What’s the name of the following type of argument that I know is logically flawed but would like to be better able to explain its weakness to the perpetrators…The arguer cites a particular extreme case, for example someone saying ‘If Obama had his way, I wouldn’t be here’ (anti-abortion argument), and assumes they are correct because of this 1 particular extreme example.
another example: evolution is wrong because the peppered moth was faked
Argument by generalization. The arguer assumes that one case will hold true for all.
As you have described it that is not a fallacy. It’s probably not the strongest argument to make if you want to convince people, but it is no way illogical.
“I don’t support Obama because if he had his way I would be dead” is a perfectly logical position to adopt, assuming the speaker can prove that it is true that if Obama had been in power when they were born they would have been aborted.
Just because Obama may have a lot of other good policies doesn’t mean that he isn’t worth rejecting solely because of one extreme bad policy. There is nothing illogical about such a position.
I suspect you aren’t explaining yourself very well. Can you explain for us whether you fell this is any less logical than someone in 1938 saying " I don’t support Hitler because if he had his way my friend I would be dead?" Hitler also had a lot of good policies, but that didn’t make it illogical to reject him because of his extremely bad ones.
You say that you know the position is logically flawed and that the speaker "assumes they are correct ", but can you explain how you know this is flawed and why you don’t accept that the speaker is correct? If Obamanm had his way they wouldn’t be here, right? So doesn’t that mean they are correct and not just assuming they are correct?
Definitely not a Straw Man. A Straw Man misrepresents the opposition. In this case there is no reason to assume that the stated position isn’t a true representation of Obama’s position. It certainly could be true based on the information we’ve been given in the hypothetical.
I htink the OP has assumed that a disputed axiom is somehow illogical. In this example the speaker has started from the axiom that if they had not been born that would be a bad thing, and therefore should oppose anything that would prevent others form being born, including Obama. The opposition disputes that axiom, which is fair enough, but that doesn’t make it illogical.
I would not classify the two examples the OP gives as instances of the same form of argument; the second, after all, contains a clearly identifiable style of fallacy. However, as regards the first example, I also suspect he is not explaining himself very well.
I missed the second example. And I agree, that’s just a blatant fallacy of composition. It runs as
The Peppered Moth is used as an example of evolution.
The Peppered Moth example was fake.
Therefore, evolution is fake.
The edifice of evolution has many traits that are not found in any one component of the edifice.
However the first example doesn’t rely on an any fallacy of composition. Obama has a certain trait and the speaker will not vote for him exclusively and directly because he has that trait. There’s no compositional error there and no fallacy that I can see if we assume that the statement is true.
To make it conform to the second example it would have to be “Democratic Senator X has said that he wants to ban all firearms, Obama is a member of the Democratic Senate, therefore Obama wants to ban all firearms.”
To try and explain myself better: I was thinking generally of the style of argument of stating a single case and assuming that that is a valid reason for your stance being correct on a complex issue. In my opinion, policies and theoretical debates should take into account a broad spectrum of empirical data. Of course each side has its poignant examples that can be cited.
From experience, I sense that the side that ends up using poignant examples as a main foundation for argument usually tends to be the side grasping to an untenable position. I am searching for terminology and literature on this type of argument technique so I can better deal with it in the future.
I’m not sure if this is relevant, but in my experience at the Dope one of the most frequently used flawed arguments seems to be related to this; maybe its opposite. It’s when someone uses a unique exception to “disprove” a general truth; to suggest that the exception to every rule somehow totally invalidates the rule, rather than simply being an illustrative exception.
That is just your personal opinion. A lot if people, probably most, will disagree with you.
Most people will base their position on complex issues on a single deal-breaker case. For example it’s not going to matter to your typical feminist what McCain’s stance is on the economy or whether the has a female VP if he adopts a position of outlawing abortion completely. The election itself remains a complex issue but their argument will be based on a single deal-breaker case.
Most people are like that on most complex issues. It doesn’t make them wrong. There is no logical fallacy here.
this is heaiodng for GD, but i just don’t believ this is true.
Are you saying that if candidate A met your ideal requirements on every single issue imaginable, but had a stated policy of making it legal to kill black people, you would still vote for him? Because you take into account the “broad spectrum of empirical data”, right, and on the broad spectrum of empirical data this candidate has got to be far better than the alternative. He just has one flaw, but you wouldn’t let a single poignant case sway you against a candidate that is far better based on on the broad spectrum of empirical data.
I suspect that is nonsense. I believe you would reject a candidate with a policy of killing all black people out of hand, no matter how ideal he is on a broad range of issues.
That is as it should be, and is no different whatsoever from the example you gave in the OP. You wouldn’t vote for a candidate who would legalise the killing of black people, and the speaker in the OP wouldn’t vote for a candidate with a candidate who would legalise the killing of unborn children. You may think the issues are non-equivalent (and we’ve done that debate to death around here) but that is purely axiomatic and doesn’t make their position illogical and yours logical.
Well this is GQ, the place for factual answers. So do you have any objective evidence to back this up, or is it just opinion?
There is no literature or terminology because it isn’t an argument technique. It is simply a position, and one adopted by all sides. You only have to see how many peoeple on these boards have said that Palin’s YEC views are a dela breaker for them voting for her to realise that. You can only “deal” with it by pointing out that you don’t prioritise the issues the same way and are willing to live with some flaws to get a generally better candidate.
Conceit.
In this particular case (the peppered moth), as well as being fallacious, the argument (against it as an example) is factually dubious as well.
Photographs were used to demonstrate the visibility (or otherwise) of different forms on different backgrounds - some of those photographs were posed using dead moths. No big deal - the photographs were just an illustrative device, not supporting evidence.
Creationists seized upon this fact and declared the whole idea false, simply because it was illustrated by artificial means.
But that’s not a flawed argument, that is classic Socratic reasoning and the heart of the scientific method.
In essence Socratic reasoning states that the truth as an absolute can never be known. You can only approach the truth by removing everything that is known to be false, and then what remains exposed is the truth as far as it is possible for human to know it.
The scientific method has Socratic reasoning at at its core. You can never know whether something is true in science, all you can ever know is whether there are circumstances under which it is untrue. That is what we call falsification. If a position (in science called hypothesis) can be shown to be untrue under even one exceptional circumstance then it considered to be untrue.
The exception to any rule does totally invalidate the rule. The rule as stated clearly isn’t true if there is even a single exception, if there is even a single set of conditions under which is observed to be false. It isn’t an illustrative exception, it is a falsification, it proves the opposing argument to be false.
Someone doing this isn’t engaging in a flawed argument. They are engaging in the only form of argument that has ever been shown capable of consistently arriving at the truth.
That’s true. We could probably have used Piltdown Man as a more concrete example.
There’s a lot more questionable about the example than that, including the fact that the pollutants themselves were causing differential mortalities of the different colours of moths, as well as changing the pigment expression in the moths. It simply wasn’t a very good example of natural selection because the process was in large part due to development effects of the pollutants, not due to selection.
That’s interesting - I wasn’t aware of those particular confounding factors. Yes - not a good example in that case - almost a promising contender for Lamarckism.
Pete, it sounds like you’re describing inductive logic: apes have hair, therefore all animals with hair are apes. Is that the term you’re looking for?
I don’t know if the OP’s example argument is wrong by the technical rules of logic or debate. (I do not have debate training.)
But it seems to me that, even if Obama assisted in making abortion available, a whole lot of other things not under Obama’s control have to also happen for that abortion to take place.
To blame a specific abortion on Obama would be to ignore a whole lot of factors that had a much larger impact on the abortion taking place.
Should Samuel Colt be held responsible for hand gun deaths in the US today?
Should the factory workers who assembled the guns for a living?
Should the Coal miner, steel worker, lumber jack, etc, (folks who gathered the raw materials that went into steel & ammo production)?
In other words, it may be an unfair exaggeration of Obama’s role/contribution to a specific event.
That a contribution is there may not be denied, but exaggerating the importance of that contribution is the failure here, IMO.
But it isn’t a representation of Obama’s position. The hypothetical statement in the OP contains an unsupported premise that Obama’s “way,” is for all pregnant women (or even any pregnant women) to get abortions. That is obviously not his position, so the fallacy is that there is a false premise.
I think Diogenes the Cynic put his finger on it. Someone who says, “If Obama had his way, I wouldn’t be here” is saying that they know for a fact that their mother would have aborted them; probably for a reason such as she was very young, she had several children already, she was a victim of rape, or something like that.
I’m not sure I would be proud of my mother’s having been forced into bearing me under such circumstances.
OTOH, I might be proud of her if she chose to bear me under such circumstances. (having had the option to abort.)