Logicial Fallacies - Assignment Example

Samples of Logical Fallacies Logical fallacies are exaggerations that seem so believable, people actually accept it as a fact. Although there are quite a number of logical fallacies available, I will be discussing only 3 of them in this paper. These fallacies would be the Slippery Slope, Appeal to Authority, and the Post Hoc fallacies. The premise of the Slipper Slope fallacy is that if step 1 happens, a person will be forced to go through all the steps until he reaches step 10, which is the last step.

So if you dont want step 10 to happen, then step 1 should be prevented from happening in the first place. . To give a perfectly good example of the Slippery Slope fallacy, one only has to look at the Direct TV “Dont Sell Your Wig” commercial from 2012 whose premise is that people who are dissatisfied with their cable TV provider eventually end up taking unbelievable steps to keep themselves entertained so that they eventually end up selling their hair at a wig shop because the unbelievable steps they took to entertain themselves left them without any money to keep themselves entertained.

Now, Appeal to Authority is one of the most popular logical fallacies in commercials. As the name of the fallacy implies, people believe in the words of authority figures. Therefore, the people will believe anything that a popular or powerful figures says. In the “GoDaddy Presents - The Baker” commercial, Jean Claude Van Damme exemplifies this definition. Although he is not a baker, people will believe anything that he says in the commercial because he is a popular and trusted public figure.

Coming to the Post Hoc fallacy, one must try to understand the concept of “after this, therefore because of this” in order to make sense of the belief that the actions of a person affect the end result of an event. The best example of this type of fallacy in commercials can be seen widely in sports related commercials. Bud Light has one of the most memorable Post Hoc commercials with the closing line “Its only weird if it doesnt work”. After all, sports fans have very specific beliefs and traditions about each game played by their favorite team.

There is the the favorite shirt, the favorite mug, not changing underwear, and the like that these team fans and members do in order to ensure “victory” for their team. Just like in the Bud Light commercial, the Post Hoc fallacy asks us to believe that just because 2 things happened one after the other, then it must be connected and must always be done in order to ensure the same outcome every time. This is a very dangerous fallacy because one should never conclude that lighting will always strike twice in the same place.

Although there are still a number of other logical fallacies in commercials that are out there, I felt that it would be best to discuss the above mentioned advertisements because they are quite popular and part of urban mythology already. So it was only logical to use these popular ads in this discussion.