KALMUS Fallacystudy
Jesse James Kalmus
Persuasion/Civic Engagement
Fall 2014
Fallacy Case Study
The second I started looking I could easily find logical fallacies through media. From television series,political debates and sources like Fox News and CNN you could easily spot the concepts we talked about in class and in our reading. The first clip is from a Seinfeld episode. My mother and I have seen about every episode. Elaine is getting her phone reconnected but the phone company is giving her a new number with an area code she does not want since she lives in New York City. She tries to use circular reasoning by saying it is not a new number but a “changed number,” trying to change the mind of the telephone installer did not work and she was not successful. My second example is from the Colbert Report. I am a fan of this show as well but I do not rely on it as my news source as ridiculous as that sounds for I know some people that do. In this example we see the strawman fallacy. Stephen Colbert’s interviewee said he did not vote for the war. Colbert responded by saying “so you want to see Saddam back in power.” This is obviously a ridiculous notion. Of course he does not want to see Saddam back in power. The suggestion does not make sense. It is completely derived from another thought that does not correlate with the conversation. In my next example we see the slippery slope fallacy. It is a car commercial. Although it is comical it does use this technique to try and persuade the audience into buying the car. They try to scare you into self driving cars. They remind you there was a movie about that. The movie ended in robots harvesting human organs. Although we know this is ridiculous we still might be drawn to this type of advertising it is easy to laugh however I believe that it still affects the person watching the commercial.
In my next example we see a hasty generalization. This comic made me laugh very much. We see the penguin thought process and how it goes into a
Persuasion/Civic Engagement
Fall 2014
Fallacy Case Study
The second I started looking I could easily find logical fallacies through media. From television series,political debates and sources like Fox News and CNN you could easily spot the concepts we talked about in class and in our reading. The first clip is from a Seinfeld episode. My mother and I have seen about every episode. Elaine is getting her phone reconnected but the phone company is giving her a new number with an area code she does not want since she lives in New York City. She tries to use circular reasoning by saying it is not a new number but a “changed number,” trying to change the mind of the telephone installer did not work and she was not successful. My second example is from the Colbert Report. I am a fan of this show as well but I do not rely on it as my news source as ridiculous as that sounds for I know some people that do. In this example we see the strawman fallacy. Stephen Colbert’s interviewee said he did not vote for the war. Colbert responded by saying “so you want to see Saddam back in power.” This is obviously a ridiculous notion. Of course he does not want to see Saddam back in power. The suggestion does not make sense. It is completely derived from another thought that does not correlate with the conversation. In my next example we see the slippery slope fallacy. It is a car commercial. Although it is comical it does use this technique to try and persuade the audience into buying the car. They try to scare you into self driving cars. They remind you there was a movie about that. The movie ended in robots harvesting human organs. Although we know this is ridiculous we still might be drawn to this type of advertising it is easy to laugh however I believe that it still affects the person watching the commercial.
In my next example we see a hasty generalization. This comic made me laugh very much. We see the penguin thought process and how it goes into a