Fallacies are everywhere. Most of the time we don’t even realize them. Fallacies are so common that it’s arguably becoming more of subliminal messaging than a misconception. You know what else is everywhere that most people don’t typically take note of? Fish. In my personal experience, when people are in bodies of water, they are conscious of fish around them and sometimes are visible and vocally uncomfortable with fish around them. More often than not, their efforts to avoid fish in water are more distracting than the fish themselves. Something else that’s weird: when people are searching, they notice fish, but not always red herrings - particularly the literary one. Red herring is a fallacy that redirects attention away from a problem or topic. I guess some would say that red herring fallacies correlate with how many red herring fish are smoked to be eaten in a day. Got you again, didn’t I? That’s a false cause fallacy, also known as post hoc, which is assuming two things are the result of each other but have no correlation together. Going back to my original point: fallacies are everywhere. In what I wrote previously, it probably seemed a little awkward and off track, but that can be how fallacies begin in other contexts. Once the awkward transition is over and the fallacy is in full swing, people can be oblivious to the mistaken beliefs.
People usually recognize fallacies in political contexts, such as speeches, debates, articles, campaigns, and then some. For example, the AT&T commercials where the man interviews a bunch of young kids, maybe in elementary school, asking them various questions that don’t seem to have any correlation to a potential advertisement. The man asks the group if it’s better to be fast or slow (implying the speed of cell phones, data use, and internet) and all kids agree that fast is better. He asks them why and one of the little girls begins to go into a really elaborate answer about running away from werewolves; she says that if you’re too slow, then you get bitten, then you have to stay in frequently, then you have to get shaved because it gets too hot, then you’ll wish you could turn back into a human… Ultimately, this girl used two different fallacies in a short few seconds - red herring and slippery slope. By reasoning about werewolves, she redirects the focus away from speed to potential outcomes of being bit by a werewolf. Additionally, her story growing longer and longer, becoming more and more in depth is a slippery slope fallacy. My favorite way to describe slippery slope is relating it to the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie; things essentially start small and harmless then snowballs down the slope to grow and become something massive and challenging to stop. Although people usually look for fallacies in media, fallacies are also used in casual conversations and contexts too. An example of red herring fallacy in our personal lives is arguing or bickering with someone through a text/post/email and whoever is losing the argument, or on the weaker end of it, ends up commenting on grammar mistakes instead of the issue being discussion prior to the grammatical comment.
Fallacies can come off as light-hearted, silly, amusing. However, they go unrecognized too often. Fallacies have become subliminal messaging in a sense due to the fact that most people fail to recognize a fallacy. There are a plethora of fallacies and all of them describe something different, but they are so important to know. If we don’t recognize them, then we fall into the deep consumer hole of the average people, then we are overloaded with information that we can’t decipher as myth or fact, then all we know is a world of confusion and lies, then we are too deep in the hole of consumerism, then we consume all information thrown at us, then we go broke because all the money was spent on unnecessary items we were told to consume. Without being able to recognize and identify fallacies in our lives, we won’t ever be able to track where the problems are rooted. Identifying fallacies helps us to keep people, companies, and others in check. There’s a reason people say don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment