[immortal_pigs]

Logical Fallacies
by Gerujin Melens

Foreword
I am Gerujin Melens, a professional speaker - or as I like to call it, a tongue-for-hire. It is my job to persuade people to the positions I am hired to take. Sometimes I must sway the masses, at other times I need only influence a single person. Regardless of the numbers, when faced with even a mildly intelligent being, it comes down to a simple debate. Now as you might or might not know, debates are won or lost on the basis of the strengths of the arguments presented. Once you have become more experienced in the art of speechcraft, you will learn that not all arguments are truly valid; you will learn that there are some arguments that might sound valid at first, but once studied more closely you will see that they are in fact faulty. These arguments are known as logical fallacies [other terms would be the 'non-argument,' the 'false argument,' or simply 'fallacy.'] In this book, I will point out 3 commonly used logical fallacies.

I. Logical fallacy of ignorance: "I can not comprehend that, so it is not true."

Statements that can be tracked back to the following two thoughts can be considered a logical fallacy of ignorance:

1. When something is currently unexplained or not understood, it must not be true.

2. Since there is a lack of evidence for one hypothesis, another chosen hypothesis can be considered proven.

The thought here is that a lack of evidence or certainty regarding one subject proves the other subject is true. This is obviously invalid, because the other subject might suffer from the same problem.

Another variation to this logical fallacy would be the idea that something is not true, because you simply do not understand and/or believe it. Statements such as "I can not believe this is possible, thus it is not true," or "this is not what people are saying, people agree with what I say," would fall under this category.

II. Logical fallacy of irrelevance [or "that might be true, but you must remember that I give to charity"].
Statements that might be valid, but do not have anything to do with the subject at hand are logical fallacies of irrelevance. A few examples are: "I should not have to go to jail for dealing skooma. Far worse things are happening, such as murder, theft and conspiracy. The guards should be focusing on these crimes instead", "the current Lady might have done great things for her people, but I believe she is secretly a vampire, that should be investigated" and "I might have committed theft, but at least I stole from an evil person". All arguments are fallacious, because they are not relevant to the situation. [In general, nearly all logical fallacies can be classified as being fallacies of irrelevance.]
A warning: lesser intelligent beings will often present such arguments without being able to understand why they are not relevant, but an intelligent being knows that irrelevant arguments are a sound way to distract and to change the subject. Thus you must always pay close attention and act swiftly, lest it be too late.

III. Logical fallacy of hypocrisy [or "yes I did that, but you did it yourself as well"].
This is quite a common logical fallacy, and it is one of the most widely used amongst all intelligent beings. When looking at the following 2 cases, you will see that they are made with a faulty assumption.
1. In a public trial a man is being accused of murder. The official accusing him was once a murderer herself. Therefore the accused man says "but you are a murderer yourself. You have no right to judge me."
2. A mage is expelled from the Mages Guild by the Archmagister for being lazy. The mage replies that the Archmagister must have been lazy himself once before, and that he is being hypocritical.
In both cases the accused assumes you can not judge or punish someone for doing something you have been guilty of yourself. The fact that the official was once a murderer does not mean that murder is justified. Thus it does not disprove the fact that murder must be punished. As for the mage, even if the Archmagister had been lazy once, it does not justify being lazy. Also, the Archmagister has the right to expel lesser members, even if doing so would be hypocritical.

---
This book would be intended as a skillbook for speechcraft. I made it so that it could be used in both Hammerfall and Morrowind. I could probably add a few more logical fallacies, but I would like some feedback first. [Hope I didn't break any moratoriums and such]

[redsrock]

[immortal_pigs]

Feedback?

[Nanu]

I went up to II. I've been looking over L&W, just not correcting. I'm around, though.

The essay itself seems a little wanting. For a paper that is arguing the case for arguing, it might need to be a bit more airtight, as in non-debatable.

[Haplo]

Trying running it through Microsoft Word's checker, but make sure you have it set to check not only spelling, but also grammar and style.