76 Fallacies

A fallacy is an error in reasoning. That is, it is a piece of bad logic. Just as it is a good idea to avoid eating bad food, it is also a rather good idea to avoid bad reasoning. Unfortunately, bad reasoning is all too common€"it pours out of the television and infests the web like an army of venomous spiders. Perhaps even worse than the fallacies inflicted from the outside are self-inflicted fallacies. These can lead people to make poor decisions about matters great and small.

Fortunately, there is a defense against bad reasoning, namely knowledge. This concise book provides the reader with definitions and examples of seventy-six common fallacies€"the knowledge a person needs to defend herself in a world awash in fallacies.

In addition to combining the content of my 42 Fallacies and 30 More Fallacies, this book features some revisions as well as a new section on common formal fallacies. The focus is on providing the reader with definitions and examples of these common fallacies rather than being a handbook on winning arguments or a text on general logic.

The book presents the following 73 informal fallacies:

Accent, Fallacy of
Accident, Fallacy of
Ad Hominem
Ad Hominem Tu Quoque
Amphiboly, Fallacy of
Anecdotal Evidence, Fallacy Of
Appeal to the Consequences of a Belief
Appeal to Authority, Fallacious
Appeal to Belief
Appeal to Common Practice
Appeal to Emotion
Appeal to Envy
Appeal to Fear
Appeal to Flattery
Appeal to Group Identity
Appeal to Guilt
Appeal to Novelty
Appeal to Pity
Appeal to Popularity
Appeal to Ridicule
Appeal to Spite
Appeal to Tradition
Appeal to Silence
Appeal to Vanity
Argumentum ad Hitlerum
Begging the Question
Biased Generalization
Burden of Proof
Complex Question
Composition, Fallacy of
Confusing Cause and Effect
Confusing Explanations and Excuses
Circumstantial Ad Hominem
Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc
Division, Fallacy of
Equivocation, Fallacy of
Fallacious Example
Fallacy Fallacy
False Dilemma
Gambler€s Fallacy
Genetic Fallacy
Guilt by Association
Hasty Generalization
Historian€s Fallacy
Illicit Conversion
Ignoring a Common Cause
Incomplete Evidence
Middle Ground
Misleading Vividness
Moving the Goal Posts
Oversimplified Cause
Overconfident Inference from Unknown Statistics
Pathetic Fallacy
Peer Pressure
Personal Attack
Poisoning the Well
Positive Ad Hominem
Post Hoc
Proving X, Concluding Y
Psychologist's fallacy
Questionable Cause
Rationalization
Red Herring
Reification, Fallacy of
Relativist Fallacy
Slippery Slope
Special Pleading
Spotlight
Straw Man
Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
Two Wrongs Make a Right
Victim Fallacy
Weak Analogy

The book contains the following three formal (deductive) fallacies:

Affirming the Consequent
Denying the Antecedent
Undistributed Middle