Students love learning to recognize fallacies and faulty reasoning. There’s just something empowering about it, I think.
There is a small industry devoted to identifying and classifying fallacies of reasoning. A comprehensive list of recognized fallacies would run into the hundreds. This course introduces the concept of a fallacy and discusses some common fallacy types, but it in no way aims to be comprehensive. Instead the focus is on how any given fallacy can be understood using the basic concepts of argument analysis introduced in earlier courses. The only classification I use distinguishes logical or formal fallacies, fallacies that arise from false or implausible premises, and fallacies that are best understood as violations of one of the necessary conditions for having a rational argument at all.
Part 1: Introduction
1.1 What is a fallacy? (4:35) (FREE)
1.2 Categorizing fallacies: pros and cons (5:04)
1.3 The rules of rational argumentation (4:09)
Part 2: Some Important Content Fallacies
2.1 Ad hominem (abusive) (10:32) (FREE)
2.2 Ad hominem (guilt by association) (7:10)
2.3 Appeal to hypocrisy (tu quoque) (3:43)
2.4 Appeal to popular belief (or practice) (4:25)
2.5 Appeal to authority (7:43) (FREE)
2.6 False dilemma (8:46)
2.7 Slippery slope (8:12)
Part 3: Fallacies that Violate the Rules of Rational Argumentation
3.1 Straw man (3:41) (FREE)
3.2 Red herring (3:43)
3.3 Begging the question (narrow sense) (6:28)
3.4 Begging the question (broad sense) (10:32)
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