The nature of discourse and argument Part 4

This should be able to stand alone, but you may want to check out parts one, two and three.

I decided to talk about some more of the thinking errors called fallacies; not because they are the most important thing, but because they are both a common impediment to good reasoning and easy to sum up. This does not mean that they are easy to spot, or to stop. Just that they are simple to explain and learning to avoid any or all of them will immediately lead to better thinking in a noticeable way.  Learning the rules of good thinking that could help you avoid all fallacies, including those I am not going to list, is a longer if  even more worthwhile process which will not be covered in this post.  Instead this post is going to focus on some specific problems often found in direct debate or discussion particularly when it comes to politics, religion, and other belief systems.

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.