Common Logical Fallacies Ad Hominem

Common Logical Fallacies Ad Hominem: A claim or argument is rejected based on irrelevant information about the person making the claim/argument; a character attack (see also reductio ad Hitlerum) Appeal to authority: Making a claim or argument that one is not qualified to make Appeal to belief: Assuming that the popularity of a belief is an indication of its rightness or accuracy (see also bandwagon) Appeal to common action: Assuming that the popularity of an action is an indication of its rightness or accuracy (see also bandwagon) Appeal to emotion: Assuming that positive/negative emotions related to a belief are an indication of the belief’s inherent rightness/wrongness Appeal to fear: Creating fear to convince an audience of a claim/argument Appeal to novelty: Assuming that anything new is therefore automatically better Appeal to pity: Using pity in place of evidence Appeal to ridicule: Using ridicule in place of evidence Appeal to tradition: Assuming that something is correct because it has “always been done” or is traditional Bandwagon: Using peer pressure in place of evidence Begging the question: Belief that a conclusion is true because you assume it is true Biased sample: The sample is either too small or not representative, thus conclusions drawn from it are not necessarily true Burden of proof: Placing responsibility for providing evidence upon the wrong party in the argument Cause and effect: Confusing cause and effect with correlation (see also post hoc) Either/Or fallacy: Creating a choice between two options to force the choice of one in a case where other options exist False analogy: Drawing a conclusion from the unnecessary/irrelevant comparison of two things Guilt by association: Rejecting a claim because you don’t like the people making it Hasty generalization: Drawing a conclusion about a population based on a sampling that is not large enough or representative enough Middle ground: Assuming that a middle ground option is correct because it exists Post hoc: Cause and effect fallacy in which event A comes before event B, and thus it is assumed that A is necessarily the cause of B Red herring: Introducing another issue as a distraction from the issue at hand Reductio ad Hitlerum/Nazium: Attempt to disprove a claim or argument by linking it to views of Hitler and/or the Nazi Party *Corollary—reductio ad slavery: comparing an action or claim to slavery and concluding that the action or argument is wrong by this association Relativist/Special pleading: Accepting the truth of a claim, but excluding some from its application Slippery slope: Claiming that one event will lead to another without any evidence to support this claim Straw man: Misrepresenting opponent’s claim in order to make that claim easier to reject .

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The Nazi-Card-Card
ISSN 1751-8229 Volume Six, Number Three The Nazi-card-card Rasmus Ugilt, Aarhus University Introduction It should be made clear from the start that we all in fact already know the Nazi-card-card very well. At some point most of us have witnessed, or even been part of, a discussion that got just a little out of hand. In such situations it is not uncommon for one party to begin to draw up parallels between Germany in 1933 and his counterpart. Once this happens the counterpart will immediately play the Nazi-card-card and say something like, “Playing the Nazi-card are we? I never thought you would stoop that low. That is guaranteed to bring a quick end to any serious debate.” And just like that, the debate will in effect be over. It should be plain to anyone that it is just not right to make a Nazi of one’s opponent. The Nazi-card-card always wins. This tells us that it is in general unwise to play the Nazi-card, as it is bound to be immediately countered by the Nazi-card-card, but the lesson, I think, goes beyond mere rhetoric. Indeed, I believe that something quite profound and important goes on in situations like this, something which goes in a different direction to the perhaps more widely recognized Godwin’s Law, which could be formulated as follows: “As a discussion in an Internet forum grows longer, the probability of someone playing the Nazi-card approaches 1.” The more interesting law, I think, would be that 1 of the Nazi-card-card, which in similar language states: “The probability of someone playing the Nazi-card-card immediately after the Nazi-card has been played is always close to 1.” In the present work I seek to investigate and understand this curious second card.
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Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich Transcript
Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich Transcript Date: Thursday, 9 March 2017 - 1:00PM Location: Barnard's Inn Hall 9 March 2017 Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich Professor Alec Ryrie This is a series of lectures on ‘extreme Christianity’, and it does not get much more extreme than this. You are familiar with Godwin’s Law, also known as the reductio ad Hitlerum: the notion that every argument in the modern world eventually progresses to the point where someone invokes a Nazi comparison, and the whole thing then collapses. There is a reason for that. Thanks to the Nazis, since 1945 Western civilisation has had something which it had not had for at least two centuries before that: an all-but universally accepted reference point for evil. That is important for any attempt to understand our culture, but it is especially important from the point of view of the history of religion in the West. Because deﬁning evil, the whole business of mapping out what morality is, is supposed to be the core business of any religious community. And in the case of Nazism, Europe’s main religious communities plainly failed to do this. The slow realisation of Nazism’s evil was an essentially secular event, and the fact that our public life is now organised around an essentially secular deﬁnition of evil seems to me to be a key fact in understanding the history of religion in modern times. Today I want to look at the sorry story of how German’s Christian communities responded to Nazism: a story of collaboration, enthusiastic enabling, and of strictly limited pushback.
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Fine-Tuned Neural Models for Propaganda Detection at the Sentence and Fragment Levels
Fine-Tuned Neural Models for Propaganda Detection at the Sentence and Fragment levels Tariq Alhindiy Jonas Pfeiffer∗ Smaranda Muresanyz yDepartment of Computer Science, Columbia University zData Science Institute, Columbia University ∗Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, Technische Universitat Darmstadt ftariq.a, [email protected] [email protected] Abstract pressed in a text fragment together with the be- ginning and the end of that text fragment. This This paper presents the CUNLP submission task is evaluated based on the prediction of the for the NLP4IF 2019 shared-task on Fine- type of propaganda technique and the intersec- Grained Propaganda Detection. Our system finished 5th out of 26 teams on the sentence- tion between the gold and the predicted spans. level classification task and 5th out of 11 teams The details to the evaluation measure used for the on the fragment-level classification task based FLC task are explained in Da San Martino et al. on our scores on the blind test set. We present (2019a). Both sub-tasks were automatically eval- our models, a discussion of our ablation stud- uated on a unified development set. The system ies and experiments, and an analysis of our performance was centrally assessed without dis- performance on all eighteen propaganda tech- tributing the gold labels, however allowing for an niques present in the corpus of the shared task. unlimited number of submissions. The final per- 1 Introduction formance on the test set was similarly evaluated, with the difference that the feedback was given Propaganda aims at influencing a target audience only after the submission was closed, simultane- with a specific group agenda using faulty reason- ously concluding the shared-task.
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On Playing the Nazi Card
Tob Control: first published as 10.1136/tc.2008.026344 on 25 September 2008. Downloaded from Editorial (1959); ‘‘scare stories’’ (1959); ‘‘time-worn On playing the Nazi card and much-criticized statistical charges’’ (1959); ‘‘extreme and unwarranted con- clusions’’ (1959); ‘‘foggy thinking’’ (1962); Professor Robert N Proctor ‘‘a rehash of previously inconclusive find- ings’’ (1962); ‘‘the easy answer to a Schneider and Glantz in this issue (see tobacco taxes helped prop up the Nazi state complex problem’’ (1962); ‘‘fanciful the- page 291) chronicle the industry’s long- (more than half of all storm-trooper ories’’ (1964); ‘‘propaganda blast’’ (1964); standing efforts to characterise tobacco income, for example, was from tobacco ‘‘statistical volleyball’’ (1965); ‘‘utterly control as ‘‘Nazi’’ or ‘‘fascist’’.1 The indus- taxes).2 They never point out that while without factual support’’ (1965); ‘‘exag- try’s rant has a certain superficial plausi- Nazi authorities tried to curtail smoking, gerations and misstatements of fact’’ bility: the Nazis had one of the world’s the industry was already powerful enough (1967); ‘‘guilt by association’’ (1968); strongest anti-cancer campaigns, one cen- to resist most of these encroachments. The ‘‘‘guesses, assumptions, and suspicions’’ tral feature of which was to curtail tobacco fact is that the Nazi war on tobacco was (1968); ‘‘worse than meaningless’’ (1969); use. Hitler himself stopped smoking in never waged as effectively as, say, the ‘‘claptrap’’ (1969); ‘‘a bum rap’’ (1969); 1919, throwing his cigarettes into the destruction of the Jews. Cigarettes were ‘‘colossal blunder’’ (1970); ‘‘one of the Danube in an act of defiance he later distributed to German soldiers throughout great scientific hoaxes of our time’’ credited for helping the triumph of the war, and cigarettes were still being (1970); ‘‘claims of the anti-cigarette Nazism.
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'Just Like Hitler': Comparisons to Nazism in American Culture
University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 5-2010 'Just Like Hitler': Comparisons To Nazism in American Culture Brian Scott Johnson University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Johnson, Brian Scott, "'Just Like Hitler': Comparisons To Nazism in American Culture" (2010). Open Access Dissertations. 233. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/233 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ‘JUST LIKE HITLER’ COMPARISONS TO NAZISM IN AMERICAN CULTURE A Dissertation Presented by BRIAN JOHNSON Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2010 English Copyright by Brian Johnson 2010 All Rights Reserved ‘JUST LIKE HITLER’ COMPARISONS TO NAZISM IN AMERICAN CULTURE A Dissertation Presented by BRIAN JOHNSON Approved as to style and content by: ______________________________ Joseph T. Skerrett, Chair ______________________________ James Young, Member ______________________________ Barton Byg, Member ______________________________ Joseph F. Bartolomeo, Department Head
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Tariq Alhindi | Jonas Pfeiffer | Smaranda Muresan
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Breaking Down the Invisible Wall of Informal Fallacies in Online
Breaking Down the Invisible Wall of Informal Fallacies in Online Discussions Saumya Yashmohini Sahai Oana Balalau The Ohio State University, USA Inria, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France [email protected] [email protected] Roxana Horincar Thales Research & Technology, France [email protected] Abstract more appropriate. Fallacies are prevalent in public discourse. For example, The New York Times la- People debate on a variety of topics on online beled the tweets of Donald Trump between 2015 platforms such as Reddit, or Facebook. De- bates can be lengthy, with users exchanging and 2020 and found thousands of insults addressed a wealth of information and opinions. How- to his adversaries. If made in an argument, an in- ever, conversations do not always go smoothly, sult is an ad hominem fallacy: an attack on the and users sometimes engage in unsound argu- opponent rather than on their argument. In pri- mentation techniques to prove a claim. These vate conversations, other types of fallacies might techniques are called fallacies. Fallacies are be more prevalent, for example, appeal to tradition persuasive arguments that provide insufﬁcient or appeal to nature. Appeal to tradition dismisses or incorrect evidence to support the claim. In calls to improve gender equality by stating that this paper, we study the most frequent falla- cies on Reddit, and we present them using “women have always occupied this place in soci- the pragma-dialectical theory of argumenta- ety”. Appeal to nature is often used to ignore calls tion. We construct a new annotated dataset of to be inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community by stat- fallacies, using user comments containing fal- ing “gender is binary”.
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Reductio Ad Hitlerum: Trumping the Judicial Nazi Card
REDUCTIO AD HITLERUM: TRUMPING THE JUDICIAL NAZI CARD Gabriel H. Teninbaum* 2009 MICH. ST. L. REV. 541 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................... 542 I. LOGIC: WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT RELATES TO THE LAW ..................... 544 A. Logic and its Role in the Law ...................................................... 545 B. The Very Basics of Logic ............................................................ 547 C. Logic Gone Wrong: Fallacies ...................................................... 548 II. REDUCTIO AD HITLERUM ARGUMENTS ................................................ 550 A. Origins of Reductio ad Hitlerum ................................................. 550 B. Reductio ad Hitlerum in Judicial Opinions ................................. 553 1. The Straw Man ....................................................................... 554 2. The Red Herring ..................................................................... 556 3. The Slippery Slope .................................................................. 557 4. Ad Hominem .......................................................................... 559 5. Circular Reasoning ................................................................ 563 6. Prejudicial Language ............................................................. 565 7. Argumentum ad Terrorem ...................................................... 567 8. Analogies, Weak and Strong ..................................................
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Appendix 1 a Great Big List of Fallacies
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The Spiral of Silence: Understanding BBC Scotland's Bias Without Fear Of
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Articles the Anticanon
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