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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. Capital punishment is morally wrong, because it is ethically impermissible to inflict death as punishment for a crime.

 

  1. 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)

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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