Description: Typically, the burden of proof lies with the person making the claim. The more outrageous the claim, the more the claimant should be expected to provide evidence before anyone is likely to believe him. When the claimant instead challenges others to prove his claim is not true he is Shifting the Burden of Proof.
Description: The Counterfactual fallacy is often committed when someone speculates on the specifics of how things would be different in different circumstances, or in the future if a particular thing happens. Where the arguer purports to have more certainty of the hypothetical situation, or their speculation goes against evidence, they are more likely to be committing the fallacy.
Description: Begging the Question is one of those phrases that has come to mean something different over time. Colloquially, it is used to mean ‘raising the question’, but the original meaning is the one invoked by this fallacy, and it’s fun to point out that people are using the phrase wrong, once you’ve explained that tomatoes are fruits and reminded them on the difference between poisonous and venomous.
Description: People often make decisions based on emotion rather than logic, so appealing to that emotion can be a very useful technique when you're trying to persuade someone. However, to be part of an effective logical argument emotion has to be used to back up the argument, rather than form the primary basis of the argument. When, instead, you simply try to scare them into agreeing with you, your argument is fallacious.
Description: The Traitorous Critic Fallacy, or Ergo Decedo, is a fallacy where someone dismisses a person with genuine complaints by telling them if they don't like it, they can leave. It's a way of avoiding dealing with the complaint itself and branding the complainer as unworthy of being part of 'our' group.
Description: The Argument from Antiquity is a fallacy where the arguer claims that something is right or good because it's traditional. If a person claims that we should do something a certain way because "that's the way it's always been done" or that a particular herb must have great healing properties because it's been used for thousands of years, they are using an argument from antiquity.
Description: The Argument from Personal Incredulity describes a situation where someone dismisses a claim for no other reason than they find it difficult to believe. In fact, the person may be having trouble believing something simply because it doesn’t conform to how they currently think, or even that they simply don’t understand some element of the claim. However, rather than asking for more information or an explanation, the claim is dismissed as false because it seems unlikely to them.
Description: The Gish Gallop is a method of debating that focuses on quantity of arguments over quality, overwhelming your opponent with multiple arguments, each of which is often poorly argued or evidentially lacking. The sheer number of arguments makes a detailed, effective refutation impossible due to the research and time needed to present contrary evidence.
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Description: The Single Cause Fallacy is committed when the speaker assumes a complex outcome to have one cause, thereby making it easier to blame on somebody or propose a solution. The reality is that many real-world issues are caused by a combination of factors, some of which may even be too complex for us to be aware of. Oversimplifying issues does not help us to talk about them with reason and logic.
Description: Special Pleading describes a situation where you have a rule that you apply to everyone else, but make up an excuse to explain why the rule doesn’t apply to you. When you are inconsistent in applying the rules in this way without a valid logical reason, you are using fallacious reasoning.
Description: The Argument from Ignorance fallacy describes a situation where someone claims a proposition to be true simply because it has not yet been proven to be false. Obviously if an outlandish claim is made and it cannot immediately be proven to be false that does not mean it should automatically be assumed to be true.
Description: This is more accurately called the Argument from Improper or False Authority. After all, it’s entirely valid to support your argument by invoking a relevant authority like, say, climate scientists opinions on climate change. However, when the authority you invoke is not an authority on the subject at hand, or objectively not reliable or trustworthy, you are committing a fallacy.
Description: The Ad Nauseam logical fallacy refers to a situation where someone asserts a claim repeatedly, often even after the claim has been debunked, in the hope that people will start to believe it through sheer repetition and that people will get sick of trying to refute it so they will simply give up.
Description: Latin for ‘after this, therefore because of this’, this fallacy is committed when people confuse correlation for causation and assume that because one event followed another, the former was caused by the latter. Of course, while this may be the case, it is by no means certain. The two events may be completely independent for example, or there may be a third element that in fact caused both events.
Description: When someone claims that the fact that everyone called them crazy means they must be right, because 'they called Galileo crazy' (or some other person who was historically dismissed then turned out to be right), they are committing a fallacy. They are forgetting that the vast majority of people in history who were called crazy weren't misunderstood geniuses, they were, in fact, crazy.
Description: When supporting your claims by comparing two things, it's important to be consistent in terms of what you're actually comparing. If you are not fair when setting up the parameters, and you end up comparing the two in different ways, you are engaging in the fallacy of Inconsistent Comparison.
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