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Understanding Fallacies

Understanding Fallacies

Spotting When We Get It Wrong

  • Overview
  • Instructor
  • Episodes
  • Recommended for you
Overview
himalaya
4 h 23 min
himalaya
26 Episodes

One of the very few survival advantages that human beings have over most other animals is our ability to reason. But if we are going to use this survival advantage to our benefit, we had better learn to reason well. In this course, Dr. Ram Neta will use anecdotes and practical advice to help you learn how to avoid using (or being fooled by) common fallacies of logic and argument. 


What You'll Learn

  • What fallacies are and why we should learn about them

  • The ways in which fallacies weaken arguments and risk misunderstanding

  • How to spot fallacies, and how to deal with them


Supplementary Readings:

Think Again: How to Reason and Argue (Penguin Books in the UK and Oxford University Press in the US, 2018) 

Understanding Arguments, 9th Edition, Concise Version, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin (UA9) (Cengage, 2014)

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Instructor
  • Ram Neta
    Ram Neta
    Professor of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill
Episodes
PART 1: Fallacies of Unclarity
13 Episodes
Trailer
1min

1. What and Why
9min

What are fallacies, and why is it worthwhile to study the fallacies that people are most liable to make?

2. Misusing Useful Tools
10min

How can we identify which fallacies people are most liable to make? They turn out to be the fallacies that result from the subtle misuse of tools that are useful.

3. Unclarity
6min

What are fallacies of unclarity, and why is unclarity not just a defect, but rather a useful tool in our language and thinking?

4. Vagueness
6min

What is vagueness, and why is it crucial for both communication and for thinking?

5. Paradoxes
10min

What are paradoxes, and how can vagueness give rise to them?

6. Conceptual Slippery Slopes
6min

How can the vagueness of terms like "significantly different" can give rise to Conceptual Slippery Slope Fallacies?

7. Fairness Slippery Slopes
8min

How can vagueness give rise to Fairness Slippery Slope Fallacies?

8. Causal Slippery Slopes
10min

How can the vagueness of terms like “probably” give rise to Causal Slippery Slope Fallacies?

9. Ambiguity
9min

What is ambiguity, and why is it necessary for communication and thought?

10. Semantic vs. Syntactic Ambiguity
9min

There are two kinds of ambiguity – Semantic and Syntactic Ambiguity – why is one harder to spot than the other?

11. Fallacies of Equivocation
9min

How can ambiguity give rise to Fallacies of Equivocation?

12. “In” vs. “About”
8min

How can we distinguish fallacies that result from unclarity in our language vs. from fallacies that result from unclarity about our language?

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