Appeal to Hypocrisy is when a person justifies their action by pointing out that their accuser is guilty of the same action. For example, “You should become a member of a church so you’re under someone’s authority as Scripture says.”   “I disagree, you’re not a member of a church.” “You should really get an ESV [...]

A “red herring” is generally when attention is drawn away from the main issue of an argument by some tangential issue that is designed to look as if it supports the main argument. Often in these cases the conclusion comes first. “The Roman Catholic church is the only true unified church. There are over 10,000 [...]

In the last segment of this series we looked at the fallacy of composition. In this part, we’ll briefly look at its opposite, the fallacy of division. The Fallacy of Division assumes what is true of the whole must be true of the parts. For example, “The Bible teaches everything we need to know about [...]

The Fallacy of Composition is assuming that which is true of the parts of something must be true of the whole. For example: God told Joshua to destroy men, women and children in the Old Testament, and the New Testament records a man getting beaten and mocked by Roman soldiers, flogged to a pulp, and [...]

Equivocation is using an equivocal word in several inconsistent ways in an argument. Only man is rational. No woman is a man. Therefore, no woman is rational. Valid? Sound? The problem is the word “man.” It’s not used in the same way throughout the argument. In (1) it’s used as a human being, but in [...]

We continue from the last part of our series (here, or here), where we covered the forms and structures of arguments. We looked at unstated conclusions, standardizing arguments, how premises almost always follow words like “since,” “because” and “due to,”etc. In this segment, we’ll examine the forms and structures of arguments a little more through [...]

Having covered some of the basic laws and rules of logical inferences, it’s time for us to see how these nuts and bolts come together in the form of a larger argument. The first thing to note is that arguments do not always come in a nice, neat, standardized form with premises in the beginning and [...]