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Saturday, November 27, 2010

The nature of discourse and argument Part 2

           The point of today's post is common mistakes made in arguments.  Again the definition of argument I am using is the formal one, of putting forth reasons, not the common one of having a disagreement.  The two main types of mistakes made are having bad starting information, or premises, and making a bad inference or connection between two or more points of information, called fallacies. The end claims made in fallacious arguments are not always false, we are currently only going over evaluation of claims as given, and not setting up and understanding requirements for truth value when claims are either not given or lacking in some way.   With that in mind let's talk about a few common fallacies in a group called Appeals.