PHIL 150 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Masturbation, Fallacy, Counterexample
Document Summary
Fallacy: a type of argument that tends to be persuasive, but is not rationally persuasive. Is this a good argument: nothing is better than sex, masturbation is better than nothing, hence, masturbation is better than sex. To avoid this fallacy try to give a precise meaning to each term used and check to if the premises remain plausible. If you cannot answer this question, then you do not have any precise idea of what the sentence means. It might look as if it says something definite, but it doesn t. Example: a necessary condition for graduating from jmu is fulfilling your gen ed requirements. S is a sufficient condition for p if and only if anything which is s is also p. (that is, if s then p. Think of a sufficient condition for p as one whose presence suffices for p. ) Example: a sufficient for graduating from jmu is fulfilling all the requirements for a ba in philosophy.
