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 .