It's always nice to see the fallacies of debate promoted so we can hopefully all improve in our exchanging of ideas. Ones to really watch out for IMO are Appeal to Emotion and Ad Hominem. These two are the most used fallacies in internet debates IMO. The more you familiarize yourself with these, the better you may become in recognizing a poor argument.

lordCarbonFiber 13y ago
Adding to that is the strange fascination with slippery slope on the internet. It's so bad that people will start by calling their own argument a slippery slope and implying that that makes it logically sound. Removing that from discussions would go along way to promoting reasonable debate.
- alex-g 13y ago
  If you believe a slippery slope argument, you'll soon find yourself believing any old rubbish.
pgsandstrom 13y ago
Personally I would guess that biases such as confirmation bias interferes with or reasoning much more than any fallacies. Also, they are harder to get rid of.
- tokenizer 13y ago
  Agreed. The fallacies are simply a toolset for confirmation bias IMO. Personally, I think cognitive dissonance is a major problem. People in general have opinion set A at any given moment, and when a direct contradiction to one opinion in set A occurs, they either fight it, or flee. There's a lot of science behind the idea that most people use their reptilian brain in arguments, emotionally defend their already engrained views, and then try to logically defend it after the fact. The real challenge is while defending your own views, to try and attempt at discerning whether or not you are simply emotionally responding to a cognitive dissonance, or whether you are rationally defending a built up worldview with foundations in knowledge and insight. I'd like to say I do the latter, but I'm sure everybody would like to agree with that...
nollidge 13y ago
It's important to really know what those fallacies look like, though. Just insulting someone isn't an ad hominem, and just using emotionally charged language isn't necessarily an argument that's relying on an appeal to emotion. And if you're going to call someone out on a fallacy, don't throw it down like a trump card. SHOW how their argument is fallacious.
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
A lot of people also mix up ad hominem for poisoning the well.

lordCarbonFiber 13y ago

Adding to that is the strange fascination with slippery slope on the internet. It's so bad that people will start by calling their own argument a slippery slope and implying that that makes it logically sound. Removing that from discussions would go along way to promoting reasonable debate.

alex-g 13y ago
If you believe a slippery slope argument, you'll soon find yourself believing any old rubbish.

pgsandstrom 13y ago

Personally I would guess that biases such as confirmation bias interferes with or reasoning much more than any fallacies. Also, they are harder to get rid of.

tokenizer 13y ago
Agreed. The fallacies are simply a toolset for confirmation bias IMO. Personally, I think cognitive dissonance is a major problem. People in general have opinion set A at any given moment, and when a direct contradiction to one opinion in set A occurs, they either fight it, or flee. There's a lot of science behind the idea that most people use their reptilian brain in arguments, emotionally defend their already engrained views, and then try to logically defend it after the fact. The real challenge is while defending your own views, to try and attempt at discerning whether or not you are simply emotionally responding to a cognitive dissonance, or whether you are rationally defending a built up worldview with foundations in knowledge and insight. I'd like to say I do the latter, but I'm sure everybody would like to agree with that...

nollidge 13y ago

It's important to really know what those fallacies look like, though. Just insulting someone isn't an ad hominem, and just using emotionally charged language isn't necessarily an argument that's relying on an appeal to emotion. And if you're going to call someone out on a fallacy, don't throw it down like a trump card. SHOW how their argument is fallacious.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

A lot of people also mix up ad hominem for poisoning the well.