"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?"
" I admit that there are people for whom even the existence of God is a big question. My answer is that I do not address them, but that I presuppose a minimum of reason in my readers." Identify the informal fallacy committed in the above statement.
"If the plane takes off from the airstrip B then it is south bound. The plane did not take off from the airstrip B, therefore it is not southbound." Identify the formal fallacy in the above argument.
Which informal fallacy is committed in the following statement - "Of course you want to buy XYZ toothpaste. There must be a reason, why, 90 per cent of India brushes with XYZ toothpaste"
"Environmentalists are continually harping about the dangers of nuclear power. Unfortunately, electricity is dangerous no matter where it comes from. Every year hundreds of people are electrocuted by accident. Since most of these accidents are caused by carelessness they could be avoided if people would just exercise greater caution." Which fallacy is committed in the above argument?
Which informal fallacy is committed in the following argument - "Scientists have been trying for centuries to disprove the claims of astrology, and none of them has ever succeeded. Therefore, we must conclude that astrology's claims are true" ?
A fallacy in which an opponent's position is depicted as being more extreme or unreasonable than is justified by what was actually asserted is called
“In the hospital, some nurses don't wear white dress, some doctors have private practice and medicines prescribed are of high cost. Therefore, treatment in this hospital is of poor quality”. What fallacy does this argument make?
Important Questions from Formal and Informal Fallacies
Which logical fallacy is committed in the following statement - "I do not believe that serial killers ought to be allowed to live. They have forfeited their right to live because anyone who kills lots of people has lost that right".
Which of the following statements are logically equivalent?
A. Some physicists are outstanding professors.
B. Some physicists are not non-outstanding professors.
C. No outstanding professors are physicists.
D. Some non-outstanding professors are not non-physicists.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below:
According to classical Indian School of Logic (Nyāya) which fallacy is committed in the following statement - "The hill has fire because it is knowable"?
- Which fallacy is committed in the following statement - "God exists since it is written in the scriptures. Since the scriptures are the words of God, whatever is written in them is true."?
- "This is the richest fraternity on the campus; therefore Mr. X who is a member of this fraternity must be one of the richest young man on the campus." Which fallacy is involved in this argument ?
