The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

More fallacies

Yesterday, this nitwit described a couple of logical fallacies that everyone raved about. For day two of my series on "how not to argue," I present two more of the most common fallacies of irrelevant conclusions. I'd feel bad for you if you got taken in by either of these.

Argumentum ad ignoratiam

An "argument to ignorance" relies on a lack of evidence against your proposition, and hoping your opponent doesn't have any.

For quite some time, the President used essentially this fallacious line of argument when he shouted "no collusion!" almost every day. In the absence of evidence supporting charges that he accepted the help of the Russian government to suborn the election of 2016 and undermine our democracy, him arguing that he didn't do exactly that could be seen as an ad ignoratiam argument.

More insidiously, a prosecutor might argue to ignorance when she says that a defendant has no alibi for the time when someone committed the crime being tried. However, under our system of criminal justice (which we designed understanding this exact fallacy), the defendant doesn't have to have an alibi. Rather, the prosecutor must prove that the defendant committed the crime. Whether the defendant has an alibi or not is irrelevant, unless some other evidence puts the defendant at the scene at the right time.

Argumentum ad misericordiam

Pity and pathos come from our connections to every human being and the general desire to prevent suffering. But an "argument to pity," however well-crafted, is not an argument to evidence.

A commercial that entreats you to send money to a charity so that these children won't suffer is exactly that. The commercial provides evidence that children are suffering; it doesn't provide evidence of a connection between you sending them money and the children suffering less. Now, if they said "here is a link to documents that show we spend 90% of our income on programs to alleviate suffering," that would be actual evidence.

Next time, find out who endorses my blog, or you'll be left out of the conversation.

Comments are closed