K.Mooneyham wrote: ↑Thu Oct 07, 2021 12:53 pm
Let's see, Daily Beast or Mr. Cotton...well, it's not too difficult for me to figure out which one I trust.
Oh, and congratulations to Mr. Cotton!
Regarding that Daily Beast hit-piece by NYC hack
Justin "My tweets auto-delete weekly" Rohrlich, is formal logic not taught in schools any longer? Or maybe it's now taught only in journalism curricula as a mechanism for obfuscation, disinformation, and deception. I did a quick read of the article, and identified at a glance all of these common logical fallacies in use over the course of just, what, 20 paragraphs:
- Strawman Fallacy: misrepresenting the position of the opponent by replacing their position with a different position (a strawman), and then attacking that different position.
- Circular Reasoning Fallacy: restating or reaffirming the premise as the conclusion without any further explanation or information; assuming the conclusion in the premise.
- Ad Hominem Fallacy: attacking the person and not their argument; one manifestation is stating that the identity of a person disqualifies them from making or engaging in the argument itself.
- Post Hoc Fallacy ("post hoc ergo propter hoc"): assuming causality from order of events; claiming that since B happened after A, then A must have caused B.
- False Dichotomy Fallacy: presenting only two possible options or outcomes to a position, framing it as either/or, when in reality there may be multiple options, explanations, or causative factors.
- Equivocation Fallacy: using language in a wrong or misleading way to either conceal a truth or a falsehood; misleading through manipulation of language; doublespeak.
- Appeal to Authority Fallacy ("ad verecundiam"): referencing an authority as a basis for an argument does not imply the argument is correct; the authority's opinion may be correct or incorrect, depending on the substance of the claim at issue (e.g., Letitia James).
- Hasty Generalization Fallacy: making a claim about something without sufficient or unbiased evidence for the claim; if the evidence did support the claim, then it wouldn't be a hasty generalization, it would just be a generalization.
- Appeal to Popular Opinion Fallacy ("ad populum"): making an argument that a position is true because a great number of people hold to that position; the majority may be factually wrong as a result of being misled or having partial information and drawing incorrect conclusions.
- Red Herring Fallacy: attempting to divert attention from the primary argument by injecting a point which may be true, but which does not further the substance of the counterargument.
- You Also Fallacy ("tu quoque"): attempting to discredit a speaker by attacking their behavior as being inconsistent with their argument; similar to the ad hominem fallacy, but this personal attack isn't designed to disqualify the speaker for who they are, but for how they act.
- Conjunction Fallacy: assuming that a set of specific and combined conditions is likelier to be true than a single condition, without concrete evidence that either is true; because these conditions combine multiple factors which must all be true in order for the entire statement to be true, it is mathematically less likely that the statement is true than would be a simpler proposition; can also be a method to cloud a single issue by introducing multiple propositions.
There may be more in that short article. I'm no scholar. But a dozen "how can we actively work to distort the public's perception" examples is probably enough.
