ENG 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Rogue State, Robert Frost, The Slippery Slope
3 May 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Certain types of defective arguments happen so frequently that they have been given names. These are known as fallacies, and such arguments are said to be fallacious". We study fallacies because we need to be able to detect them. Make sure you know these because you will need to be able to spot them and name them when you see them: appeal to ignorance: arguing that a lack of evidence proves something. In one type of this fallacy, the problem arises by thinking that a claim must be true because it hasn"t been shown to be false. No one has shown that ghosts aren"t real, so they must be real. ". The problem is that lack of evidence is supposed to prove something but it can"t. A lack of evidence alone can neither prove nor disprove a proposition. Because someone is an expert in one field does not mean that he or she is necessarily an expert in another.
