Stalking the Wild Fallacy
A "wild" fallacy example is not one that is unusually weird, rather it is one that is found in the "wild", in the natural habitat of argumentation. In contrast, a "tame" example is one created specifically to be an example of a fallacy, such as many of those found in textbooks.
This file contains examples of logical fallacies from the written media: books, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and fundraising letters. I have included enough context so that the arguer's intention is not misrepresented, but excluded information irrelevant to the specific argument.
Some points to keep in mind:
- The level of difficulty of these examples varies from the obvious to the obscure.
- Sometimes the fallacy is not committed by the writer, but by someone else, and only reported in the written passage.
- Some of the examples are not full-fledged fallacies, but linguistic boobytraps which might trick the reader into committing such a fallacy.
- You can test your knowledge of the fallacies by reading each passage, identifying the fallacy committed, then clicking on "Fallacy" at the end, which will take you to the file for the specific fallacy committed.
If you have any good examples of logical fallacies, please send them to me! I prefer documented, as opposed to anecdotal, examples—that is, arguments drawn from some source that can be cited rather than from memory.
…[T]he acceptance of abortion does not end with the killing of unborn human life. It continues on to affect our attitude toward all aspects of human life. This is most obvious in how quickly, following the acceptance of abortion, comes the acceptance of infanticide―the killing of babies who after birth do not come up to someone's standard of life worthy to be lived―and then on to euthanasia of the aged. If human life can be taken before birth, there is no logical reason why human life cannot be taken after birth.
Source: Francis A. Schaeffer, "It is Your Life that is Involved", Who is For Life? (1984) …[S]harp-tongued Benjamin Disraeli, so the story goes, was ordered in the last century to withdraw his declaration that half the Cabinet were asses. "Mr. Speaker, I withdraw," was Disraeli's response. "Half the Cabinet are not asses."
Source: Sarah Lyall, "The World; The Right Hon. Twerp Debates the Windbag", New York Times, 2/26/1995
The march was organised by the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, who estimate that 20,000 people turned up. It kicked off with a rally outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square to demand that the Bush administration ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Here, the demonstrators followed in the footsteps of that other well-known progressive Osama bin Laden (and numerous others, of course) who in a ‘Letter to America’ in 2002 accused it of having ‘destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history, [yet] you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries’. This was almost the exact same argument made by most of the demonstrators, though I’m pleased to report that there was no ‘Al-Qaeda against climate change’ contingent.
Source: Brendan O’Neill, "A March of Middle-Class Miserabilists", Spiked, 11/7/2006
Source: Penn & Teller, "Ouija Boards/Near Death Experiences", B.S.!
Renault…says pedestrian safety takes a high priority, but that it has chosen not to make its cars safer for pedestrians because of uncertainties over a forthcoming European Pedestrian Safety Directive. "We are waiting to find out which direction the EU wants to go in," a spokesman says.
The directive will force car makers to meet minimum standards for pedestrian safety…. In Phase 1 of the directive, new models sold in the EU must meet preliminary standards from October 2005, and all new cars must meet the standards by 2012. …
Phase 2 imposes more demanding tests, which apply to new models from 2010, and to new cars from 2015. … EU-wide, Phase 2 is expected to prevent 854 deaths a year among pedestrians and cyclists, and 36,917 serious injuries.
However, the European Commission is under pressure from Europe's car makers and their representative body, ACEA, to make the Phase 2 tests less stringent. … ACEA's proposals have been calculated to lead to 443 additional deaths and 9,746 additional serious injuries every year, relative to the original proposals.
Source: Oliver Tickell, "Crash Course in Safety", Guardian Unlimited, 7/7/2005
Three distinguished psychiatrists, Drs. Marmor, Bernard, and Ottenberg, have observed: "The reactions of some of these individuals [who criticize psychiatry or psychiatrists] seem to reflect a fear that any psychiatric insights may expose their own underlying mental instability, much as a patient who fears that he has cancer of the lung may be terrified of a chest X-ray."
Source: Morris Kominsky, The Hoaxers The Internet has been a fertile ground for groups to plant evil seeds. As ways to interact on the Internet have grown, so grow the hate groups. Online communities, which so innocently attempt to bring like-minded individuals together for virtual socializing, created a nice breeding ground for venom.
Source: "Google Should Act", Contra Costa Times, 3/10/2005
…Scientology textbooks sometimes refer to psychiatry as a "Nazi science".
Well, look at the history. Jung was an editor for the Nazi papers during World War II. … Look at the experimentation the Nazis did with electric shock and drugging. Look at the drug methadone. That was originally called Adolophine. It was named after Adolf Hitler.
Source: "Q&A: Tom Cruise", Entertainment Weekly, 6/9/2005
We hated the war, but we loved it too. Vietnam made us special, a generation with a mission. Vietnam gave the semblance of moral shape to what was actually a formless hatred of "the system." The war justified every excess, every violent thought and deed. Heaving a rock at some corporation's window, we banished guilt by the thought: This is for the Vietnamese. Trying to set fire to a university library, we said to ourselves: This is for the Vietnamese. If the war gave us license, it also gave us an addictive sense of moral superiority: we were better than the circumstances in which we were forced to live. If we committed small misdemeanors of indecency, they were in the long run justified by the much larger and more obscene crime in Southeast Asia.
Source: Peter Collier, "Something Happened to Me Yesterday", in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties, with David Horowitz (Summit Books, 1989), p. 264.
On the campaign trail, [John Kerry]'s in favor of raising taxes on everybody who makes over $200,000 a year. Unless, of course, he's the one being asked to pay more, in which case, forget about it.
We know this because of a little whoopee cushion recently inserted into the income tax forms of his home state of Massachusetts. …[A]n anti-tax group managed to place a line on the tax form giving Bay Staters the option of paying at the old, since-repealed 5.85 percent rate, rather than at the current 5.3 percent rate.
For two years now, John Kerry has had the opportunity to pay his "fair share." But…the Democratic Party candidate for president has taken the money and ran.
"Why do you even call asking about this?" his spokesman, Michael Meehan, said Saturday morning. "He has made the same decision as 99.9 percent of his fellow Massachusetts residents."
Source: Howie Carr, "A Flying Squirrel", New York Post, 4/19/2004 Segregation is a natural instinct of all animals (including man).
Source: Hubert Eaton in a speech in 1964 defending racial segregation, cited in Morris Kominsky's The Hoaxers If "experts" could always be trusted to make the right moral decision, then public participation would not be necessary—but they cannot be, and so it is.
Source: Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life, John Wiley & Sons, 1999, p. xv.) A major problem in dealing with Irving as a cross-examiner lay in the fact that he would frequently build into his often lengthy and elaborate questions assumptions that themselves rested on his falsification of the evidence, and so had to be disputed before the question itself could be dealt with. This tactic, whether conscious or not, did not escape the attention of the judge. "No, Mr. Irving, that will not do, will it?" he exclaimed on one such occasion: "You cannot put a question which has as its premise a misstatement about the date when gas chambers began operating…. If you are going to ask that question, and it is a relevant question, you must premise it correctly."
Source: Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001, p. 202.) There are very few general laws of social science, but we can offer one that has a deserved claim: the restriction of the concept of humanity in any sphere never enhances a respect for human life. It did not enhance the rights of slaves, prisoners of wars, criminals, traitors, women, children, Jews, blacks, heretics, workers, capitalists, Slavs or Gypsies. The restriction of the concept of personhood in regard to the fetus will not do so either.
Source: Phillip Abbott, quoted by Helen M. Alvaré in "Abortion is Immoral", from The Abortion Controversy, Greenhaven, 1995, p. 25. Every human group is born, grows, declines, and dies, as it must if it is an aggregation of individual living beings.
Source: From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process, Johns Hopkins, 1940, p. 80. Cited by S. Morris Engel in Analyzing Informal Fallacies, Prentice-Hall, 1980, p. 28. How do we know that we have here in the Bible a right criterion of truth? We know because of the Bible's claims for itself. All through the Scripture are found frequent expressions such as "Thus says the Lord," "The Lord said," and "God spoke." Such statements occur no less than 1,904 times in the 39 books of the Old Testament.
Source: Gilbert W. Kirby, "Is the Bible True?" Decision, Vol. 1, Jan. 1974, p. 4. Cited by S. Morris Engel in Analyzing Informal Fallacies, Prentice-Hall, 1980, p. 55. The Lies Behind Gun Control
"We need safe storage laws." False. States that passed "safe storage" laws have high crime rates, especially higher rates of rape and aggravated assault against women.
Source: "The Media Campaign Against Gun Ownership", The Phyllis Schlafly Report, Vol. 33, No. 11, June 2000.) Retail Politics
Among the various celebrity-endorsed items being advertised inside Madison Square Garden on a recent Sunday afternoon were the following: … one candidate for president of the United States—Bill Bradley, endorsed by some two dozen retired basketball legends, four
Hollywood actors, one tempestuous former tennis star, and one R&B singer.
… Surely John Sweeney's recommendation of a presidential candidate carries more weight than Dr. J's. After all, does Jim Palmer's low ERA really make him a reliable guide to home mortgages?
Well, yes—at least according to the associative logic that drives this country's multimillion-dollar celebrity-endorsement industry. If Pete Sampras shills for Pizza Hut, then their pizza must be the best. And if a champion athlete is possessed of certain ineffable qualities—grit, say, or sportsmanship—and that athlete happens to speak fondly of a certain Lean Mean Fat-Grilling Machine, then the Lean Mean Fat-Grilling Machine must also be imbued with the fat-grilling equivalent of grit and sportsmanship.
… If we pick our presidents in much the same way that we pick our underwear, then Michael Jordan's preference for Bill Bradley is precisely as relevant as his preference for Hanes.
Source: Nicholas Confessore, The American Prospect, December 20, 1999, pp. 24-5. John D. Woodbridge, Ph.D., author of the first article…offered five examples of why he had come to believe that warfare rhetoric in the political arena is hurting the work of the Christian church:
"First, culture-war rhetoric can be self-fulfilling prophecy, exacerbating the very conflicts it seeks merely to describe. … Second, culture-war rhetoric leads us to distort others' positions, to see enmity in place of mere disagreement. It leaves no room for nuanced positions, or for middle ground. Third, culture-war rhetoric distorts our own position too…. Fourth, culture-war rhetoric plays into the hands of extremists on the Left…. Fifth, culture-war rhetoric tends to create division among Christians…."
Several issues later, Christianity Today published Dobson's rebuttal.
[Dobson:]"…there are those who wish we would ignore the social issues altogether and seem to resent our refusal to do so."
Several issues of Christianity Today went by and then came the Woodbridge response to Dobson.
"In my article, I cited Dr. Dobson of Focus on the Family as an example of a Christian leader who has chosen to use warfare rhetoric to describe the "ongoing civil war of values." But neither Dr. Dobson nor Focus on the Family was the focus of the article. … But like a man who sees his profile transformed beyond recognition in a distorting mirror, I did not recognize a number of Dr. Dobson's characterizations of my essay."
Source: Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America (Prometheus Press, 1997), pp. 75-8. Acknowledgment: Thanks to Peter Wilkinson for the guilt by association example.
