Fallacies of Reasoning
Exercise
Instructions: For each of the items below, (1) determine if a fallacy of reasoning
is operating and if so, identify it; and (2) explain how the specific reasoning either is sound
or how/why the reasoning follows a faulty pattern as defined in your text.
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Why does a family who has no children in a school district have to pay
school taxes? This is like paying cigarette taxes even though you don’t
smoke.
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Cindy Lauper is not a good role model for young girls because of her wild
hair, choice of dress and because she receives her spiritual advice from a
wrestling promoter.
- I
wish I could take my four basset hounds with me when I move, but I just
can’t. I know you only have a small apartment, but won’t you consider
adopting them? I hate to think of them starving in the street or winding up
in the dog pound.
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Capital punishment is morally wrong, because it is ethically impermissible
to inflict death as punishment for a crime.
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Party labels don’t mean anything anymore. You can draw a line right down the
middle. On the one side are the Americans, on the other are the Communists
and Socialists. (George Murphy, Speech to a Republican Fundraiser, 1946)
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Almost every industrialized nation in the world except for the US has a
national curriculum and national tests to help ensure that schools
throughout the country are meeting high standards of education. If such a
system can work elsewhere, it can work in the US.
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You often hear people say that the French are rude, especially to people who
don’t speak their language. But I love France! The wine, the food, the
museums! There’s no country in Europe I’d rather visit.
-
Bill Baxter deserves to be promoted to vice president. He has three small
children, and just last week his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.
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The Democratic Party makes victims out of all taxpaying Americans. For 40
years they had control of Congress and the money. The results? We’ve had an
out-of-control illegitimacy rate, out-of-control entitlements for illegal
immigrants, a public education system that’s broken. There’s [sic] more
people in prison than any other nation. We’ve had moral decay. It seems that
the Democratic Congress’s objective was to keep everybody uneducated,
overweight, drugged and drunk, and charge responsible taxpayers for the
cost. (From a 2000 newspaper call-in column)
Testimony is
like an arrow shot from a long bow; the force of it depends on the strength of
the hand that draws it. Argument is like an arrow shot from a crossbow, which
has equal force though shot by a child.
—Samuel Johnson