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Your assignment for this unit involves identifying fallacies, conclusions, and premises as well as correcting fallacies.

Using the  Unit V Assignment Template , review the dialogue (short conversation) between three people. Identify four fallacies, along with the four premises and conclusions leading up to the fallacies identified. In the first column, identify the fallacy present. In the second column, identify the conclusion of the fallacious argument, and in the third column identify the premises, or the reasons offered for the conclusion. In the last column, propose some ways to counter this fallacy. You should have a total of four fallacies, four conclusions, four premises, and four counters to correct the fallacies. All fallacies must come from Chapter 8 of our textbook.

View the  Unit V Sample Dialogue and Template for an example of how your completed assignment should look. APA Style will not be required for this assignment, and no outside resources are required.

There are two broad categories of fallacies:

• Informal fallacies are faulty or flawed forms of reasoning that relate to the content of premises, and must be determined with reference to external information.
• Formal fallacies are logically invalid forms of argument, and the fault in their reasoning can be determined purely by reference to logical structure.

Three general types of informal fallacy are:

• Fallacies of relevance (red herrings): these rely on premises that are either irrelevant or not suf- ficiently relevant to reasonably support a conclusion.
• Fallacies of ambiguity (linguistic fallacies): these occur when the meanings of words or con- cepts are twisted during the course of reasoning, or uncertainty and ambiguity are used to support an unjustified conclusion.
• Material fallacies (fallacies of presumption): these have premises that assume too much and that represent some of the most common techniques of poor reasoning, even when they are not necessarily fallacious.

Four common formal fallacies are:

• Affirming the consequent: this is based on the mistaken assumption that, if B will necessarily be true when A is true, then observing B is sufficient to prove that A is also the case: ‘If you love me, you’ll reply to my email. You replied to my email, so you must love me.’ It has the general form: ‘If A, then B. B. Therefore, A.’
• Denying the antecedent: this is based on the mistaken assumption that, if B will necessarily be true when A is true, then observing that A is not the case must also mean that B is not the case: ‘If you order steak, you’ll enjoy your meal. You didn’t order steak. So you cannot enjoy your meal.’ It has the general form: ‘If A, then B. Not A. Therefore, not B.’ 19
• The undistributed middle: this is based on the unwarranted assumption that knowing X about members of a category is the same as knowing that X applies only to members of that category. For example: ‘All magicians have beards. My friend has a beard. So he must be a magician!’ Even if it is true that ‘all magicians have beards’, this is not at all the same thing as saying that ‘only magicians have beards’. In general, the fallacy takes the form: ‘All As are B. C is B. Thus, C is also A.
• Base rate neglect: this is based on the logical-seeming claim that, if most As are C and few Bs are C, then any randomly picked C is more likely to be an A than a B. Why is this fallacious? Because until we know how big category A is, relative to category B, we cannot in fact say anything about how likely a randomly picked case is to belong to either group. For example: ‘Most diplomats are bilingual. Few ordinary Londoners are bilingual. If I meet someone bilingual in London, they’re likely to be a diplomat.’ This is a fallacious argument, because it neglects the fact that there are very few diplomats in London relative to the overall population.