Question

Find an example of confirmation bias and other errors or fallacies in an Internet ad. Include the link and state why there is something misleading or faulty about the ad.

Answer 1

The fallacy is a kind of error in reasoning. The list of fallacies below contains 227 names of the most common fallacies, and it provides brief explanations and examples of each of them. Fallacious arguments should not be persuasive, but they too often are. Fallacies may be created unintentionally, or they may be created intentionally in order to deceive other people. The vast majority of the commonly identified fallacies involve arguments, although some involve explanations, or definitions, or other products of reasoning. Sometimes the term "fallacy" is used even more broadly to indicate any false belief or cause of a false belief. The list below includes some fallacies of these sorts, but most are fallacies that involve kinds of errors made while arguing informally in natural language.

Charges of fallacious reasoning always need to be justified. The burden of proof is on your shoulders when you claim that someone's reasoning is fallacious. Even if you do not explicitly give the proof, that is, give your reasons, it is your responsibility to be able to give it if challenged.

An informal fallacy is fallacious because of both its form and its content. The formal fallacies are fallacious only because of their logical form. For example, the Slippery Slope Fallacy has the following form: Step 1 often leads to step 2. Step 2 often leads to step 3. Step 3 often leads to ... until we reach an obviously unacceptable step, so step 1 is not acceptable. That form occurs in both good arguments and fallacious arguments. The quality of an argument of this form depends crucially on the probabilities. Notice that the probabilities involve the argument's content, not merely its form.

The discussion below that precedes the long alphabetical list of fallacies begins with an account of the ways in which the term "fallacy" is imprecise. Attention then turns to the number of competing and overlapping ways to classify fallacies of argumentation. For pedagogical purposes, researchers in the field of fallacies disagree about the following topics: which name of a fallacy is more helpful to students' understanding; whether some fallacies should be de-emphasized in favor of others; and which is the best taxonomy of the fallacies. Researchers in the field are also deeply divided about how to define the term "fallacy" itself, how to define certain fallacies, and whether any theory of fallacies at all should be pursued if that theory's goal is to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing between fallacious and non-fallacious reasoning generally. Analogously, there is doubt in the field of ethics regarding whether researchers should pursue the goal of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing moral actions from immoral ones.

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