For this Critical Thinking exercise, you will find a minimum of two examples of logical fallacies on the news, on the internet, or any other outlet of communication (citing the source of this fallacy as appropriate); you could even make up your own hypothetical example if necessary. As you present the fallacies to the class, you will also analyze them: in other words, explain what the specific name of your fallacy is, and why your example is a logical fallacy. Other things to consider in your main post: What can we imply about a speaker or writer whose arguments contain logical fallacies?
Does the presence of a logical fallacy in someone’s argument immediately invalidate their general position on an issue? Why or why not?

The fallacy examples below are hypothetical examples:

1. Although I learned the theory of natural selection in biology classes, my church minister said that this theory is false and therefore I believe it should not be taught in schools.

2. We cannot believe that vaccines are good for our bodies, as they are created in the laboratory and not created by nature. Nothing that comes from outside nature can do the organism any good.

Explanation:

The first example presents a fallacy called an appeal to authority and occurs when an individual uses the opinion of an authority, or the behavior of an authority, to justify incorrect reasoning on a particular issue. As we can see from this example, the narrator believes that the theory of natural selection should not be presented in schools, because the church minister does not agree.

The second example presents a fallacy known as an appeal to nature. In this type of fallacy, the speaker claims that anything that was not created by nature is bad and must be fought, even if there is concrete evidence to the contrary. As we know, vaccines are safe, this is a scientifically proven fact, but because they are not natural, many people claim that vaccines are harmful.

When a speaker or writer uses fallacies in their work, we can consider that speaker or writer to be someone with little capacity for logical reasoning and little insight into the subject they are addressing. In this case, we can conclude that this person needs to prepare more and research more before approaching this subject.

The presence of a fallacy in an argument does not invalidate the speaker's position, but it does invalidate the argument. This is because the fallacy represents the speaker's position on the subject and shows the speaker's opinion, but this is an incorrect opinion, which must be respected, but not validated.

honestly, school in itself just seems to be a huge waste of time. a lot of people graduate but still end up not doing anything in college anyways, which really makes the whole point of graduating seem useless. i'd rather not bring anyone's hopes up then. what i'd recommend is for whoever's reading this to simply drop out.

i mean, kanye did it. he said something along the lines of, "don't let society tell you what to do." now, he's obviously a very successful person, and since his album is called the college dropout i guess he never really had to go through all that nonsense in order to become a millionaire. the same goes for anyone else then.

1 - shakespeare

2 - stephen king

3 - stephenie meyer

4 - seiichi morimura

5 - sabrina elkins

6 - sally cheney

7 - samantha hunter

8 - shelley bates

9 - sue civil-brown

10 - sylvie kurtz