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Logical Falacies

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Submitted By jayjaxman1970
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James Jackson
BCOM/275

Week 2 Assignment
Logical Fallacies Analysis

1. Personal attack ad hominem. An ad hominem compares the qualities of the person making a claim to the qualities of the actual claim. It is when it is argued that a claim cannot be true because there is a certain lack of quality in the person providing the claim. With this fallacy, it is not the claim itself being analyzed, but the person making the claim. A “personal attack” ad hominem does exactly that – it attacks the person making a claim in order to set them in a negative light. The thought is that a claim cannot possibly be true if the person making the claim is a “bad person”. We see this in the media all of the time with politics. Often pundits in the media will claim that a politician in the opposing party does not have the “moral authority” to claim something because the politician may have been accused of doing something that the media outlet is reporting as morally wrong. A good example of this was early in Barack Obama’s presidency, and even when he was campaigning. During that time some media outlets would dispute a patriotic statement he may have made. They claimed that he could not be patriotic because there was no proof he was even an American citizen since no one had ever seen his birth certificate. This could also be considered a circumstantial ad hominem, as the media was saying that his claimed circumstances refuted his patriotism.
2. Scare tactics. Scare tactics involve trying to have people think a certain way, or agree with you, by scaring them. Scaring them allows you to have them agree with your position. One example of scare tactics is the media portraying crime to be out of control. Overblown reports (hype) of dangers and threats make people feel like they are in a hopeless position. The media outlet will then tell people that they do not need

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