Essay on The fallacies from advertising, politics, and popular culture
It is not a secret that one of the major sources of fallacies is the media, e.g. television, radio, magazines, and the Internet. However, we experience some arguments in our daily life that can be viewed as another source of fallacies. There are three distinct informal logical fallacies I have experienced in the media and in my life. Informal fallacies stand for the arguments, which can be regarded as fallacious for various reasons, but other than some formal flaws. As a rule, informal fallacies require analyzing the argument’s content and understanding the key message.
One of the examples of fallacies in the media is an advertisement “Measure ROI on social media. Definitely.” This argument is used to persuade the audience of the significance of social media, but it is fallacious. It is a fallacy of composition. The person presenting the fallacy should be more accurate in his arguments to ensure that he or she was not committing a logical error. Another ad about automated cars is used to demonstrate the slippery slope fallacy. Undoubtedly, it would not be logical to assume that self-parking cars could lead to the invention of robots that would harvest human bodies. The political ad about seven houses of Senator John McCain illustrates the red herring fallacy. The ad starts by making a claim that Barak Obama’s political opponent has no idea about the US economy, but, eventually, the public attention is diverted from the issue about economy to the property of the opponent. The major idea of the person presenting the fallacy is to win an argument in the discussion by taking the public attention away from the initial argument to another issue, which is also of great importance.
Thus, fallacies in the media and in our everyday life provide some incorrect logical arguments that are lacking validity and soundness.
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