‘You think you’re thinking, but you’re actually listening.’ –Terence McKenna
Neuman examined three common types of fallacious arguments:
• The false cause fallacy.
• The appeal to the people fallacy.
• The appeal to ignorance fallacy.An argument using the false cause fallacy […]: I watered my lawn and then it rained. It must have rained because I watered my lawn.
An argument that appeals to the people […]: Most people believe that extraterrestrials exist, so you should too.
An argument that includes an appeal to ignorance […]: We know that Big Foot exists, because no one has been able to prove that it doesn’t.
Neuman’s idea is that the ability to detect fallacious arguments, such as these, is related to skill in drawing inferences from text. In order to test his idea, Neuman measured student’s performance on detection of argument fallacies, deductive logic, and the inference process in reading comprehension.
He found that comprehension was significantly related to spotting fallacies. Performance on the pure deductive logic task was not.
image { Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman, Production still from Shadow, 2010 }
