Term | Definition |
Appeal to Pity | use of guilt and sympathy to distract the audience from the facts |
Red Herring | use misleading or unrelated evidence as a distraction to support a conclusion |
Scare Tactics | try to frighten people into agreeing with the arguer by threatening them or predicting unrealistic dire consequences |
Bandwagon | encourage an audience to agree with the writer because everyone else is; popular appeal |
Slippery Slope | suggests that one thing will lead to another, and another, and another, oftentimes to disastrous results; exaggerated cause and effect |
False Dilemma | reduce complicated issues to only two possible courses of action--two choices |
Appeal to tradition | when it assumed that something is better or correct simply because it is older, traditional, or "has always been done this way" |
False Authority | asks audiences to agree with the claim of the writer based simply on the authority of another person who may not be fully qualified |
Substituting Personal Authority for Evidence | occurs when someone offers personal testimony as proof instead of actual evidence of the claim |
Guilt by association | calls someone's character into question by examining the character of that person's associates |
Dogmatism | shuts down discussion by asserting that the speaker's beliefs are the only acceptable ones |
Genetic Fallacy | a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context |
Ad Hominem | arguments attack a person's character rather than that person's reasoning in their argument |
Tu Quoque | when one attempts to defend oneself from criticism by turning that critique back on the accuser--using hypocrisy or "two wrongs make a right" |
Strawman | set up and dismantle easily refutable arguments in order to misrepresent an opponent's argument--twisting words |
Hasty Generalization | draws conclusions from very little evidence |
False Cause | confusing chronology with causation: one event can occur after another (or at the same time) and not be caused by the first |
Begging the Question | occurs when a writer simply restates the claim in a different way in order to support the conclusion; such an argument is circular--it "argues in circles" |
Faulty Analogy | an inaccurate, inappropriate or misleading comparison between two things |
Appeal to Ignorance | an argument for or against something based on the lack of evidence for/against it |
Appeal to nature | suggesting that something must be good because it is natural, or bad because it is not natural |