u/HurryOvershoot

I'm struggling to find realistic examples of informal fallacies -- can anyone help?

My difficulty is that so many textbook examples are caricatured and obviously fallacious. What I'm looking for is more arguments that people would seriously advance, ideally real arguments that people actually have advanced. I think this criterion implies that the arguments will at least arguably not be fallacious, which is fine, but I still want them to have the structure of particular fallacies.

It's really for cases like these that the fallacy categories are most useful: identifying an argument as having the structure of a particular fallacy can guide subsequent evaluation of the argument (because the particular questions you would ask to evaluate it are different depending on the argument's structure). Whereas those caricatured textbook examples are not useful -- it's easy to say that they are fallacious but doing so gets you nowhere because people wouldn't actually make those arguments.

The specific fallacies for which I'm looking for examples are:

composition

division

false equivalence

circular reasoning

appeal to ignorance

appeal to authority

false dilemma/false choice

cum hoc ergo proper hoc

post hoc ergo propter hoc

hasty generalization

false analogy

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u/HurryOvershoot — 14 days ago