Keep Hope Alive

When my family moved from the city to the suburbs, I had to transfer to a public school for the first time in my life. The good thing was that it was an excellent school with an extensive curriculum. I only got to spend my last two years of high school there but I don't think that there was single class that I enjoyed more or learned more from than Logic. We spent an entire semester learning the fallacies and how they are used/misused everyday. I recall, for one assignment, keeping a notebook of instances of any fallacy I found in advertising, newspapers or magazines.

Given the rhetorical manipulations of this past election season, the numerous verbal debates I've had and the heinous diatribes I've seen in blogs and on the various cable programs, I nearly concluded that the tenets of basic logic and knowledge of fallacies were lost forever. But after seeing this post, by a younger person at that, I see that hope is still alive and that someone - somewhere - is still teaching, studying and learning how to think, reason and argue -- the right way.

But with the mass influx of varied views and opinions comes the increased potential that readers of opinionated writing will be exposed to arguments based upon faulty logic, or "logical fallacies." For this reason, people who frequent the Blogosphere should familiarize themselves with the different types of logical fallacies so that they aren’t duped by arguments that seem convincing on the surface but that lack any true merit.

Fallacies rear their ugly little heads all the time, though usually in a very subtle manner. Take for instance the silly graphic appearing on the index page of Booker Rising. About midway down the page in the left hand column is a picture of a black man holding a gun. The wording of the picture cleverly asserts "KKK and NAACP agree on disarming African-Americans; Do You Agree?"

If you've never seen this info before, please bookmark his links and spend a little time absorbing the information. If you are just a little rusty on some of the lesser known fallacies, bookmark the link anyway and browse it when you get a chance.