Communication Fallacies

One article that I was looking over was a news article titled "Girl, 13,

had to go to hospital after taking cannabis edible at Southwest Side Chicago school - CBS Chicago". In the beginning, it states, "A mother says her 13-year-old daughter was unconscious for 24 hours after she was given a marijuana edible at school." One of the fallacies that this represents is hasty generalization because further in the reading it says that a student consumed a substance that "may have been cannabis" or in another line, "what they believe was an edible". This is a hasty generalization because no one knows for sure if the substance the students consumed was really cannabis or not and they made a generalization based on what happened to the students. What a hasty generalization is that it is a "fallacy of inductive reasoning" as stated in the lecture video. This means that when 1 thing happens and people assume that what happened is the general conclusion. This is a fallacy because there is not enough evidence.

Another article I found titled "Here’s a new way to lose an argument online: the appeal to AI | The Verge" Talks about how many people turn to Ai for information. In the middle of the reading it states "And every time I see this appeal to AI, my first thought is the same: Are you f**king stupid or something?... I had no further interest in what that person had to say" This represents the Ad hominem fallacy. This fallacy is when the person making their claims attacks their opponent rather than finding a solution. In this article, the writer is belittling those who use AI as a resource and completely shuts them down.

The final article I found called "High-School Start Times Are Still Too Early for Teens - The Atlantic states "Adolescents in the U.S are chronically sleep-deprived, in part because most schools start too early" This represents the false cause fallacy also known as error in causal reasoning. This line shows this fallacy because it says that schools starting early is what is causing sleep deprivation in adolescents. However, the reason why this is false is because there are so many other reasons as to why adolescents are becoming sleep deprived. For example, sleeping too late because they decided to stay on their phone or watch movies. This fallacy says that people assume that one event follows another and that the 1st event is the cause of another event. Despite this being a false cause fallacy, it does say in the claim, "in part" meaning that there are other parts that contribute to sleep deprivation of adolescents. In the reading for this week, it talks about the Toulmin Method that helps to analyze the logic of any argument. One of the methods is the qualifier which "limits or clarifies the claim" (Crusius). This is an important thing to include in an argument because it gives less of an opportunity to the opponent to reject the claim.

Resources

Crusius, T., & Channell, C. (2016). The aims of argument: A text and reader (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education