Love Is a Fallacy

Marisol Arellano
Reading 290
Professor:
30 october 2012

FALLACIOUS WOMAN
Fallacies are fun. Errors in deceptive, logic, accidental or deliberate, fallacies go together with studies in critical thinking and reading, and give us great feelings of fallibility. Human consciousness cannot express all the knowledge of experience through language. “Love is a Fallacy” is a short fun story written in old school days, concerning raccoon coats and the vicissitudes and traps of courtship. Just to show how the story is dated; you will rarely see in fact there is no one who wears raccoon coats today. Fallacy has found it’s mostly from Latin into English version of stories. But reading “Love is a fallacy” introduces one to the fun world of fallacy. Most of short stories are rich in fun and entertaining characters and beleaguered many with literary devices accompanied by interesting twists. Much fun is derived from Shulman’s “Love is a fallacy” where the he teaches the fundamental fallacies’ principles in an entertaining way. Shulman’s “Love is a fallacy” is all about a young University student man in the early 1950’s. The main character in the story is a self described “enthusiastic, perspicacious, calculating, astute and acute” man whose main aim as depicted in the story is to obtain, from his friend Petey, a girl called Polly. Petey is a dump guy who is in great need of a raccoon coat. His desperate need for the coat prompts him to strike a deal with the narrator in exchange for Polly. During that period, a raccoon coat was part of life and everybody in the campus was at least having one. Polly was a beautiful girl that everyone would dream of dating. The narrator believed that Polly would be perfect for him because of what he wanted to be in the future. He wanted to be a lawyer and he saw every lawyer marrying a beautiful lady. The only problem was that Polly was not one of the brightest girls on campus. This narrator uses his intelligence to get the better off the roommate whom he assumed not be a very bright guy. He intended to use his intelligence to steal his roommate girlfriend. However, his intelligence comes to haunt him later when teaching Polly logic.

The story talks about how fallacious things might seem. After reading the story about these two guys and the lady, there are several many things one can learn about fallacies. One of the fallacies being depicted is that of women. Even though, Polly was not the brightest girl in the campus, she uses the logic to outsmart the narrator. This shows us that everything is not the way it seems. Everyone has both his/her strengths and weakness. It is very vital to look at logic, do an analysis to it, then come up with a very conclusive conclusion. People should be rational in their thinking, deeply analyze a concept, think of what may have been omitted or concealed, before deciding whether it is worth believing in someone or something. When it comes to picking up theory and men’s dating advices, many falls back to evolutionary psychology and evolutionary theory to seek for guidance. This becomes the source of the characteristic waning about social status, dominance, gender attraction, hierarchy and the elusive alpha male. There are several fallacies about women which are seen everywhere and they can result to very dangerous beliefs about sex and women. The three fallacies about women as depicted in Shulman’s “Love is a fallacy”, are the fallacy of division, fallacy of composition and the naturalist fallacy. The fallacy of composition occurs when an individual assumes something that is true for an individual to be true for a group because the individual is part of the group. In Shulman’s “Love is a fallacy”, the narrator assumed that he should marry a beautiful lady because every lawyer was married to a beautiful wife. In terms of logical reasoning, fallacy of division is the opposite of the fallacy of composition. The naturalist fallacy occurs when someone assumes what is naturally true to be morally true. Naturally men might take advantage of women because of their position in the society. This is what the narrator tried to do with Polly. However, his plans are dashed away when Polly outdoes him and he ended up the loser.