quent . That day I lost my interest in football, but I gained realization of the need to make my own judgments, rather than accepting mob opinion.
- Might makes right is the argument that the listener must accept the arguer’s conclusion or suffer the consequences. The threat may be physical or it may involve some other undesirable action. Between parents and children it is usually the former, and among scientists it is the latter. The threat is irrelevant to the validity of the conclusion, and yet it may affect the listener’s decisionmaking.
“Everyone knows that this theory is correct, and if you try to prove otherwise you will destroy your credibility as a scientist.”
- Extenuating circumstances is the plea for accepting the conclusion out of pity for someone. The arguer claims that acceptance will help someone in trouble, or that rejection of the conclusion will cause undue hardship to someone (usually to the arguer). The extenuating circumstances are irrelevant to the validity of the basic argument.
Students often use the plea of extenuating circumstances on their teachers; lawyers use it on juries and judges. Scientists use it in personal, not scientific, arguments.
- Red herring is diversion of attention from an argument’s weakness, by creating a distracting smoke-screen. The fallacy is named after a technique used in training hunting dogs: drag a sack of red herring (a strongly scented fish) across the scent trail that the dog is supposed to follow, and train the dog to stick to the main trail without being distracted or diverted to the red-herring trail. The fallacious red herring can and usually does consist of valid reasoning, often protracted and sometimes emotional, so the listener is left with the impression that the conclusion is valid. In fact, the red herring is a related issue that is extraneous to the central argument.
This style of misdirection is the secret of many magicians’ tricks. It rarely is employed deliberately in scientific arguments. However, a similar smoke-screen – ‘straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel’ [Matthew 23:24] -- is sometimes adopted: the arguers demolish a minor criticism of their argument, giving the false impression of careful and objective thoroughness, while obscuring a brief mention of a serious weakness in the argument.
When the theory of evolution was proposed by Charles Darwin and advocated by Thomas Huxley, falacious refutations were rampant: Evolution is inconsistent with the Bible (appeal to authority); Darwin is a heretic (personal attack) who should be excluded from our community of scientists (mob appeal) and will certainly burn in Hell (might makes right).
Faulty Link Between Premises and Conclusion
“The myth of the scientific method keeps the scientific community from recognizing that they must have a humanly developed and enforced professional ethics because there is no impersonal method out there that automatically keeps science the way it ought to be.” [Bauer, 1994]
