Saturday, October 23, 2010

Week 9-Post 3-Fallacies

There were some Fallacies in Chapter 11 of the Epstein text that I wanted to do further research on just because they didn't seem clear enough. According to www.nizkor.org, a fallacy is " is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position". According to the website nizkor.org the following pattern must happen
1) Person A has position X.
2) Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
3) Person B attacks position Y.
4) Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This fallacy is committed when people actually misinterpret the other person's argument but putting words in your opponents mouth that they did not say is not going to attack their position or argument. So this made it a bit easier to understand than the text because Epstein states about strawman fallacy is "its easier to knock down someones argument if you misinterpret it, putting words in other person's mouth" (202). But searching another link heleped me better understand this type of fallacy.

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html

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