A few weeks back on the ocassion of Bastille day, I commented on my hope of one day having the same type of celebration, for Evin. In that writing, I shared a brief history of Bastille, and of course in the end, associated the concept of a modern free socieity, with having no political prisoners.
This seemingly benign post, spiraled to a heated exchange and when I visited that thread back, and another that I see today titled: “Sources on Pahlavi Family Looting” … made me wonder if those commenting are familiar with the basics of –rational debate–.
In logic and rhetoric, a fallacy is a misconception resulting from incorrect reasoning in argumentation. By accident or design, fallacies may exploit emotional triggers in the listener or interlocutor (e.g. appeal to emotion), or take advantage of social relationships between people (e.g. argument from authority).
Fallacious arguments are often structured using rhetorical patterns
that obscure the logical argument, making fallacies more difficult to
diagnose. Also, the components of the fallacy may be spread out over
separate arguments.
For a comprehensive list of fallacies you can refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
In specific, one blogger here comes to mind who uses these couple of these fallacies rather routinly:
- Proof by verbosity, sometimes colloquially referred to as argumentum verbosium
– a rhetorical technique that tries to persuade by overwhelming those
considering an argument with such a volume of material that the
argument sounds plausible, superficially appears to be well-researched,
and it is so laborious to untangle and check supporting facts that the
argument might be allowed to slide by unchallenged.
Doesn’t matter what the subject of discussion is, this individual , posts 100 links from a library I assume he maintains, just to do the above. (In the Bastille day thread, he is posting about Neda?!?)
- Irrelevant Conclusion: diverts attention away from a fact in dispute rather than address it directly.
- Example
Argument: Billy believes that war is justifiable, therefore it must be justifiable. Problem: Billy can be wrong. (In particular this is an appeal to authority.) - Special cases:
- purely personal considerations (argumentum ad hominem),
- popular sentiment (argumentum ad populum–appeal to the majority; appeal to loyalty.),
- fear (argumentum ad baculum),
- conventional propriety (argumentum ad verecundiam–appeal to authority)
- to arouse pity for getting one’s conclusion accepted (argumentum ad misericordiam)
- proving the proposition under dispute without any certain proof (argumentum ad ignorantiam)
- Also called Ignoratio Elenchi, a “red herring“
- Example
In the looting by Pahlavi family, the subject is very clear: The poster is providing sources for what he suggests are proof for Pahlavi’s mis-appropriation of funds. Whoever wants to respond to this post in a logical way (and not introduce a fallacy) would have to focus on:
–The content of the post, and rejec it on that basis.
Instead, here are the list of the responses:
1-Mollahs have stolen 100 times more (the authore never claimed Mollah’s stole any less, so that forms a red-herring)
The same way if I say X killed 5 people, does not mean Hitler did not kill millions does it?
2-Pahlavi’s did not loot because they did so much for the country (Even if they did, it is not addressing the question raised)
3- Attacking the poster (this one is real popular, instead of replying to content, attack Jebhe Melli, its supporters, intellectuals …
The responders may do this knowingly or unknowingly. In the former case it is a type of malacious mis-information to divert from the topic. In the case of latter, it may be just a frustration of a reader who supports a person or a concept without the proper backing and has to use the above fallacies.
At any rate, in a court of law, that is un-biased and fair/impartial these type of responses are easily rejected by a judge or pannel of judges. As readers/posters we should be familiar with these arguments, try to identify them and avoid them (unless our intention is not the truth).
