Fallacies Critical Thinking Skills Require

¶ … Fallacies Critical thinking skills require a careful assessment of all of the facts and avoidance of many of the constraints introduced by various fallacies. In fact, there are a wide range of fallacies that people frequently fail to recognize when they confront them, and they may not be able to discern the reality from the subterfuge in these settings unless they are well versed in their techniques.

To this end, this paper provides a review and discussion of the three common types of fallacy characterized by ad hominem, the false dilemma and the straw man. A summary of the research and salient findings will be provided in the conclusion. Ad hominem. According to Walton (1989), ad hominem arguments are personal attacks on the answerer himself. Not surprisingly, for many people, "It may be difficult to know how to handle such powerful and subtle attacks, and whatever the answerer does or fails to do can be tricky and dangerous.

In particular, it is hard to know what form of criticism is appropriate, or even to know how to reasonably and fairly evaluate whether or why such a question is open to justifiable criticism or not" (p. 147). This author emphasizes that in ad hominem fallacies, the attackers frequently focus on the personal situation, actions, character, or affiliations of the person whose arguments or statements are the subject of criticism, an approach that has long been regarded as a fallacy and which represents a lapse in critical thinking skills (Walton, 1989).

A good example of an organizational use of ad hominem fallacies was their use by the vice president at the encouragement of the Republican Party during the 1960s. For instance, one biographer reports that, "Agnew was sent out on the campaign trail, and later as vice president, to attack the hippies, leftists and pinkos that Nixon felt were primarily responsible for the decline of America (which couldn't possibly have been his fault).

Armed with a series of ad hominem zingers penned by Nixon's sleaze purveyors Pat Buchanan and William Safire, Agnew made many memorable contributions to the history of destructo-politics" (Spiro T. Agnew, 2006, p. 3). False Dilemma.

A false dilemma is a type of fallacy of logical argument that takes place when too few of the available alternatives are taken into account and all but one are assessed and considered impossible or unacceptable; for example, according to Hutchenson (2006), "A father speaking to his son says, 'Are you going to go to college and make something of yourself, or are you going to end up being an unemployable bum like me?' The dilemma is the sons supposed choice limitation: either he goes to college or he will be a bum" (p.

3). Critical thinking, of course, requires a more careful assessment of all of the available alternatives and a balance drawn between them. If there is a paucity of information available, though, this level of critical thinking is not possible. While the foregoing example of the conversation between the father and son is relatively benign, the consequences of a false dilemma can be more severe when they are used by organizations such as the criminal justice system.

For example, in a capital case, the defendant, "Simmons," was characterized by the prosecution as being so vile and unrepentant that the jury was led to believe that their sentencing options were more limited than was actually the case: "Thus, the State had created a 'false dilemma' for the jury, in that it was led to believe that the only way to prevent Simmons from posing a future threat to society would be to sentence him to death.

The plurality concluded that this situation was repugnant to the requirements of due process in the context of capital sentencing" (Baarsma, 2002, p. 24). Unfortunately, this type of false dilemma technique is reportedly used more frequently in criminal justice than many observers might believe. According to Miller and Wright (2002), "When it comes to plea bargaining, we have created a false dilemma. The dilemma grows out of the central reality of criminal adjudication in the United States. The vast majority of criminal cases are resolved through guilty pleas rather than trials.

Most of those guilty pleas result from negotiations between prosecution and defense" (p. 29). Straw Man. According to Walton (2004), "The straw man fallacy is committed when the proponent's argument is based on premises that do not represent the commitments of the other party in the dispute, and where his argument used a distorted version of these commitments to try to refute the other party" (p. 25).

The straw man fallacy represents a common technique that is used to divert attention away from the actual issues involve to irrelevant or even imaginary ones that can be impossible to defend against. In this regard, according to Walton (2004), "Straw man, as a fallacy, is defined as misrepresentation of an arguer's position. When an opponent's position is distorted or exaggerated in a straw man argument, the effect is often to divert the line of argument to irrelevant issues.

So the straw man argument, as typically used, involves an aspect of irrelevance... Straw man is getting your opponent's position wrong and then refuting that wrongly attributed position" (Walton, 2004, pp. 22-4). Some organizational uses of the straw man fallacy can be found among physical education professionals and the scientific community when assertions as to race accounting for superior performance are made.

For example, Entine (2001) points out that, "Some race realists seduce themselves into believing that they are being intellectually honest in pointing out the 'natural' advantages of certain 'races,' but they reach beyond limited data to speculative and sweeping conclusions. The consequences of such disingenuousness are serious and mounting" (p. 294). The casual observer might ask what damage was possibly being done by such assertions, but Entire emphasizes that the effects can be profound.

Citing the example of a scientist at a prominent national conference, Entine reports that he "declared that there is no 'running gene,' as if that somehow resolved the debate over the causes of black domination of running. Such bluster is a classic straw man. No scientist claims there is a 'running gene.' That's a dodge of.