5 Logical Fallacies to Avoid When Arguing (With Examples!)
Pretty much everyone has been in an argument in their lives and if you say you haven’t, then you haven’t been on social media or outside in the past 5 years. The problem with arguing is a lot of times people, including you and me, fall into logical fallacies which are arguments with faulty reasoning.
They can often be quickly disproven with logic and facts so make sure you’re not falling into these next 5:
Straw Man
“Looks at’em, being all wrong and full of straw.
The straw man fallacy, in its simplest terms, is when someone takes your argument, distorts it into something else, and then they attack that new argument. This is sometimes done because the person finds attacking a generalization or tangentially related argument easier than your specific point.
Related Article: 5 More Logical Fallacies to Avoid
For example:
If Person A says “One-time use plastics are dangerous for the environment therefore we should ban all plastic bottles.”
Person B might ‘straw man’ it and say, “So you think people shouldn’t be able to drink water while on the go? If people get thirsty outside they should just die? You’re anti-life? Hey, everyone, this guy is anti-life!”
“Buy a Bottle and Save a Life”
Here, instead of arguing Person A’s point of ‘one-time use plastics’, Person B jumps to other conclusions, changes what Person A was referring to, and attacks the new made-up idea that people shouldn’t be able to drink water on the go.
Of course, a straw man can happen outside of an argument when you're just making a statement. For example, you might say “I don’t watch Youtube” and someone might jump out of a bush yelling, “So you don’t support indie content creators?”, though this tends to lean a bit more into our next logical fallacy…
2. False Dilemma
The ‘false dilemma’ fallacy is when a person takes an argument/statement and makes it an either-or as if we were still in a debate class. This essentially happens when someone refuses to see that pretty much all topics aren’t black and white, there are usually many layers to an idea, like an ogre.
“I call him Shrek”
For example:
Person A might say “I didn’t like Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.”
Person B will create a false dilemma and attack saying, “Oh so you hate Superman? What are you a Marvel Fan-boy? You only like light-hearted comic movies and can’t take the serious gritty stuff that is given to us by our lord and savior, Zack Snyder?”
Here the false-dilemma person is saying you either like Man of Steel or you hate Superman despite there being other adaptations of Superman. The rest of the argument is an exaggeration that may or may not have happened online… maybe.
“The disrespect to Man of Steel is real”
The internet has really ruined our lives… wait a second this sounds like…
3. Non Causa Pro Causa
A “Non Causa Pro Causa” argument (translation: not the cause for the cause) can easily be described as the embodiment of “correlation does not equal causation”, when someone takes two topics and creates the false connection that one causes the other just because they are somewhat related. This usually happens when someone doesn’t have all the information (or chooses to ignore it).
For example:
After drinking a bunch of expired milk someone might say, “My stomach hurts, it must be because of the bagel I ate this morning. I ate a bagel the other day and my stomach hurt too. I must have a gluten allergy. I need to burn all the bread! Sliced bread was a mistake and should have stayed banned!”
Related Article: That Time the U.S Banned Sliced Bread
Worse than spoiled milk
Here, our ‘logical’ person believes bagels are making them sick therefore they must have a gluten allergy. They completely ignore other factors and assume that just because they had bagels twice and became sick both times, the bagel must be the cause.
If our confused example person would have realized that the milk was the problem but then claimed all milk is poisonous and out to get us then that’s closer to our next fallacy…
4. Hasty Generalization
A hasty generalization is when a claim is argued using only a very small sample size. Just because one thing in a group is bad, it doesn’t mean they’re all bad.
For example:
Someone might incorrectly say “I watched Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and it was bad, all Star Wars movies must be bad. Actually, all space movies must be horrible, space must be boring.”
Related Article: The Space Pen That Saved Apollo 11
“How dare you.”
Here our movie-goer now hates space movies because of one movie without giving the others a chance or realizing that there might have been other factors that caused that one bad movie.
In all these arguments we have to be careful when debating them and not fall into our own logical fallacies. If you tell the Space/Star Wars haters they can’t have an opinion because they haven’t seen all the star wars movies then you’re dangerously close to our next logical fallacy…
5. No True Scotsman
The ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy is sometimes called ‘Appeal to Purity’ since those that fall into this fallacy call upon a pure version. An arguer will attempt to move the goalpost in their argument to satisfy their point.
For example:
In rebuttal, to our last example, a person might say, “A true Star Wars fan would enjoy the Phantom Menace and realize how great it actually is.”
Someone overhearing the conversation may jump up and say, “Well, I re-watch all the movies every year, I have all the collectibles, I have multiple signed books, comics, and scripts, but even I think Phantom Menace wasn’t great.”
In response, the arguer will fall into the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy and say, “That’s because you’re not a TRUE star wars fan. A real and TRUE star wars fan would love Phantom Menace.”
Here, the arguer falls into the fallacy by adjusting their argument to exclude others because they disprove their point. A term for the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy that is more common these days is ‘gatekeeping’ since a lot of people will exclude others from their hobbies or interests by claiming they are not ‘real fans’ of the topic.
“You’re not a real gate unless you have iron bars”
When it comes to all of these fallacies we should remember that everyone falls into one or another at times. In fact, those that are savvy enough can use these fallacies to trick others into agreeing with their stance. I’ve picked on things in popular culture in this article to make it light-hearted but you’ll see these occurring in everything in life, especially politics.
It’s important to review our opinions and look at them from multiple angles to ensure we’re not falling for these fallacies.
Quick Facts
One of the earliest uses of the term straw man was from Martin Luther in the 16th century when he was criticizing the Church. The church, in response, created a straw man argument and were called out by Martin Luther when he stated, “...they set up a man of straw whom they may attack.”
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is actually my favorite of the DC Superhero films.
