Blog #2

Something I found very interesting in the past couple of classes was when the speaker came in to the talk about fallacies. This stood out to me for a lot of reasons. One important reason was because yes, fallacies are things you have to memorize...but they are also much more than that. After learning about fallacies I realized I use them in my daily life without even noticing. Fallacies are a mistaken belief, especially one based on unsound argument or a failure in reasoning that makes an argument invalid. For example the other day in my UF class my teacher was talking about the commercial that starts out saying you need to buy this pen and then all the sudden draws all these conclusions that will happen if you don't have the pen and in the end if you do not have the pen you will die. Before I would have just heard this commercial and laughed and not realize what strategy she had used in the commercial. Now after hearing the lecture about fallacies I know this is the slippery slope fallacy. This fallacy is described as the false belief that by taking one action/stance it will cause a chain reaction of unfortunate events. Another fallacy I thought was interesting to learn about was the straw man fallacy. This fallacy stood out to me because I didn't even realize that I was doing it myself. Sometimes when I argue with my brother I would take the argument that he has said to me and reword it a bit to make my argument sound better. I always thought I was winning the argument by doing this but in reality my argument became invalid by doing this. The straw man fallacy is the distortion of your opponent's argument so that you can attack it. I found the bandwagon fallacy interesting as well because I use this fallacy in my life often as well. Sometimes I accept things that I am doing as okay because everyone else is doing it, but I now realize that is a fallacy and I cannot use that generalization anymore. The bandwagon fallacy is the belief that the opinion of many is always valid. This however is not always correct. Another fallacy I found interesting was red herring. This is something I did not really think about at all. The funny thing about this was the other day I got a Boise State parking ticket and one of my friends literally said, "you do not need to pay that, you already pay the school enough money." At the time I actually agreed with them because his reasoning sounded correct to me. It was crazy to me that just a few days later I learned that this was not only a fallacy but the exact example the teacher had taught in class.