If you are able to give something a name and study it, it helps you to recognise it faster and be more confident dealing with it.
But I agree in some sense. Just yelling them out when you see them like it's a game of bingo is rarely productive.
Shorthands also have a couple of obvious pitfalls. One of them being in this case that neither party might recognize particular leakiness in a generally agreed-upon abstraction.
What you (IMHO) should be learning--and the vocabulary sort of comes implied with this, but is not necessary--is how to recognize the shape of such a concept or structure (in this case, fallacies) and how to "disarm" them, deal with them, in the context of an argument. Pointing out the fallacy by name should only be done maybe after disarming the fallacy in context of the argument, as further clarification.
If doing that is too long and convoluted, it really goes to show that learning a common vocabulary is training for the wrong thing. Instead, train to make your ways of dealing with fallacies shorter and to the point.
Say you know and studied all the moves in karate; During a match, your opponent comes at you with a certain attack, and you know the perfect defence / counter attack to it because you studied it all. You call out the name of your opponent's attack and shout the name of your counter attack. Having agreed upon a common vocabulary, your opponent knows they are defeated by your counter. A shouting match ensues.
I'm not saying that having a common vocabulary is not useful, it's very useful. Imagine two karate trainers sharing tips on what techniques best to learn students of a certain level. Imagine how they are even able to talk about "students of a certain level". But that's all meta game. In a real fight the moves have no names, and in a real argument neither do the fallacies.
That's fine but it also leads to a shift of burden of proof on the counter argument rather than the initial claim. In turn, this leads to "proving a negative" and it is generally quite impossible to do so. Therefore, one needs to be careful with the line of arguments.
Personally, I have also found that the best way to counter a fallacy is to ask the claimant to substantiate his/her stance.
Great comic though
However, they might turn useful in understanding why somebody told you not to "put up a straw man", or used other apparently weird expressions. (I think I've never found an occurrence of the "No true scotsman" argument, but it sounds quite funny!) Though I doubt I would hunt for this specific book in that case, just googling around would be probably faster.
Thanks for sharing the comic; this looks like a fantastic weekly read.
I think there is a difference how those lists are presented and particularly which audience they are intended for.
I think the worst possible way is if a list is intended to be read by participants of a debate - and then the author (or one of the participants) magically expects everyone to obey to the list and complains if they don't.
That's pretty much like the bully who as been outwitted and demands the other to "fight like a man". For people not familiar with them, those lists are in the end only another set of arbitrary set of rules thought up by humans. (Yes, this may even apply to the whole principle of logical reasoning). Sticking to those rules may in fact give you anormous insight to learn facts about the world, but this is in no way obvious. In particular, if the one who tells you about those rules appears to be biased against your own views, you have even less incentive to learn about them.
The second-worst way is to memorize the fallacies, recognize them in an argument, call them out and by that expect them to be disputed. This might be useful if you're an undecided bystander and try to keep a clear head. However, if you're yourself part of the debate, this probably isn't going to convince your opponent or any bystanders: You're calling out the fallacies, but you're not explaining why they invalidate the particular argument.
So in the end all that's left in your actual counter-argument is "the list says that kind of argument is invalid" - which, ironically, is itself a pretty bad appeal to authority.
Fallacy Man has demonstrated that nicely.
I think the good kind of lists go a step further: They show you how to detect the fallacies and how to dispute them. This way you could actually use them like the patterns in the chess example and drive the discussion forward, even if neither your opponent nor your bystanders know about the fallacies.
We have a fallacy for it too, "Fallacy Fallacy".
I love this. I did a few extracurricular courses in philosophy in university (a rather broad "General Overview" and another course on Ethics in particular). Super interesting stuff. What I learned in Ethics is useful to me almost every day (more days than not, anyway).
One thing I took from these courses is that philosophy is not quite the scientific study of learning the Great Answers to The Great Questions. It's not even quite about learning the Great Answers proposed by historical Great Thinkers.
No, The Great Questions don't really have any single correct Great Answers to go with them.
Philosophy is about learning the counterarguments to any of the proposed Great Answers by Great Thinkers, recognizing their shapes in other proposed answers, cementing the Great Questions to stay questions (which might seem disingenuous, but is only when applied without rigour).
I like your post because it applies this idea on a meta-level to the field of philosophy concerned with fallacious arguments (Logic and Eristic dialectic, if I'm not mistaken)--you provide a counterargument to the dialectic strategy of pointing out a fallacy! Nice one :)
> ad hominems are frequently
> used in moral
> characterizations
In the above, we haven't delved into why skinning cats is bad (it seems to be bad self evidently and without need for justification, although that's another story), we're just characterized Bob as himself as bad. That's an ad hominem, but it's not fallacious - it only serves to instantiate the badness of an action in a particular person.
While it's important to be able to recognize a fallacious proposition, it's equally important to realize that the presence of an informal fallacy in an argument does not imply that the argument is either invalid or that the conclusion is false. To give two examples: ad hominems are frequently used in moral characterizations, and most moral analogies are functional strawmen by virtue of exposing the circumstances under which a particular claim is weakest.
At best, the presence of informal fallacies indicates that an argument needs more attention from its audience.