Logic Look: Appeal to Popularity

Appeal to Popularity

"The basic idea is that a claim is accepted as being true simply because most people are favorably inclined towards the claim. More formally, the fact that most people have favorable emotions associated with the claim is substituted in place of actual evidence for the claim. A person falls prey to this fallacy if he accepts a claim as being true simply because most other people approve of the claim.

It is clearly fallacious to accept the approval of the majority as evidence for a claim. For example, suppose that a skilled speaker managed to get most people to absolutely love the claim that 1+1=3. It would still not be rational to accept this claim simply because most people approved of it. After all, mere approval is no substitute for a mathematical proof. At one time people approved of claims such as "the world is flat", "humans cannot survive at speeds greater than 25 miles per hour", "the sun revolves around the earth" but all these claims turned out to be false. "

Watch any politician for 60 seconds yo will see this one. Have they ever mentioned a poll? The question is who are these "people"?

Logic Look: Straw Man

I am not a logician or linguist so I had gotten confuses by straw man as apposed to red herring fallacies. So I went back to my logic book from collage. We all need a big dose of the informal fallacies. Hopefully we all can understand what is really being said. Even if it is nothing.

Logic for good or bad should be required in high schools. Time to refresh what I knew. I didn't want to copy from my book so I will use this site for now. It has a better list.

Straw Man:

"The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. (Cont.)

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person. "

Do the "we can't do nothing" stimulus arguments sound familiar.