Social Fallacies
Specialists in communication are often hired to clean up problems created by unthoughtful messaging. While advocates dedicate significant amounts of time and energy promoting causes, they often struggle to clearly identify their logical positions. To further the problem, in light of clear arguments advocates commonly utilize informal fallacies to persuade their target audiences. These weaknesses tend to create easily avoidable communications crises. The first step is to identify the communicative problems.
For this assignment, identify a social issue you are personally interested in learning more about, advocating for the cause, or are against it, and identify fallacious reasoning.
In 750-1,000 words:
- Research an advocate (individual or organization) that promotes a relevant social issue. Identify the organization and explain the relevancy of the social issue.
- Show the steps you took to translate the position/argument you researched into a clear logical form by writing out the logical premises and conclusions from the material presented by the advocate.
- Identify a minimum of five informal fallacies that are made by the advocate. Explain the fallacies themselves and how each functions.
At least two academic peer-reviewed sources are required for this paper.
Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite. Refer to the LopesWrite Technical Support articles for assistance.
All B.A. in Communication majors should save the final version of this assignment with edits that incorporate faculty feedback after grading. Students should also save the assignment directions. COM-490: Communication Capstone will require students to prepare a portfolio that showcases their work in the program. Please save this assignment in multiple locations. See the “Communication Professional Portfolio Guide” under course materials for further instructions.
Topic 2 Reading exercises from:
Copi, Irving M. Introduction to Logic, 14th Edition. Routledge.
4.3 INSTRUCTIONS
Identify and explain the fallacies of relevance in the following passages:
PROBLEMS
1. If you can’t blame the English language and your own is unforgivingly precise, blame the microphone. That was the route Jacques Chirac took after his nuclear remark about a nuclear Iran. “Having one or perhaps a second bomb a little later, well, that’s not very dangerous,” Mr. Chirac said with a shrug. The press was summoned back for a retake. “I should rather have paid attention to what I was saying and understood that perhaps I was on the record,” Mr. Chirac offered, as if the record rather than the remark were the issue.
—Stacy Schiff, “Slip Sliding Away,” The New York Times, 2 February 2007
2. Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
—George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy, 1915
3. Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lances full and fair against the brazen foreheads of every defamer of his country and maligner of its honor.
For the Republican party to desert this gallant man now is worse than if an army should desert their general upon the field of battle.
—Robert G. Ingersoll, nominating speech at the Republican National Convention, 1876
4. However, it matters very little now what the king of England either says or does; he hath wickedly broken through every moral and human obligation, trampled nature and conscience beneath his feet, and by a steady and constitutional spirit of insolence and cruelty procured for himself an universal hatred.
—Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
5. This embarrassing volume is an out-and-out partisan screed made up of illogical arguments, distorted and cherry-picked information, ridiculous generalizations and nutty asides. It’s a nasty stewpot of intellectually untenable premises and irresponsible speculation that frequently reads like a “Saturday Night Live” parody of the crackpot right.
—Michiko Kakutani, “Dispatch from Gomorrah, Savaging the Cultural Left,” The New York Times, 6 February 2007.
6. I was seven years old when the first election campaign which I can remember took place in my district. At that time we still had no political parties, so the announcement of this campaign was received with very little interest. But popular feeling ran high when it was disclosed that one of the candidates was “the Prince.” There was no need to add Christian and surname to realize which Prince was meant. He was the owner of the great estate formed by the arbitrary occupation of the vast tracts of land reclaimed in the previous century from the Lake of Fucino. About eight thousand families (that is, the majority of the local population) are still employed today in cultivating the estate’s fourteen thousand hectares. The Prince was deigning to solicit “his” families for their vote so that he could become their deputy in parliament. The agents of the estate, who were working for the Prince, talked in impeccably liberal phrases: “Naturally,” said they, “naturally, no one will be forced to vote for the Prince, that’s understood; in the same way that no one, naturally, can force the Prince to allow people who don’t vote for him to work on his land. This is the period of real liberty for everybody; you’re free, and so is the Prince.” The announcement of these “liberal” principles produced general and understandable consternation among the peasants. For, as may easily be guessed, the Prince was the most hated person in our part of the country.
—Ignazio Silone, The God That Failed, 1949
7. According to R. Grunberger, author of A Social History of the Third Reich, Nazi publishers used to send the following notice to German readers who let their subscriptions lapse: “Our paper certainly deserves the support of every German. We shall continue to forward copies of it to you, and hope that you will not want to expose yourself to unfortunate consequences in the case of cancellation.”
8. In While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006), Bruce Bawer argues that “by appeasing a totalitarian [Muslim] ideology Europe is “imperiling its liberty.” Political correctness, he writes, is keeping Europeans from defending themselves, resulting in “its self-destructive passivity, softness toward tyranny, its reflexive inclination to appease.” A review of the book in The Economist observes that Mr. Bawer “weakens his argument by casting too wide a net,” and another reviewer, Imam Fatih Alev, says of Bawer’s view that “it is a constructed idea that there is this very severe difference between Western values and Muslim values.”
—“Clash Between European and Islamic Views,” in Books, The New York Times, 8 February 2007.
9. To know absolutely that there is no God one must have infinite knowledge. But to have infinite knowledge one would have to be God. It is impossible to be God and an atheist at the same time. Atheists cannot prove that God doesn’t exist.
—“Argument Against Atheism,” http://aaron_mp.tripod.com/id2.html (2007)
10. When we had got to this point in the argument, and everyone saw that the definition of justice had been completely upset, Thrasymachus, instead of replying to me, said: “Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse?”
“Why do you ask such a question,” I said, “when you ought rather to be answering?”
“Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose; she has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep.”
—Plato, The Republic
4.5 INSTRUCTIONS
Identify and explain any fallacies of defective induction or of presumption in the following passages:
PROBLEMS
1. My generation was taught about the dangers of social diseases, how they were contracted, and the value of abstinence. Our schools did not teach us about contraception. They did not pass out condoms, as many of today’s schools do. And not one of the girls in any of my classes, not even in college, became pregnant out of wedlock. It wasn’t until people began teaching the children about contraceptives that our problems with pregnancy began.
—Frank Webster, “No Sex Education, No Sex,” Insight, 17 November 1997
2. A national mailing soliciting funds, by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), included a survey in which questions were to be answered “yes” or “no.” Two of the questions asked were these:
“Do you realize that the vast majority of painful animal experimentation has no relation at all to human survival or the elimination of disease?”
“Are you aware that product testing on animals does not keep unsafe products off the market?”
3. If you want a life full of sexual pleasures, don’t graduate from college. A study to be published next month in American Demographics magazine shows that people with the most education have the least amount of sex.
—The Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 January 1998
4. There is no surprise in discovering that acupuncture can relieve pain and nausea. It will probably also be found to work on anxiety, insomnia, and itching, because these are all conditions in which placebos work. Acupuncture works by suggestion, a mechanism whose effects on humans are well known.
The danger in using such placebo methods is that they will be applied by people inadequately trained in medicine in cases where essential preliminary work has not been done and where a correct diagnosis has not been established.
—Fred Levit, M.D., “Acupuncture Is Alchemy, Not Medicine,” The New York Times, 12 November 1997
5. In a motion picture featuring the famous French comedian Sacha Guitry, three thieves are arguing over division of seven pearls worth a king’s ransom. One of them hands two to the man on his right, then two to the man on his left. “I,” he says, “will keep three.” The man on his right says, “How come you keep three?” “Because I am the leader.” “Oh. But how come you are the leader?” “Because I have more pearls.”
4.6 INSTRUCTIONS
Identify and explain the fallacies of ambiguity that appear in the following passages:
PROBLEMS
1. …. the universe is spherical in form … because all the constituent parts of the universe, that is the sun, moon, and the planets, appear in this form.
—Nicolaus Copernicus, The New Idea of the Universe, 1514
2. Robert Toombs is reputed to have said, just before the Civil War, “We could lick those Yankees with cornstalks.” When he was asked after the war what had gone wrong, he is reputed to have said, “It’s very simple. Those damn Yankees refused to fight with cornstalks.”
—E. J. Kahn, Jr., “Profiles (Georgia),” The New Yorker, 13 February 1978
3. To press forward with a properly ordered wage structure in each industry is the first condition for curbing competitive bargaining; but there is no reason why the process should stop there. What is good for each industry can hardly be bad for the economy as a whole.
—Edmond Kelly, Twentieth Century Socialism, 1910
4. No man will take counsel, but every man will take money: therefore money is better than counsel.
—Jonathan Swift
5. I’ve looked everywhere in this area for an instruction book on how to play the concertina without success. (Mrs. F. M., Myrtle Beach, S.C., Charlotte Observer)
You need no instructions. Just plunge ahead boldly.
—The New Yorker, 21 February 1977
