Examples of Fallacies

I. Fallacies of Relevance

A. As an academic, Professor Benedict J. Kerkvlier has given himself away as biased and unscientific… It is pathetic to see Professor Kerkvlier, a non-Filipino, deploring political and social conditions in a foreign country like the Philippines when his own country calls for social and moral regeneration.

--- Vincent Romero, Philippine Consul General, in a letter to “The Honolulu
Advertiser”, 5 December 1974.

B. The classic trap for any revolutionary is always “What’s your alternative?” But even if you could provide the interrogator with a blueprint, this does not mean he would use it; in most cases he is not sincere in wanting to know.

--- Shulamith Firestorn, “The Dialect of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.”

C. In that melancholy book “The Future of an Illusion”, Dr. Freud, himself one of the great theorists of the European capitalist class, has stated with simple clarity the impossibility of religious belief for the educated man of today.

--- John Strachey, “The Coming Struggle for Power.”

II. Fallacies of Presumption

A. While General Grant was winning battles in the West, President Lincoln received many complaints about Grant’s being a drunkard. When a delegation told him one day that Grant was hopelessly addicted to whiskey, the President is said to have replied, “I wish General Grant would send a barrel of whiskey to each of my other generals!”

B. A national mailing in 1992, soliciting funds by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), contains a survey in which questions are to be answered yes or no. Two of the questions asked are these:

“Do you realize that the vast majority of painful animal experimentation has no relation at all to human survival or the elimination of disease?”

“Are you aware that product testing on animals does not keep unsafe products off the market?”

C. Family farms are not destroying the rain forest… Throughout the Latin American tropics and in many regions of Asia and Africa, fires are deliberately set by agribusiness and the landowning elites to destroy the forest and replace it with pasture. The loss of forest from this cause has been increasing at an explosive rate, and this is the main reason the rain forest is shrinking.

--- J.H. Blaut, “It Isn’t Farmers Who Kill Rain Forests,” The New York Times, 7 August 1996.

III. Fallacies of Ambiguity

A. Robert Toombs is reputed to have said, just before the Civil War, “We could lick those Yankees with cornstalks.” When he was asked after the war what had gone wrong, he is reputed to have said, “It is very simple. Those damyankees refused to fight with cornstalks.”

--- E. J. Kahn, Jr., “Profiles (Georgia),” The New Yorker, 13 February 1978.

B. … since it is impossible for an animal or plant to be indefinitely big or small, neither can its parts be such, or the whole will be the same.

--- Aristotle, “Physics”

C. Fallaci wrote her: “You are a bad journalist because you are a bad woman.”

--- Elizabeth Peer, “The Fallaci Papers,” Newsweek, 1 December 1980.