"Mr. Quintal has argued that logic is not the most important thing in life. Apparently Mr. Quintal advocates irrationality. It has taken two million years for the human race to achieve the position that it has and Mr. Quintal would throw the whole thing into garbage:"
Which fallacy is committed in this arguments?
Strawman
In this passage, Mr. Quintal simply argued that logic is not the most important thing in life, a fairly modest and limited claim. However, the response distorts this claim into something far more extreme: that Mr. Quintal 'advocates irrationality' and wants to throw away the entire two-million-year achievement of the human race. This is not what Mr. Quintal actually said; his position has been exaggerated and misrepresented into a weaker, easily attackable version, and it is this distorted version that is then criticized rather than his real argument. This is the defining feature of the strawman fallacy: replacing an opponent's actual claim with a distorted, exaggerated, or oversimplified version of it, and then refuting that artificial version as though it were the original argument.
It is not slippery slope, since no chain of increasingly extreme consequences is being predicted from a single small step; it is not red herring, since no unrelated or diversionary topic is introduced to shift attention away from the issue; and it is not hasty generalization, since no broad conclusion is being drawn from a small or unrepresentative sample of cases. Hence, the fallacy committed here is the strawman fallacy.
Similar Questions
Which fallacy is exemplified in the following statements: "Of course gun ownership should not be prohibited. You can kill someone with hockey stick, but no one proposes to ban ownership of hockey sticks."?
Given below are two statements:
Statement I: Formal fallacies are those that can be detected only through analysis of the content of the arguments.
Statement II: Formal fallacies pertain to deductive arguments that have identifiable forms.
In the light of the above statements, choose the most appropriate answer from the options given below:Which informal fallacy is committed in the following statement-"How can you say animals have rights and should not be killed, when you eat meat?"
Important Questions from Formal and Informal Fallacies
Consider the argument provided below:
“Sound is permanent because it is a product like the jar”
Identify the fallacy involved in the above argument on the basis of Indian logic from the options given below:
"No one has ever been able to prove the existence of extra sensory perception. We must therefore conclude that extra-sensory perception is a myth". Which one of the following fallacy is committed in the above statement?
- "Miss World says that the socially correct thing for a vegetarian guest to do at a dinner party is to look perfectly happy eating salads. Therefore, to act likewise is the socially correct thing to do". Which fallacy is committed in the above argument?
"The Daily News carried an article this morning about some local teenagers who were arrested on charges of drug possession. Teenagers these days are nothing but a bunch of junkies".
Which fallacy is committed in the above statement?
"I think you will find that this bail out is the best option before our organization, especially because disagreement may indicate that this company is not the right place for you" Which informal fallacy is committed in the above argument?
