>> Today we're at the last
set of informal fallacies, this is set three of three. We're going to go through these and then the next time
we're going to move into a whole new section. Next section is going to be
dealing with propositional logic and that's going to finish us out for the rest
of this semester. So let's keep going with
the informal fallacies. The first one we have
here is complex question. The answer to one question is
buried inside another question. The unasked question
needs to be first. So you could imagine two teams in a soccer match playing
against each other. And one person walks
up to another person on the opposing team and says, hey does the referee
know you just cheated? There's no way the other
person can answer that question without admitting to cheating. If the person says, no,
then it's yes I cheated and the referee doesn't know
or if the person says yes and it's yes I cheated
and the referee knows. So here the question that's
not asked is, did you cheat? There's question one and
then question two is, does the ref know? But because this person only
asks question number two and never asks the first
question, did you cheat, there's no way the person can
answer the second question without implicitly answering
the first question with a yes. And so it's forcing
the person to say, yes to this first
question that's never asked in the first place. And that's what a
complex question is doing. So the question that's buried
inside is, did you cheat? The other question
is, does the ref know? The unasked question
needs to be asked first. So there's a complex question. The next one is a
false dichotomy. The false dichotomy acts
like there's two choices when there's probably more. So either a or b. The choice is yours. When in reality it is probably
a choice c, maybe even a d and maybe even an e. So
there's false dichotomy. The next one is equivocation. Equivocation is when a
conclusion relies on a word or phrase that is used
in two different senses. To help with equivocation
just think about puns. These are, you know probably one of the easier jokes
to tell are puns. That's if you ever have a class
with me face to face in person, it's all I do, all
day long is tell puns. On the online classes
I want to be sure that, we just cut to the chase and
you really get the information with no distractions because
I think they are watching the lessons on a computer
is distracting enough. So I really try and avoid
trying anything funny, I just want to be sure we talk
and I get the information out. But on this example with
equivocation let me go ahead and tell you a few
of my favorite jokes and I know you're going
to stare at the screen and be like, where's the joke. But I don't care I'm
going to tell it anyways, because my grandma
told me I was funny. So here's the first joke. My or my brother-in-law
told me this one. So, did you hear about Chewbacca
he's playing for the empire and he's been getting
strikes back to back. That's not the joke,
that's just the setup. So, everybody's being
really hard on Chewbacca but I said you know you
got to take it easy on him, it is wookiee season after all. So there you have the wookiee
or rookie is played in two ways. All right here's another
one, this one comes direct from my, direct from my niece. Why did conditioner spend so much time cleaning
out the bathtub? Because sham pooed, I
know that was amazing. All right let me
tell you one more. Why did the oversized
cat get kicked out of the feline
karate tournament? Cause he was a cheetah. Cause a cheetah is a large cat, a cheater is somebody
who cheats. So there's the word being
used in two different senses. Now those aren't
technically equivocations because that word wookiee, is
not the same as the word rookie. And the word cheetah isn't
the same word as cheater. So here's one that's
more of an equivocation where the actual word is
used in two different senses. This one comes from my nephew. What did spine so to brain? Don't worry I got your back. So there I got your
back means in this case like the spine really
is the brains back and I got your back means
I'm looking out for you. So there's two different
senses for the puns. I know these are amazing right? All right let me
tell you one more. I know I said that was going to
be the last one, but I'm going to tell you one more
anyways, this ones great. This ones for all you
science nerds out there. Did you hear that oxygen
and magnesium got together? I know, I was like, OMG. Cause you got your
periodic table elements, oxygen and magnesium
and then OMG is like you know the
text message saying. So OMG is used in
two different senses. Come on these are amazing jokes. All right I'll stop. Anyways that's equivocation,
you really like, equivocation is used
in humor all the time. Okay amphiboly the next one. Amphiboly and equivocation are
really close to each other. For amphiboly, the
conclusion is based on a problematic interpretation of a poorly constructed
statement. So for equivocation it's really like a word has multiple
meanings. So for equivocation a word or
phrase has multiple meanings. For amphiboly it's a
grammatically poor sentence. So you start off with a grammatically
poor written sentence and then the arguer
goes for the problematic and unlikely meaning
of the sentence. The person uses the unlikely
meaning of the sentence. So that's amphiboly. So basically when you
finish an amphiboly, when you seen an amphiboly
happen, you can almost guarantee that the person who
said whatever sentence in the first place is going to
say that's not what I meant. There's amphiboly. Next one composition. These two I'm going to put
back to back, the other one that goes along with
composition is division. Composition problematically says that if the parts are
certain way, the whole, the whole must be
the same way as well. So if you have the parts, that
are built up to make something, you say well the parts have
property a. Therefore the whole which is made up of the parts,
will have property a as well. Division starts with the
whole, it just does it in the opposite direction. Its says because the
whole has property a. Each individual part will
have property a as well. So these are just going in the opposite direction
composition and division. For composition you could
imagine a dry eraser marker, you can put dry erase markers
together if you put the cap on one dry erase
marker on the bottom end of another dry erase marker. And so you could stack as many
dry erase markers as you wanted. So you can imagine saying, if
one dry erase marker won't break if you throw it across the room, that would be the parts having
property a. The dry erase marker if you made a dry erase
marker tower and threw it across the room, it
wouldn't break as well. That's saying the whole
has property a as well. And that's, that's
absurd like, if you throw, if you stacked a whole
bunch dry erase markers, you connect them end cap to
the bottom end and threw it across the room it's
going to break. So that is composition
where you falsely assume that because the parts have
property a they whole will have property a. And then division is
going in the opposite direction. Saying that a whole
has property a, therefore the parts will
have property a as well. So for instance, water
will quench your thirst. Water's composed of
hydrogen and oxygen so hydrogen will
quench your thirst. And oxygen will quench
your thirst, that's absurd. Hydrogen will not
quench your thirst. Oxygen will not quench
your thirst. Okay so those are the fallacies
we're going to be working with today let's go ahead
and look specific examples. The first one, are you in favor
of the ruinous economic policy of the current administration? So this one is committing
the complex question. And the unasked question
is, is that policy ruinous? The only way the
person can respond to this is with a yes or no. If they say yes, then it
means the policy is ruinous and I'm in favor of it. If they say no it's
the policy is ruinous and I'm not in favor of it. But either way the unasked
question, the policy, is the policy ruinous,
that question, that question is never
allowed to be challenged. Okay next one. Either you're with us or
you're with the terrorists. The choice is yours. In this case, you
have two options. You're with us, you're
with the terrorists or there could be
another option, right I'm not with
either of you. Okay so that one is a false
dichotomy that ignores that the person can
be with neither. Next. Good steaks
are rare these days so don't order yours well done. This one commits
an equivocation. And it mixes up rare
as undercooked with rare as hard to find. So good steaks are rare
these days is like, you know the restaurants just
don't serve good steaks anymore. They're really kind
of cutting costs and you never see a
good steak anymore. So that's a rare
that's hard to find. So then the person says, so
don't order yours well done. In other words, you want it
cooked rare as in undercooked, you want that steak to
have some red in it. And so that's two senses of rare
being used there wakka [assumed spelling], wakka wakka. I know these jokes are amazing. I crack me up too. Next. George said that
he was interviewing for a job drilling oil wells
in the supervisors office. We can only conclude that
the supervisor must have a dirty office. This one is amphiboly. It confuses interviewing
for drilling wells with actually drilling
wells in the office. Let's look at those parts. So, George was interviewing
for a job drilling oil wells in the supervisors office. So one way you could take it
is, the interview is for a job to drill oil wells where you
drilling those oil wells? Inside, here's the, this
is the supervisors office, that's the table right there. I know, it's pretty good huh. So there's the table,
there's the supervisors office and George is interviewing
for a job, they're going to drill a well right
behind that chair. This is the oil well at
the supervisors office. That's the way this person is
taking, we can only conclude that the supervisor
must have a dirty office because there's going to be
oil everywhere in the office and it's going to be messy. But the way this really
is probably intended is, George went to the supervisors
office and he sat down and he had an interview
with the supervisor. And what was that
interview about? It was about going to
drill some oil wells out in the mountains
or somewhere else. That's the way it was
probably intended. But this person takes
the grammatically and ambiguous sentence and applies it problematic
reading to it. Okay, next one. Every sentence in this
paragraph is well written, therefore the entire
paragraph must be well written. This commits the
fallacy of composition. A bunch of well written
sentences might not hang together well in a paragraph. So for instance, I'm going
to read to you a bunch of well written sentences
together and you tell me if it's a well written
paragraph. Dogs are big. Trees are green. Cats like food. My window is open. That's my paragraph. Like that paragraph was garbage. The parts are the sentences,
the whole is the paragraph and this person is
problematically saying because the parts are done well, the whole must be
done well as well. The next one. The students attended
Bradford College come from every one of the 50 states. Michelle attends
Bradford College, therefore Michelle comes from
every one of the 50 states. This one is the opposite
of composition, it's the fallacy of division. It's basically saying
that people in the college come
from a lot of places. So for instance you have, we'll
have one, two, three, four. And imagine there's a bunch
of other people there. And then we're going to
have Michelle over here. Okay. So this person
comes from Alaska. This person comes
from California. This person comes from New York. This person comes from Florida. And you keep going
all these people come from different places
and when you look at where everybody comes from,
you realize they all come from 50 different states. Then it's saying,
therefore Michelle comes from every one of the 50 states. So it's saying that this person
comes from Alaska, California, New York, Arkansas,
Alabama, it keeps going. So that is because the
whole, the student body of Bradford College,
has this property. The part, Michelle will
have this property as well. And that's a problematic
conclusion to draw. So once again composition, division they're doing
the opposite direction. Composition goes from the part
to the whole, division goes from whole to the part. Okay. That's the last set of
informal fallacies, go ahead and get working on
your homework. See you next time. Take care.