Fallacies in Reasoning

By Ashraf Adeel

This book is a very brief introduction to informal fallacies that can occur in our reasoning both in ordinary life and in scholarly work. It is important for us as thinking beings to be alerted to these pitfalls of reasoning. While there is no dearth of introductory texts that discuss fallacies, separate and simple treatments of fallacies are few and far between. This little booklet has been written with a view to making a very simple and stand-alone presentation of important informal fallacies. The idea is to provide beginning readers with an easily accessible introduction, which they can read completely in one or two sittings without having to purchase or find a whole book of Logic or Critical Thinking. The hope is that the readers of these pages will end up trying to avoid these fallacies more assiduously in their life and work. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. Ashraf Adeel
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201678494

Ashraf Adeel

M. Ashraf Adeel Currently Professor and Cahir of Philosophy Department at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, M. Ashraf Adeel has held a Professorship in Philosophy at University of Peshawar and worked as the founding Vice-Chancellor of Hazara University in Pakistan. He was a senior Visiting Fellow at Linacre College Oxford in 1999 and has also served as President of Pakistan’s Philosophical Congress (the country’s premier association of philosophers). Adeel has published research articles in philosophy of language, science, Islamic Ethics, and epistemology. His book Epistemology of the Quran: Elements of a Virtue Approach to Knowledge and Understanding (Springer 2019) is the first systematic study of the Quranic epistemology and studies epistemic concepts of the Quran from a contemporary perspective. His book titled How Do We Deal with Different World Views If They Are Based on The Same Evidence: The Philosophical Problem of Underdetermination in Quine and Davidson is a sustained defense of underdetemination and possibility of alternative conceptual schemes or world views both in science and in general. Some recent articles include “Moderation in Greek and Islamic Traditions and A Virtue Ethics of the Quran”, The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 32, No. 3, summer 2015, “The Evolution of Quine's Thinking on the Thesis of Underdetermination and Scott Soames' Accusation of Paradoxicality”, HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. Vol. 5, spring 2015, and “The Concept of Understanding in Jaspers and Contemporary Epistemology” Existenz, Vol. 10/1, spring 2015. Two of Adeel’s anthologies of Urdu poems have also come out in 2015 and 2019 from Pakistan. He is also a playwright. He is currently working on a novel and on the Virtue Ethics of the Quran.

Book preview

Fallacies in Reasoning

By

M. Ashraf Adeel

Professor and Chair

Department of Philosophy

Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

Table of Contents

I  Preface

II  Introductory Remarks about Fallacies

III  Classification of Informal Fallacies

IV  Fallacies of Relevance

V  Fallacies of Faulty Induction

VI  Fallacies of Presumption

VII  Fallacies of Ambiguity

I

Preface

This booklet is a very brief introduction to informal fallacies that can occur in our reasoning both in ordinary life and in scholarly work. It is important for us as thinking beings to be alerted to these pitfalls of reasoning. While there is no dearth of introductory texts that discuss fallacies, separate and simple treatments of fallacies are few and far between. This little booklet has been written with a view to making a very simple and stand-alone presentation of important informal fallacies. The idea is to provide beginning readers with an easily accessible introduction, which they can read completely in one or two sittings without having to purchase or find a whole book of Logic or Critical Thinking. The hope is that the readers of these pages will end up trying to avoid these fallacies more assiduously in their life and work. 

M. Ashraf Adeel

Philadelphia

January 18, 2014.

II

Introductory Remarks about Fallacies:

Reasoning, we know, is an important tool in the survival kit of humanity. It is a mental process through which we reach at decisions and conclusions that can be life saving, at least sometimes. For example, if land sliding starts as we are climbing a hill, we quickly step out of the way of an oncoming boulder. Our reasoning ability helps us take this decision and it is obviously a decision or inference that saves our life. It takes place in the mind as a process of one thought leading to another. It is exactly this process which we call reasoning and it’s the very foundation of our lives. Sometimes we reason correctly and that is very helpful. But on other occasions we make mistakes in our reasoning. These mistakes are due either to our being wrong about facts or being wrong in drawing a conclusion from the presumed facts or both. Given this situation, it is of the highest importance that we cast a second look at our reasoning processes and evaluate them both for their factual correctness and drawing of conclusions from the facts. Critical thinking is exactly this process of casting a second and careful look at one’s reasoning to evaluate it for its correctness both in terms of facts and in terms of drawing conclusions.

The mental process of reasoning, when expressed in language, is called an argument. It has two parts, premises and a conclusion. Premises provide the support for the conclusion. For example, in our example above our silent reasoning can be expressed this way:

There is a boulder coming my way. If it hits me, I can get killed.

Therefore, I must step out of its way.

The first two statements are the premises and the last one is the conclusion of this argument.

Arguments come in two varieties, deductive and inductive. Deductive arguments are the ones whose conclusion follows with necessity or certainty from the premises. Inductive arguments, on the other hand, are the ones whose conclusion follows from their premises with some degree of probability but never with certainty.

The following is an example of a deductive argument:

All continents are adrift.

Europe is a continent.

Therefore, Europe is adrift.

Given the premises, the conclusion follows with certainty. Deductive